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Feb 8

Week Three, Part Two: Timed Coordination

Time for more timing! After you have designed a scheme for weekly routine cleaning, you need to test the plan.

Instead of the quick tidy-up five minute flash, scurrying from room to room, you’ll now invest fifteen to twenty minutes a day doing cleaning that you know will attend to all the routine tasks over the course of a week. How will you know how much time you need each day? Or if you have broken the tasks down enough to fit in the time frame? Here’s the plan: Start with ten minutes for each day’s assigned tasks, work really hard to accomplish those tasks inside that deadline, and only inch it up minute by minute when you are absolutely sure you can’t ever do your complete routine run-through without more time. Read more

Feb 7

Week Three, Part 1: Coordinating Routine Schedules

A big thinking week!

Last week you tested a quick tidy up routine, a routine designed to pull any room into order in a very short amount of time.

No doubt (unless your home is utterly amazing) you found yourself whizzing past many undone tasks from the room cleaning charts while you whipped around doing only the quick tidy-up tasks.

You probably learned a few other things, such as:

  • vacuuming every space everyday used all the allotted five minutes and left no time for anything else.
  • whipping through each day did make a overall improvement.
  • running the same routine several times did train you to go faster and/or get more done.
  • setting a five minute deadline allowed you to do more than you thought possible–but not everything that needed doing.

Week Three is the week to solve some of that problem by designing and testing a plan for routine cleaning: not a quick, “emergency” routine, but a standard operating procedure.  Read more

Feb 6

Week Two: Tidy Trials

Week Two dawns with you having a full file folder or a notebook of completed room evaluations, right? Perhaps. But if you didn’t quite finish all the rooms, of course, you want to do that. If you only have one room to attend to, week two may very well be day two. The point is to have worked through on paper what each room needs, or could have done to it. Here’s what you will have if you actually do all the work:

  • General information about the room is permanently recorded for future reference for those big improvement projects (new window treatments, painting, etc.). Accrued benefit.
  • The detailed list, broken down by how often the job should be done, for everything you can think of to keep the room spit spot. Pre-planning. Back Planning. Profitable inefficiencies. 
  • Several quick fix ideas that will improve something about the room or its function, as well as long-term ideas to improve the room. Evaluations. Attend.
  • A quick routine plan to pull the room into order in a limited amount of time. Attend and Automate. Dovetailing.

That’s where we start in week two, so if that didn’t get done last week, do it before “week two” starts!

Read more

Feb 4

Frequently Asked Questions About Room Evaluations

Usually there are lots of questions about how to  break down the cleaning tasks and how to determine the cycle for how often a task will receive attention. Here are the FAQs for handling that portion of the form: Read more

Feb 3

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Week One: Room Evaluation Part Two

Continuing cheerfully along from the previous post:

5. Assess the tasks. Now its time to fill in the chart at the bottom of the form. Imagine every possible cleaning task for the room, along with any of its closets. I know, every home and apartment is now open concept, and you get three or four rooms for the price of one.  If you list the cleaning tasks on the chart by area, you can fit in more tasks (!), then coordinate the main tasks for the area as if it were one room (dusting all the flat spaces in the area, or wiping the entire floor area, etc.)

Remember this is Clean Cup Cleaning, so be very thorough in your list. Of course, closets are the inside of the cup! Pull open the closet doors and study them as well. What do they need for straightening? What do they need for organizing? Well-organized closets, besides being one of the slowest areas to organize,  are often where people can eek out far more storage space than they imagined they had once they get around to it. Read more

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