How to Create a Practical Home Cleaning Plan

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Many working women struggle to stick to a cleaning routine.  Learn to create a custom home cleaning plan that’s centered around you, your schedule, and your family’s needs.  As a result, you’ll have a cleaning checklist you’ll actually use to keep your whole house clean.

As I rushed through the dining room, my eyes darted to the right.  Something was moving low along the floor.

I stopped.  What the…?  My face crinkled in confusion, straining to identify the flowing black mass in the pre-dawn light.

I didn’t have time for it.  Shaking my head, I clipped forward toward my bedroom.

My eyes glanced casually back, then widened in abject horror as the thing, the MASS, whipped out from under the dining room table and began to follow me.

Create a Custom Home Cleaning Plan

A custom home cleaning plan is an answer to your desperate yelps for sane, doable homekeeping.

Why?

A custom home cleaning plan is centered around:

• Your family’s needs and standards
• Your home
• The way you live, and
• The time you have

A thoughtful, well-planned cleaning routine provides you with a realistic cleaning schedule you’re actually capable of.

It helps ensure you’re focusing most of your cleaning efforts on tasks that matter most, and not wasting time on ones that don’t.

Finally, it works around your schedule in the time you have available, so you always have time to clean.

The 3-step process below is exactly what I did when I created my own home cleaning plan about 10 years ago, and it’s worked like a charm.  My cleaning plan helped me eliminate those dust balls large enough to be classified as paranormal, that loved to follow me from under the dining room table!

I even give my own home cleaning plan away here on my blog, and you can also read all about the 30-minute daily cleaning routine behind it.

Ready to create your own home cleaning plan?  Let’s get to it!

By the way… I created a Home Cleaning Planning Kit full of fillable worksheets that walk you through the exact steps described in this post.  It’s free inside my Resource Library, and it’ll be a huge help in creating your customized home cleaning plan.  Subscribe to my email list and claim your free copy now!

 Step 1:  Prioritize Cleaning Tasks

The first step in creating your home cleaning plan is to determine your priorities.

Which cleaning tasks matter the most in your home?  This could be influenced by your personal and family preferences, how often you entertain, medical needs, etc.  I have a fillable PDF Cleaning Priorities worksheet in my free Home Cleaning Planning Kit, which is available in my Resource Library, free to subscribers.

Do you detest a messy entry?  Maybe your husband gets irked over a dirty kitchen.  Or you might need your bathrooms to sparkle for your weekly girls’ night.

List those high priority tasks first.  Oh… and don’t say keeping your whole house clean is super important.  If that’s what you’ve been telling yourself, that’s probably why you’re having trouble keeping your house clean.

Next, decide which tasks or areas are less urgent, but still important to complete.  Depending on your priorities, this might include vacuuming, dusting, cleaning bathrooms, etc.  List those medium priority tasks next.

Finally, think about the tasks or areas that you don’t care about, or that aren’t urgent or important.  Again, depending on your preferences, this could include cleaning baseboards, dusting blinds, cleaning windows, etc.  List these low-priority tasks last.

Now, go back through all 3 of your lists, and provide an estimate of how long it takes you or your family members to complete each task.

Step 2: Find (Or Make) Time In Your Schedule For Cleaning

Figure out when you have time to clean each week.

Remember that you’ll probably have daily, weekly, and monthly cleaning tasks to complete. As a result, you should try to identify a little bit of time each day to devote to cleaning.  Even 15 minutes can make a difference, so identify as much free time in your schedule as possible.

For example, can you spare 15-30 minutes each evening?  An hour on Saturday mornings?  20 minutes every other afternoon?

Write down the specific times you have available (Such as 3-5 pm on Tuesdays), or the time of day (such as 1 hour on Saturday afternoons).  Place an X through days where you have no time to clean.

Grab your free copy of The Home Cleaning Planning Kit and use my fillable PDF worksheets to map out your cleaning times!

Step 3:  Build Your Home Cleaning Plan

Now that you’ve prioritized your tasks and made room in your schedule, it’s time to build your home cleaning plan!

As you build your schedule, be mindful of when and how you use your home.  If certain parts of your home need to be presentable at certain times of the week, schedule tasks around those deadlines.

Okay… grab a 4-week calendar (Or grab my free Home Cleaning Planning Kit inside the ShowMe Suburban Resource Library) and let’s get building!

Things to Consider When Scheduling Tasks

Keep the following things in mind as you’re scheduling tasks.  As a result, you’ll end up with a custom home cleaning plan that actually works for you, and gets each area of your home when you need it to be clean.  That’s the whole point, right?

First, are there times of the day or week when certain areas need to be cleaned?

For example, do you entertain a lot on weekends and want your house to be clean for that? Do you host weekly or monthly gatherings?

Schedule major cleaning tasks like dusting, vacuuming/mopping, and bathrooms around those events.  You might need to adjust your cleaning time slots if you have specific days or times when certain parts of your home need to be clean.

Next, you might want to leave a few time slots empty so you have built-in catch-up time, just in case something comes up or you get behind on cleaning.

You’ll also want to consider WHO will complete the tasks you’re scheduling.  Do you plan to give your family members a chore list to help carry the load?  Keep their schedules in mind as you plan cleaning tasks for them to complete.

Finally, consider scheduling low-priority tasks on a rotating basis in the same time slot each week.  This will help keep the rest of your cleaning routine intact, and ensure the lower-priority tasks actually get done.  There’s more detailed info on rotating time slots in the section on low-priority tasks below.

