Yes! That one has absolute staying power for me too. I think she’s also who I got the understanding of working from the top to the bottom of a room from. I feel like this is especially important when cleaning bathrooms and kitchens. Like you’re gonna hate yourself if you vacuum and THEN you wipe your counters. Top to bottom.
The other useful thing since having kids is the Lazy Genius, (Kendra Adachi) idea of running your dishwasher every single night whether it’s full or not. Always run it at night and unload it in the morning. That way there’s no variability to the system, you can just set up the system and go.
Idk if it’s flylady but someone out there on the internet got me using those wasted pockets of time to do parts of things or small things. Instead of watching the plate in the microwave go round put away a few things.
Small kids in some way helped on this- it’s a rule for myself now that if I’m in the kitchen and there isn’t a chaos toddler actively in the “launch self into the dishwasher” zone, it’s time to frantically load a few dishes. That sort of thing.
Mainly I’m looking for cadence and a cycle so everything gets done but not all at once. Like do X Monday, Y Wednesday, Z Tuesday and Thursdays. Then everything is done by Friday and you start again the next week because you’re living with a toddler
That’s exactly what she provides. She has daily tasks (erryday) then days of the week zones, then monthly bigger zones IIRC. Handy framework to make sure all areas are eventually hit.
I also liked Flylady, but for the type of schedule that you’re looking for I used Rachel Hoffman “Unfuck your Habitat” lists that I adapted to my apartment, I’m going to look them up and link them
This is also actually something I have liked to Pinterest for. Just searching like, home monthly cleaning checklist. And then finding one that fits my schedule at the time.
I like Flylady and you don’t have to sign up for any emails or anything.
But I really, really liked Motivated Moms which has a small subscription fee and you can do an app or the printed lists.
It’s really detailed and includes stuff that comes up once/month or quarterly.
After a while you just build that into your routine regularly. Everybody in my family knows when it’s Sheet Day. Lol And once you’ve got that routine you don’t have to think about it too much, which I find frees up a lot of space in my head.
So when you have these cleaning routines, specifically weekly stuff, what do you do when (for example) you go away for the weekend? Do you skip stuff, or double up later in the week? I’ve been personally resistant to setting up routines like that because I feel like skipping stuff wouldn’t work for my brain and I’d never find the time to do things later in the week and would just keep slipping further behind and getting stressed about it.
If you do things regularly it will be OK to skip them. I don’t have a schedule these days but one of Flylady’s things is don’t try to catch up, just jump in.
Daily tasks:
Clear dishes
10 minute picking things up
10 minute dusting (see note below)
10 minute vacuum
10 minute bathroom reset (reset = quick scrub toilet, wipe sink, clear items next to sink, grab more toilet paper from the stash as needed)
Ten minutes above means a minimum, so I just need to keep moving and then if it’s been longer than ten minutes I can stop. My biggest hurdle is that I need to keep moving. And all of it together is less than an hour which feels very doable. Sometimes I do them back to back, sometimes not.
Weekly tasks:
One hour weeding outside, aside from lawn mowing (lolol I haven’t done this in a minute but I should. Plus the outside, hands in the dirt time is good for my mental health too.)
Weekly bathroom deep clean - we have two bathrooms, each bathroom gets deep cleaned every other week which means I clean whichever bathroom didn’t get done last week. Mainly this means scrubbing the shower and making sure to wipe around the toilet.
Meal planning/grocery shopping
Laundry - we usually have 3-4 loads in a week, I do one load on a given day. Two if I have to, three means the last load will definitely live in the dryer for at least one day but probably longer.
25 minute room reset. Rooms are kitchen, entry/laundry, living room, bedroom. If each room gets attention every 4-6 weeks then it’s not too bad. Again, 25 minutes feels very doable. Some how like much less than a half hour?
Specifics below for the 25 minute room reset, it was actually really helpful to pull this out to look at again because I’ve been winging it too long. And obviously the bathrooms got graduated to a different schedule but in my mind they’re still in that “25 minute task” category in terms of how much of my day they’ll take up.
Dusting note: Choose an area - living room, air vents, ceiling fans, bedrooms, all the doors/trim. Having two of the reusable microfiber dusting heads is great, then they go through the wash and are ready to go again.
Laundry note: Having a clothes washer I can prep the night before to run in the morning has been amazing for actually getting everything washed, dried, and put away same day. On school days it runs when Kiddo is having breakfast and getting ready for school and is ready to move to the drier when I get back from dropping him off at school which feels like minimal effort, so when I’m “ready” to start my day later the laundry is basically 90% done already which helps my momentum.
Sometimes I make it so I can only listen to my favorite podcast when cleaning as motivation. This helps when it’s one of the ones that I HAVE to listen to as soon as it drops every week.
If it bugs me, I do it then, but if I miss a week, it’s fine because it will get done regularly.
I have never scheduled much on weekends, though. I used to do groceries then for transportation reasons, but that was it. We did a very light version of sabbath observance on Sundays.
I mean, we make the bed and wash the dishes and feed the cats, but the weekends are family time.
Weekly for me isn’t necessarily weekend, actually I sometimes do stuff during weeknights so I can do less chores and more fun stuff during the weekend. But I also have no problem skipping a week for some chores
