Prioritize Your Life: Cleaning

I'm not going to pretend that I can solve all of your problems with a single, short blog posts. Believe me, I'm no saint of cleaning myself (ask my fiancee).

But I do have a system, and - when I follow it - my system works very well. My system, obviously, is not a panacea. I have certain cleaning tastes that fit my personality, and working within a certain set of standards helps me to achieve.

The best advice I can give you is: figure out what kind of cleaning personality you have, and then work it out from there. It will help you develop shortcuts to take all the work out of cleaning. For example, I am pretty lazy when it comes to mail, so right by the door I have a container where I can put all of my mail to go through once a week (or so). If I didn't have it, then there would be letters everywhere and I wouldn't be able to find anything.

I recently read a blog post over at Unclutterer, where they recommend cleaning for no more than fifteen minutes a day. They say that, cleaning for fifteen minutes a day, focusing on a different task every day, will save you from having to do a major overhaul each weekend.

I don't always use that system, because I clean in cycles. I'll get really adamant about cleaning for a week, and then have a bad week. Which is okay, because I realize that. So what I end up doing is setting up systems so that everything doesn't go crazy when I don't clean every day. I have a "landing pad" for all my stuff when I get home, so that my shoes and bookbag don't get strewn everywhere. Also, I try not to wash clothes and dishes on the same day, and I do one the very best that I can, so that one task doesn't get neglected.

Unclutterer always has useful information on how to clean efficiently, even for those who don't know your cleaning 'type'.