Cleaning the house is one of those things that has to be done over and over… and over again! How can you make it less of a burden?
When I taught time management classes, one of the things I loved to teach was the 80-20 rule. It is best explained with examples. Eighty percent of the time, you wear twenty percent of your wardrobe. Eighty percent of the phone calls you receive come from twenty percent of your friends. Eighty percent of the dirt is in twenty percent of the soil. Twenty percent of the salespeople make eighty percent of the sales. Okay, sometimes it’s 90-10 and sometimes it’s 70-30 but you get the idea.
Eighty percent of the dirt is on twenty percent of the floor? Hmm, what does that suggest about cleaning your house? Often a quick tour of the parts of your house that really need it will make cleaning much easier. If you’re in a hurry, leave the dust behind the sofa and under the table alone and simply wipe a swath through heavy traffic areas. Sooner or later, you’ll get to them too, or hire someone else to do a deep clean from time to time.
You can probably come up with many examples of the 80-20 rule that apply to your own ways of cleaning the house and keeping things tidy. Perhaps eighty percent of the dirty dishes lying around come from one person. Perhaps eighty percent of his frustration with the way his house looks could be resolved by doing twenty percent of what he thinks he should do.