Tag Archives: cleaning

COLLECT LIKE TASKS TOGETHER TO SAVE TIME

You need to pay the bills. I’m pretty sure you don’t sit down at your desk, pay one bill, then go and clean the toilet. Well, maybe you do. But probably you sit down and pay all the bills all at once, writing out the checks, stamping the envelopes and filing away the invoices.

Try using this system—it is a system—for other like tasks. For example:

Telephone calls.
Replying to emails
Running errands

There are two ways to clean a house. One way is one room at a time. It’s nice to have one room completely done. Another day, you do another room. But this is not the best system for saving time. For each room, you have to gather your equipment—vacuum cleaner, dust mop, dust rag, cleaning solution(s), high mop–and take them to the room. Then you have to put them all away. Next room, another day, repeat. What I do is vacuum the whole house one day (I also wash the kitchen floor that day). On another day, I dry mop the floors and dust. Another day, I clean the bathrooms and kitchen. Done on a regular schedule, everything remains clean enough for company.

There is something called mindfulness. For me this means paying attention to what you’re doing. Take stock every so often. Then see if you can figure out a better way to do the routine things you have to do every day, week, month, and year. This is a great way to get your life streamlined, leaving you time to do the things you enjoy the most.

Have you ever done this with a particular chore? Tell us about it in the comments. I love learning new tricks.

QUICK CLEAN ANYTHING

Need to clean up the kitchen, bathroom, refrigerator, your office? Here’s the best way to do any clean-up job quickly:

  1. Put everything away, or pull everything out of what you want to clean (like the refrigerator).
  2. Start at the highest point, and dust or wipe everything down, circling the area if it’s large, like a living room or bedroom, or starting at one end of a long space like the laundry room or the bathroom and moving to the end.
  3. Clean the floors—spot clean as necessary, and do a thorough job on a routine basis.

Sounds simple and easy when you break it down like this, doesn’t it? Since I sit a lot of the time on my computer, I break up jobs like these just the way I have them listed above. It doesn’t take more than ten minutes to straighten up a room in preparation to dust it or wipe things down. Except for possibly the kitchen, it doesn’t take much more than ten minutes to dust or wipe. For the kitchen, I sometimes break it into two sessions. Same for the floors.

And if everything is put away after it’s used, you can even pretty much skip #1 except when cleaning out something.

Another way to tackle keeping everything clutter-free and clean is to do one type of job in those ten minutes. Dust as many rooms as you can in ten minutes, go back to your sit-down job, then do another ten minutes after another hour has passed. Like this: I do the bathroom and kitchen on Wednesdays, I dust mop the bare floors and dust all the furniture on Fridays (I take Thursdays and Sundays off), and I vacuum the whole house and wash the floors on Saturday. This way you only get out your supplies for each job once a week instead of getting them all out every day to do, say two rooms a day.

The main points: Keep everything picked up and put away. And spot clean every room every day—counters in kitchen and baths, spots on the floor, handprints around doorknobs and so on. When you see something dirty or out of place, take a moment to fix it.