Week Four: Building a Cleaning Calendar

Admittedly, if you have only your Executive Oversight time for design planning, and no quiet afternoons or pleasant evenings on the back porch for extra fill-in-the-calendar sessions, week four may stretch over two or three actual weeks to co-ordinate all the tasks on the calendar, but that is really all right. In the meantime, you can simply invest more time concentrating on the weekly routine plan: tweaking it by combining tasks into little efficient packages, taking note of distractions, and discovering ways to permanently solve nagging frustrations. Besides, slowly building the cleaning calendar and routine cleaning plans has an ulterior motive.

The Ulterior Motive

Slowly implementing the cleaning process, layer by layer, helps build consistency, and provides more opportunities to develop the habit of smart thinking while working. Bad habits take a long time to change and good habits take a long time to stick. Keeping with the routine cleaning plan for an extra two or three weeks is good for habit-building. Just don’t make it so good that you never actually get around to scheduling your deep cleaning tasks on the calendar.

If you are alertly working through the routine weekly plan (i.e. evaluating what doesn’t go well and making changes to solve those problems), you can ease into adding deep cleaning items when they are scheduled. Once they are on the calendar they will be there forever (well, at least until you change them) to remind you they need attention. But for that to happen, you do need to assign work times for the tasks:

Filling in the Perpetual Cleaning Calendar with Tasks

Take your completed room cleaning charts from your room evaluation sheets and begin to fill in a blank perpetual calendar with the various tasks, listing them on the calendar as often as you said they needed attention:

• annual: 1 time during the entire year.
• biannual: 2 times in the year. They can be six months apart, but if it is something like washing an obscure window, it might make sense to schedule in early in nice weather, and late before bad weather.
• Quarterly: 4 times a year.
• Bimonthly: 6 times a year.
• Monthly: 12 times a year.

Here are some other things that helped my perpetual system stay useful:

1.  Remind yourself about the other design considerations from this post. and this post.
2. As you fill in each blank, record enough information so you know what to do when the time comes. The space is small, so use codes.
3. Projects like reorganizing shelves and drawers, sorting through papers, and other such jobs tend to be slow. They also may not need as much time ever again after they get handled and are regularly maintained. Having two days a month reserved for such projects (perhaps back to back days, or days you know you could afford to work longer) makes it easier to tackle such jobs. All you need to do is insert a specific project into your reserved organizational cleaning slots.
4. The 256 cleaning slots on the calendar were quite satisfactory for me, because I was only responsible for deep cleaning one bedroom. If you personally are deep cleaning more than one bedroom, here are some options:

• Keep the tasks as consistent as possible between the rooms.
• Select a deep cleaning bedroom month and choose to do one bedroom a week, or the same tasks in all bedrooms each week. A four bedroom house would take a month.
• If apprentices are in the house, expect them to be present and assisting as  often as possible when you are working in their room.

Of course, something else is a little odd about this odd looking calendar: no days of the week. This is what makes it perpetual, but it might also cause some  people some spatial reasoning problems. We’ll save  handling that issue for the next post. In the meantime, do your homework:  begin to fill in the calendar in this order:

• holiday and once a year tasks
• monthly tasks
• quarterly, bimonthly, and biannually as they best fit.