An Odd Looking Calendar

When does a yearly calendar not look like a yearly calendar? When it only has twenty-four days in a month.

My perpetual cleaning calendar has only twenty-four planned opportunities each month to handle all the deep cleaning projects on the room cleaning chart lists. This schedule automatically eliminates all Sundays from cleaning (hooray!) and builds in four to seven additional “free” days for catch-up, sick days, book reading marathons, vacations, cooking sprees, puzzle building, or whatever else life brings.

Unlike the typical twelve page calendar, this calendar is only one sheet, a true year at-a-glance, to show which deep cleaning appointment you have scheduled for each day. Now all of that should make the task seem manageable, shouldn’t it?

House Cleaning Success Strategies

Before you try your hand at scheduling cleaning tasks, however, plant the following ideas in the back of your mind. The more success you have incorporating them, the more satisfying your planning experience will be. We’ll list 1-4 today, look at a family fun idea for Valentine’s Day on Thursday, and finish 5-8 of this list on Saturday.

1) Make certain almost every job on the calendar can be accomplished in less than fifteen minutes. This means breaking up large items (like closets, dressers, desk drawers) into smaller cleaning modules. Have a closet as large as a room? If needed, divide it by area: west wall, south wall, floor, upper shelves or by measurement: first two feet of space, second two feet of space. Obviously carpet cleaning and rearranging furniture need more time, but, honestly, very few tasks cannot be broken down into fifteen-minute modules.

Thinking this way has some helpful benefits. Often only one or two drawers in a desk or a small section of a closet deteriorates more quickly than the rest. Subdividing makes it easy to clean the problem child more often the the compliant areas. Completing the task for the day gives a sense of closure as well, even when other areas have not yet been attended to. Your experience may be different than mine, but having done what was scheduled, I was content to know the rest of the desk, closet, or what have you, had a future cleaning appointment set. Bit by bit the finished areas began to outweigh the unfinished–and since the quickly disarrayed parts got more frequent attention, they were pulled back into shape before they could wreck everything. I found this encouraging.

2) Other than actual cleaning modules, something else is also important to schedule—the time you will arrange appointments for yearly service or professional cleaners or purchasing supplies for home projects. If you want to clean the deck in mid-May, decide how far ahead you want to purchase the cleaning supplies, rent a washer, hire a neighbor boy to do the job (depending on how the job will get done). Put these tickler file dates on the calendar as well as the actual days the work should be done. Attending to this one detail, makes it more certain some jobs will get done when you want, besides having the bonus that you start thinking about the job itself anywhere from two weeks to a month ahead of time. This is back planning in action.

3) Think about what makes sense seasonally. Do not plan attic work in July or detached garage work in January if you have hot summers and frigid winters. Flag poles and cycles of concentration in action.

4) Pick a similar day (the first or fifteenth, for example) for monthly jobs. You’ll start to remember them without even checking your calendar. More flag poles in action.