So, by now you know enough about me to know that cleaning – picking up – whatever, is not high on my list of personal achievements (if not, see this week’s Monday Musing). The other thing you have learned is that I’m all about the smart, quick, easy – well, “life hacks” that work well in a crazy busy two working parent life – whether you are naturally disorganized or not. We all need to keep it simple to keep it sane.
So, when I saw the cleaning calendar at acreater.blogspot.com, I thought it was genius. When I started using a rotating meal plan, and when I scheduled my laundry day, I found that I was much more organized and efficient at it without a lot of process around it. This uses the same concept, but for cleaning.
But wait. Every morning? Ha, every morning we barely have time to get out the door still eating our breakfast in the car. I doubt that we’ll be making our beds. And every evening – well, after dinner is made, cleaned up, put away, we still have homework. There really isn’t a whole lot of time for additional chores.
Still, the concept works, it just needed to be adjusted for 1) a family that has two work outside the home parents, and 2) has a cleaning service 🙂
So, here is my version of the Cleaning Calendar for Working Mom:
Obviously, you can also adjust this for your particular situation. For example, we don’t have carpets, so I didn’t put “steam cleaning carpets” as a yearly task, but you might want to switch out one of the other yearly tasks for that. The original calendar only had “catch up” for Saturday and Sunday, but I added tasks – unfortunately, we have to spend time on chores on the weekend – there’s just not enough time during the week.
Also, as mentioned, we have a cleaning service. This means that once a week we have someone who is dusting and vacuuming, etc. That leave us to concentrate on tasks that she doesn’t do – like wiping down the doors and handles of cabinets and cleaning behind the stove, cleaning out a closet, etc. I tried to schedule longer yearly tasks for months that have more than 4 weeks – that way you can spread it across two weeks. (You can see this in the example where I have “yearly continued” from March.)
You might still be confused on how this exactly works, and I know that most people are visual, so I’ve come up with an example of how this would look on a calendar on a daily basis. Since we are coming up to April (and spring cleaning), I have used April as an example of how my calendar will look (using shorthand for AM/PM tasks – assume those are known by heart).
I slipped weekly tasks like “changing sheets” in the schedule because that’s one of those things that often slips to the end of the list or doesn’t make the list at all. (I know – you’re all saying “eeewe!”, but I eventually remember – just more like 1x a month.). It’s something that I’d like to do more regularaly, so I put it on my list. I figure closets – I have 4 bedroom, 1 bathroom, 1 cedar, 2 coat, and 2 eves that – if tidied up regularly – would never get to be a big, all-day task. Our mudroom may not need a cleaning every week, but then I thought maybe I’d switch off with the mudroom one week, and the laundry room the next week. My point is – be creative and flexible to make it work for you.
I can already anticipate that there will be times when the calendar will go out the window – all hands on deck events like a major snow storm means our extra time is spent elsewhere. The heat and humidity of July means exerting as little energy as possible. The key is to get back to the schedule as soon as you can.
What do you think? Would this work for you? Would you be willing to give it a try? What ways would you adjust the cleaning calendar?
I think I’m going to give it a try. I’ll let you know how it goes.
