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I have 6 Daily Habits that will Keep Your Home Clean. The good thing about this list is that these aren’t hard or time consuming. I have a lot of other things I want to do with my time besides clean – how about you?
These habits will make the biggest difference in making your home feel clean. If you have to choose between these or your Cleaning Routine on any given day, do these first. These are the key to making everything else work.
Super Tidy
Take time every day to put things where they belong. There are tips and trips to make the Super Tidy more effective in the blog post HERE, but simply put – take 10 minutes every day to involve your family and focus solely on putting things where they belong. A Magical thing starts to happen when you are truly consistent with this habit, you start to put things away before the official “super tidy” time. It’s as if you know you’ll have to put it away anyway, so you just start to do it right away. Amazing how that works. 😉
Keep Up A Weekly Cleaning Schedule
Doing a little cleaning and a little laundry every day goes a long way! Don’t wait for the build-up, just do what you can!
Basically – A Cleaning Schedule is where you choose a day to vacuum or a day to dust or a day to clean the bathrooms, and then you stick to those days each week to clean those things. Fore more info, read: How To Have A Perfectly Clean House All The Time … or something like that.
Leave the Kitchen Clean After Dinner (All hands on deck!)
Make it a family habit that after dinner everyone stays in the kitchen until it’s clean. This makes the rest of the night go so much more smoothly – you will wonder why you were not doing this all along. Do you ever put the kids to bed and then look at the dirty kitchen overwhelmed and exhausted? Many hands make the job go much faster. Have everyone help as soon as they stand up from the dinner table. If your children are still young, start this habit now and you will always be glad you did!
Utilize Your Inbox
One of the most common complaints I hear (and help clients deal with) is paper clutter. Piles of paper are a huge problem, but with some simple daily habits (and I mean SIMPLE), this problem can be solved forever.
The quick summary is that you pile mail and papers in your inbox all week long unless something is urgent, then you make make a weekly appointment with yourself to sit down and go through it all at once. It takes a lot less time to go through it at once like this than to nickel and dime your time all week.
Read: Taming The Paper Trail (How To Effectively Use An Inbox!)
Read: The H.M. Session (Change Your Life with The Weekly H.M. Session)
What I see happen sometimes with clients is they will try this, but doubt themselves, so they will start forming piles around their inbox of “urgent” things, thereby guaranteeing that they make their inbox obsolete and proving their fear correct. Go all in. Trust the system and don’t self-sabotage.
Encourage Kid’s Chores
If you have kids, your home is going to get messier. I have good news, if you have kids and your home is messier, you also have kids that can also help you clean it! Of course, to get to the point where children’s help is helpful, it requires a lot of time with the parent training. Start off with adjusted expectations, but you have to start somewhere. There are difficult moments, but it is so hard. I have so much to say about this topic that I have updated my main blog post about Kids Chores.
Take the Kitchen Garbage Out Daily and Others As Needed
At our house, the kitchen garbage goes out every day whether it is full or not. Other garbages go out when they are full.
- When the system works perfectly: the children are supposed to notice when they do their daily chores. Our children”tidy” different areas of the house as part of their chores, and I explain to them that “tidying” includes checking to see if the garbage needs to be changed.
- In reality: I notice when the garbage is full and then remind the child responsible for that area when they are working on their chores that day.
- Either way, the little garbages around the house get changed and it isn’t that big of a deal.
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Was disappointed your book wasn’t hard cover or soft, because I have yet to download it! Don’t use computer often enough to keep it active!!! Am working on it! (Use iPad lots), but don’t print from it. Maybe that’s what I need to learn!
Which book do you mean, Jan? Can you email me mary@maryorganizes.com? I may be able to help.
I craft, meaning I crochet, sew, make jewelry, cross-stitch etc. I love it all. And I love craft magazines. I have patterns galore in these magazines. But as you can guess all this is very cluttering. Suggestions on taming all this?
Are you trying to collect a library/archive of information? If so, you should get shelves and magazine holders and organize by what makes the most sense – craft type, project type, magazine type, etc.
If you are just trying to keep what you’ll really use and need, I recommend donating or selling the books/patterns after you’ve used them.
Hope this helps!
Can you scan the articles that interest you and save them on pinterest? Then you don’t have to keep the magazines laying around and others can enjoy your findings.
This worries me a bit due to copyright laws – be careful!
I place the pattern in a notebook sleeve and in a labelled notebook by type.
Mary, I am really having a hard time with having my kids help me with the supertidy. They now make there beds every day and each does one or 2 jobs each day, my 6 year old sweeps the living room and washes one mirror, my four year old sprays and washes the bathroom sink and stool and my 3 year old wipes down the table and chairs. But no one wants to clean up and help me with the supertidy. I am so tired of chasing after them i feel like its a real power struggle they don’t understand like your kids how much i really need their help. I really hope you can write something in length on how to do this without ending up fighting with them. I am not soo good at this. 🙁 I already reward them for doing their other jobs but i don’t want to always have to give them a reward for simply cleaning up. Any advice. I am looking forward to more of the things you write in your blog about what you do. 😉
Think about their ages … and expect them to help about that many minutes at a time with breaks in between. But, you should be able to get them to work that long. So, incentives, discipline, alpha-mom, you can do it!!! My kids definitely don’t deserve a reward for normal routine stuff, but if I need their help in a pinch, that is when I throw out the incentives. And for young children, I present regular stuff as the incentive … like, after we do this, then we can do play-doh, etc. You are doing great! Being a mom is hard and there are many moments we feel like we are failing, but if we are trying, we aren’t failing!!! Just keep on swimming!
I like what May replied. It may not be a real incentive, as in something extra, but to say “if we all pitch in and do this super tidy, we’ll have time for mommy to read a bedtime story, or watch a movie, or play a game, or whatever, before bed. Show them how you will have more time for them if they just spend a few minutes doing this super tidy before bedtime. It can even be a game to see which kid gets more done. Competition can be a good motivator and make it more like a game than work. Definitely have fun with it; don’t make it work. Kids will be more likely to do it if it is presented as a game than if it is presented as work. Hide a reward, like a card that says special one-on-one time or an ice-cream treat or whatever appeals to your kids, and whoever finds that card can cash it in sometime in the next week if you don’t have time to do something with them that night. I get my grandson to do it pretty easy most nights. I let him pick out the music to play, the TV goes off, and we clean for 10 minutes. I stay in the same area, and then we are doing it together, singing, dancing, and cleaning. It’s got to be fun. LOL. You can do this if I can!
Love these ideas!
Hi Mary! I have finally improved with my housekeeping troubles!!! I found a way to make the kids do the super tidy every day and my house has improved greatly!! Also I picked a really simple cleaning routine. I deep clean one room a day like you suggest and one load a day and I use all paper plate products for breakfast lunch and snacks and I just clean dinner dishes! It is so much easier! I also made kid chore charts that they do (sometimes ).
I’m happy for you that you’re feeling like some progress has been made. The housework stuff does get easier as kids get older if you keep focusing on teaching them. They’ll get it, probably never perfectly, but it will get better.