My Cleaning Schedule

I said I would share my cleaning schedule, so here we go!

I somewhat jokingly referred to my cleaning style as ADHD cleaning, because I’ve found that I can’t handle anything overwhelming. If you tell me that Monday is the day I dust every room in the house, I’d say, “yep, I can do that.” But when Monday rolls around, I’ll think, “nope, that’s WAY too much dusting… and I hate dusting.” But then maybe you try telling me, “okay, don’t do all the dusting… just clean the living room.” Again, I’d go in thinking, “Just clean the living room. It’s just one thing!” But then I’d look at the living room and think, “ugh, that’s a big room to clean… it’s going to take me forever.” Anyone else out there like this? Or am I just super lazy??

So I finally tried something new. First, I listed everything I need to do in a week. Here’s an example:

• vacuum (upstairs & downstairs)
• mop (downstairs & bathrooms upstairs)
• dust (upstairs & downstairs)
• laundry
• write menu, write grocery list
• clean bathrooms
• change sheets

If you look at my list right now as it is, there are seven items there. Seven tasks and seven days of the week. Perfect, right? Weeeellll…. I think we established that I can’t handle something that simple. Plus… are YOU able to get by with vacuuming just once a week? Do you only do laundry on one day? If you do… that’s awesome. I’m impressed! But my main living space needs to be vacuumed way more often with daily cooking and messy kids. And letting the laundry accumulate over the week would stress me out and overwhelm me. So I had to break my list down more:

• vacuum upstairs (1x a week)
• vacuum downstairs (3x a week?)
• mop downstairs (1x a week)
• mop upstairs (monthly)
• dust upstairs (1x a week)
• dust downstairs (1x a week)
• laundry (3x a week?)
• write menu, grocery list (1x a week)
• clean upstairs bathroom
• clean master bathroom
• clean downstairs bathroom
• change our sheets
• change the boys’ sheets

That’s more accurate for me. I even found more things to throw in: water the plants, rotate kids’ books & toys, declutter, sanitize the kitchen, empty all the bathroom trash cans. Basically anything I didn’t want to forget to do on a very regular basis. Now we’re up to roughly 21 tasks each week. Divide that number by 7, and we’re at 3 tasks per day. Now THAT sounds doable to me.

Draw up a quick weekly chart, and start plugging in tasks. Think about how busy your days are. Do you have extra time on one day or a super busy day every week? What days do you typically get the most done now? How much cleaning do you want to do on weekends? For me, my boys are both in school all day on MWF. Those are my “heavier” days for cleaning. I have minimal motivation on Saturdays, but I have a little more on Sundays. I ended up with this:

As you can see, I have monthly things in there that I added after I got my weekly schedule in place, and I even put deep cleaning on there. But let’s focus on the weekly stuff for now. This is pretty well broken down, but if I started finding that, for example, dusting the whole downstairs was too overwhelming for me, I could break that down even further. I paired some things together because I found that I preferred to do them together: when I’m watering plants, it just makes sense to me to dust those surfaces as well. And after I dust and drop bits of dead leaves or maybe spill some dirt, it just makes sense to vacuum it all up. And this all takes awhile! So I do it on a day that my boys are at school and Andrew is at work. I prefer to change my boys’ sheets on a day that I know they’ll get a bath. I found out that with laundry, it’s best for me to just do one load a day from start to finish. But I put “laundry catch up” on Thursday in case it was a crazy week and I fell behind on my one-load-a-day plan. I declutter my kitchen countertops on Friday evening after the school and work week is over so we can start fresh on the weekend with no paper on those surfaces. And once they’re decluttered, it just makes sense to sanitize the kitchen.

Do you see how my weekly cleaning schedule is VERY specific to me? And yours may look totally different! If you are at work all week and don’t have kids, you probably don’t have to vacuum 4 times a week. If you cook every night and make a bit of a mess (I totally relate), maybe you need to vacuum/sweep/mop every night when you clean up the kitchen. I used to only have one day that I went grocery shopping, but I’ve found that I often go out on the weekend for a few things we ran out of, so I started just planning on a weekday and a weekend shopping trip. Maybe you’re the same way, or maybe you prefer to only go once a week. Make your schedule what works best for YOU.

Wait, wait, wait… did you think that was it? I have one more thing! I got to the point of having a weekly cleaning schedule nicely typed up and displayed in my kitchen command center, but I still found myself unable to keep up with it. So I highly recommend having a planner, notebook, dry erase board… something to write out your tasks each week. Because guess what’s going to throw a wrench in your lovely weekly cleaning schedule. Life. Things will come up, people (including you) still get sick, you may need to cancel all of your big plans for a mental health day… this stuff just happens. You need to be able to move things around and keep things flexible if you have any hope of staying on top of things on a regular basis. I have my weekly cleaning schedule written down in the back of my planner, but that’s just my starting point. When I plan out my day or week ahead, I scooch things around to accommodate things that come up like appointments, coffee dates, etc. Here’s my current week:

As you can see, I have my daily list of things to complete set up in checklist form, because I LOVE being able to check things off my list and SEE that I’ve accomplished something(s). I also put in my weekly menu (tips on that to come) and events for that week. You may have noticed that I didn’t check off “dust upstairs” on Monday. And that’s because I didn’t get to it. So I will either slide it to Tuesday, or I’ll just cross it off if I don’t get to it again. I know, I know…. once in awhile I don’t dust every week! But I usually do, which means skipping a week here and there is NOT a big deal. I also can look back and see that I crossed it out, so next week I’ll make a point of getting it done since I skipped the previous week. I also like writing non-weekly tasks on little sticky notes so I can easily move them ahead to the next month. Things like cleaning out the vacuum cleaner filter (once a month) or returning library books (every other week) get written on movable notes so I can fit them in as they come up in my weeks.

I hope this wasn’t overwhelming. Cleaning used to be overwhelming for me, which is how I ended up in my “ADHD/divide & conquer” cleaning approach to begin with. I feel like it can seem like a lot to go through all of these steps just to get a schedule in place, but breaking things down into bite-size tasks and spreading them out over the week has made a world of difference for me. Checklists have made a world of difference for me. Giving myself grace and being flexible with my daily chores has made a world of difference or me. So if your current way of doing things isn’t working for you, maybe you should give my method a try. It could make a world of difference in your home!