Schedule High Priority Tasks First

Fill high priority tasks into your open time slots first.

Remember that these tasks were the most important ones to you and your family.  As a result, you might want to schedule them every day or every other day, if it makes sense to do so.

Depending on your priorities, you might have tasks like make the bed, declutter, and wipe down kitchen counters listed every day.

Add Medium Priority Tasks Next

For most of us, medium-priority tasks make up the bulk of our cleaning routines.  Vacuuming, dusting, and thorough bathroom cleaning might have landed on your medium priority list.

At this point in the home cleaning planning process, you’ll need to decide how and when to complete these medium-priority tasks.

You should decide whether to plan for:

• A different medium task each day of the week (Such as dusting on Thursdays, mopping/vacuuming on Fridays), or
• Completing all of your medium cleaning tasks on 1 weekly bulk cleaning day (Such as dusting, vacuuming, and cleaning bathrooms on Saturday mornings).

Your approach will depend on the time slots available on your schedule, as well as your style of cleaning.

• Do you like compressed, marathon-style power cleaning sessions, where you can knock out a bunch of stuff at once?
• Or do you feel less overwhelmed with an expanded schedule, tackling 1 medium-priority task per day?
• You could even do a hybrid where you bulk half of your tasks on 1 day, and the other half on another day.

If you aren’t sure which approach will work best for you, choose one and try it for a few weeks.  You can always change it later!

Once you’ve decided on a compressed schedule, an expanded schedule, or a hybrid, add medium priority tasks to the available time slots on your schedule.

Fill in Low Priority Tasks Last

After everything else is scheduled, add low priority tasks to the remaining time slots.  After all, these are “low priority” based on your time and needs, and as a result, they don’t deserve a prime spot on your home cleaning plan.

As I stated above, you might want to consider scheduling low priority tasks on a rotating basis in the same time slot.  It may sound complicated, but it really isn’t!  If you’re using a 4-week calendar to create your home cleaning plan as I suggested, it’ll be a breeze.

For example, let’s say your low-priority tasks are cleaning baseboards, dusting blinds, cleaning windows, and wiping down cabinets.  You’ve chosen to schedule rotating low-priority tasks on Saturday mornings from 9:00-9:30.  The Saturdays on your 4-week cleaning schedule might look like:

• 1st Saturday 9:00-9:30:  Wipe down cabinets
• 2nd Saturday 9:00-9:30: Dust blinds
• 3rd Saturday 9:00-9:30: Clean windows
• 4th Saturday 9:00-9:30:  Clean baseboards

See how those lower-priority tasks cycle through the same time slot throughout the month?  As a result, they’ll get covered, and you won’t subconsciously worry about getting them done.

Adjust Time Slots As Needed

As you think about the way you work best and the times you’ve identified in your schedule for cleaning, you might realize that the days/times you have available don’t fit the way you’d like to clean your home.

If this happens, you might need to make some adjustments to your schedule to make room for cleaning.  I would err on the side of making time for the way you WANT to clean your home, rather than randomly sticking tasks in any open time slot, just to get them scheduled.

Because, what’s the point of creating a home cleaning plan you won’t actually use?

I’m not suggesting that you miss your kids’ events so you have plenty of time to stay home and clean the bathrooms.  But could you stay up 30 minutes later a few nights a week to get some cleaning done?  Could your son maybe carpool to soccer practice with another player to give you some breathing room?

Step 4:  Try and Tweak… But Don’t Give Up

If your home cleaning plan feels a little rocky at first, stick with it.

The reason most women don’t end up keeping their house clean is because they don’t push themselves through the initial discomfort of a new routine.

The unfamiliarity of a new routine feels hard, stressful, and tiring.  So, they decide it’s easier to live with a messy house or to clean sporadically, instead of giving themselves the grace to adjust.

Don’t be that woman!

If you start implementing your plan and you feel overwhelmed with your schedule, here are a few things to try.

• Adjust your schedule to give yourself more breathing room
• Try switching your approach to doing all the medium priority tasks on one day, or vice versa
• Ask family members for help with some of the cleaning tasks

Keep trying and tweaking until you get it right.  But mama, don’t give up.  You want a clean house… you DESERVE a clean house.  But no one can get your house clean except you… and your family, if they’re helping!

Create a Custom Home Cleaning Plan:  Conclusion

Creating a custom home cleaning plan is a big first step on the road to a consistently clean home.  Because the cleaning routine is planned around your family, your schedule, and the way you like to clean, you’re far more likely to stick to it.

In rapid-fire style, here’s a rundown of the steps to create your custom home cleaning plan.

1. Prioritize cleaning tasks into high, medium, and low priority categories, and estimate how long each task takes to complete
2. Find (or make) time in your schedule for cleaning, and mark available cleaning time slots on a 4-week calendar
3. Build your home cleaning plan by scheduling high priority tasks first, medium priority tasks next, and low priority tasks last; add or remove time slots if needed
4. Try your new cleaning routine out for a week or so, and adjust as needed until you find a routine that works for you… don’t give up!

Want even more helpful cleaning and organizing tips for working women?  Join the ShowMe Suburban community and learn simple habits and routines to keep your home clean and organized, so you can relax away from work without feeling the stress of a messy home.  Sign up below, and grab your free copy of my Home Cleaning Planning Kit inside my Resource Library!