Do you dread the vacuum cleaner? How about the sink filled with dirty dishes or that monstrous pile of laundry that needs to be folded and put away?
Did you ever try the, “Company is coming so I will just take all the clutter and scoop it into paper sacks and stuff them into my bedroom so the rest of the house looks clean and tidy,” approach to last minute cleaning? If you haven’t tried it, don’t. Trust me, the house might look really tidy afterwards, but it makes maneuvering around your bedroom really tough and I guarantee you won’t find the time to unpack and sort those bags for a LONG TIME!
I found a solution to those cleaning chores.
It isn’t really groundbreaking. In fact it is the same trick we use when we homeschool our kids. Slow and STEADY wins the race and keeps the house in its place.
You already take this approach with your kids. Each fall you start a new text with them, probably one for each subject. It is long and seems insurmountable. But you schedule a few days each week to work with your child on that subject. You might only spend half an hour at a sitting. But the key is that you set up a schedule and do it regularly.
I used to teach scuba diving and the phrase we always used was,”Plan your dive, and dive your plan.” This is the same phrase you adopted when you started homeschooling, even if you didn’t know the actual phrase, and that is exactly the same phrase you need for those cleaning chores.
I use a bullet journal to stay organized because I love drawing and art and, frankly, none of the planners I could purchase fit very well. So I make a page each month that is just for cleaning. That is what works for me. I bet you have something different.