More Odd Looking Calendar Strategies

Joshua remembers the progressive dinner as “a lot of work,” especially for a middle school age young man. But to have him have time to throw a dinner party, he had to have time to learn to cook, and to have time to learn to cook, he needed a mentor who had time to teach, and to have a mentor who had time to teach, the mentor needed time to prepare, and for the mentor to have time to prepare, routine life had to be under control, and for routine life to be under control, attention and time had to be given to planning, and to have time to give attention and time to planning, Executive Oversight meetings had to be a settled issue. Accrued Benefits. Now are you ready to finish the list of thinking strategies before scheduling the deep cleaning tasks onto a perpetual cleaning calendar? You see there is a House-that-Jack-Built connection between all this cleaning detail and the world of family frolic and fun.

The Final Four (House Cleaning Planning Strategies, that is)

5) If you want the feel of a really clean-all-at-once kitchen, schedule all the kitchen deep cleaning tasks back to back over the course of several weeks. If you are happy to know that the kitchen will get deep cleaning attention consistently, plan for one or two deep cleaning kitchen jobs each week.

6) If your at home work time is limited, schedule unusual jobs to prepare for special holidays on the calendar. You will need to put them onto the calendar before other tasks. Christmas lights pulled out and tested a week or so before you want them put in place (which would be another appointment).  Plan to polish silver early in November for Thanksgiving and early in March in preparation for Easter. Set a date to clean lawn furniture in mid-May and mid-September. This, of course, is only for those who live where summer is a holiday, rather than status quo.

7) If you run out of deep cleaning schedule slots, buy a smaller house! Seriously, you can double up similar tasks, break into your stash of unscheduled days, or schedule a living space deep cleaning task along with a bedroom deep cleaning task.  A touch of dovetailing.

8) How to handle the traditional Fall and/or Spring Cleaning? The advantage of such seasonal cleaning is finishing many time consuming, labor-intensive jobs in a (relatively) short amount of time. The disadvantage is that you need days of uninterrupted, concentrated work to get everything done. Here is the way to have the best of both worlds:

Schedule major cleaning days in the “free days” of whatever months you want to majorly clean in. Then if your schedule can handle major cleaning days, simply move all the wall washing, drawer straightening, carpet cleaning, and garage organizing tasks into those free days, and cross them off from their other appointments. If, however, the concentrated cleaning days don’t work, you still have in place all those individual cleaning appointments. (See how adroitly I thwarted the idea you are starting to formulate, the one where you sort of vaguely think you’ll “do lots of work” during some ill-defined and nebulous “major cleaning spree,” without really planning what to do when? Plan for both and either one is more likely to be successful.)

Now, in the space program and other life and death venues, such double systems are called redundancy: multiple ways to accomplish the same task in case the preferred system fails. Do you agree home oversight is crucial enough to warrant this brand of redundancy, rather than the boringly repetitive redundancy more often associated with house cleaning?