How to Create the Best Cleaning Routine EVER! {my minimalist weekly cleaning routine for busy moms} | Easily Manage Your Home Part 5
This post is Part 5 of the series How to Easily Manage Your Home (you can catch up on all the parts here!), and today we will be digging into how to create a simple, easy to follow weekly cleaning routine that you will be able to stick with forever.
Now, if you’ve been around the blog for a while, you may be thinking, “Kassy, don’t you already have a blog post about creating a cleaning routine?”
Yes, yes I do…
BUT it was one of the first 10 posts that I ever wrote, so I think it’s safe to say that it is time for an update!
As I was creating my course, I realized that there needed a couple of extra steps in order to organize all of your cleaning items, so this post will give you even more bang for your buck than the last one did!
(If you want to check out the original post… click here!)
I know you are as excited to get started as I am, so let’s dig in.
If you want to be sure you are keeping up with the series and are creating all of the routines you need to Easily Run Your Home, grab the Easy Home Management Checklist!
1) Grab Your Gear
If you want to create your routine right alongside me, go ahead and grab everything you need.
To create this routine, you will need a pen, some scratch paper, and a notebook (or whatever you are creating your Home Management Binder in).
And if you’d like to use the same templates I am using, you can grab the Autopilot Workbook!
If you want a free template, you can grab my cleaning schedule template. It is a little less pretty than the workbook, but it will totally work for creating the schedule 🙂
2) Make a List
So we are going to start by making a list on our scratch paper of all the cleaning tasks that we have.
As you are making this list don’t worry about if it is a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly task.
Just write everything down that you can think of.
One suggestion I have is that you write each item down separately. So instead of writing “bathrooms” on your list, write down “master bathroom, kid’s bathroom, and downstairs bathroom”.
If you just write “bathrooms,” it won’t look like much on the paper and it might be hard to remember that each of those bathrooms can take a bit of time to complete.
You want to write each item individually because that will give you an accurate representation of how long the task will take you.
Writing the items down separately also gives you the freedom to decide if you want to do all of your bathrooms on the same day or if you want to split them up and do them on different days of the week.
And as you are making the list, add in anything that feels like a chore to you.
For me, this is grocery shopping. I just don’t like it. It takes a long time, and it just stresses me out.
Because of this, I add it to my chore list so that I will remember to space it out with my other cleaning tasks.
So if you have anything that feels like an extra chore to you, add it to this list as well!
3) Look at Your Weekly Routine
Now we are going to look at the Weekly Routine that we created in the last post and we are going to figure out which days make the most sense for us to clean on.
If you haven’t yet had a chance to create your weekly rhythm, check out this post before you go on. Determining your weekly rhythm first will make sure you put the correct cleaning tasks on the correct days.
This is because you don’t want to pile too much cleaning onto days that are already Busy, and you want to take advantage of the days that give you a little bit more downtime.
Now you want to be sure that you are basing your cleaning routine on a typical week. We all have weeks that are a little bit different than the norm: like holiday weeks, vacations, and of course birthday week (because life is too short not to have birthday week!).
So I wouldn’t base my cleaning schedule off of one of those weeks.
And since I base my cleaning schedule off of a typical week, when one of those weeks comes up and I may have to skip a day or two of cleaning, it isn’t a big deal because my house gets cleaned consistently.
4) Choose Your Cleaning Days
Based on the Weekly Routine that we looked at in the last step, decide which days make the most sense for you to add some cleaning in.
For some people, it may make sense to do a small amount of cleaning every single day. That is what I do for my cleaning routine. But for other people, it may make sense for them to do most cleaning on fewer days.
So it really depends on your weekly routine how many days a week you should be cleaning.
The only recommendation I have for you when you are making this decision is to do at least 2 days a week.
It is just too much to try to do all of your cleaning on one day. Doing it all on one day of the week will leave you feeling tired at the end of the day and dreading next week’s cleaning day.
Spreading the cleaning out over multiple days just lets you enjoy life a little bit more on the days that you are cleaning 🙂
The more days that you can spread the cleaning over, the better and more relaxing it will be because you won’t be spending your entire day cleaning.
5) Sort Your List
Now we are going to grab another piece of scratch paper and sort the original list that we made.
Across the top of the sheet write “Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Yearly” then put the cleaning tasks under the proper column.
6) Divide and Conquer
Next, we will take everything in the Weekly column, and we are going to divide it among our Cleaning Days.
Now be sure that everything on your weekly cleaning list is everything that YOU want to do in that week… not everything that your mother-in-law, or your sister, or your best friend or your cousin thinks you need to clean every week… only things that YOU think you should clean every week.
And that is really important because if you are trying to keep your house clean to someone else’s standard, you won’t be happy.
It will only make you happy if you keep your house as clean as you want to.
So if you want to just vacuum your floors and clean your toilets every week… just vacuum and clean your toilets every week.
No one will call the cleaning police on you (and even if they do, they really can’t do anything to you ;).
And I would say if you are going to err on one side or the other, I would err on the side of doing too little cleaning.
That might sound a little weird on a blog post about cleaning, but it is much more important to spend time with your family than it is to spend all of your time cleaning up after them.
So if you are using the Autopilot Workbook, grab out the Weekly Cleaning Routine and fill out the top lines under the days. (If you are wondering what the bottom 3 lines are for, check out How to Easily Manage Your Home Part 2).
Now, you’ll probably notice that on my template I only have 3 lines under each day designated for cleaning. And that is because I don’t think that we should be cleaning all the time.
If you are doing more than 3 cleaning tasks every day, you will pretty much be cleaning in all of your spare time and you won’t have any time to take a break.
And you all know how important I think it is for mom to have a break!
Why This Step Is So Important: Story Time
I used to clean one day per week and it was very overwhelming to try to do this.
Splitting it up to multiple days of the week really took the stress out of cleaning, and it also made my house feel cleaner longer.
Which is honestly kind of weird.
You would think that dedicating one day to completely cleaning the house would make the house feel really clean. But I found that it usually only last one day before it felt dirty again.
I’ve found that doing a little bit of cleaning every day just keeps the house in a state of perpetual cleanliness!
I don’t know why that it, or if it is just me, but it is definitely something I’ve noticed since I split up my cleaning among multiple days.
If you want to read the full story of how I used to clean and see my current cleaning schedule, check out My Simple Weekly Cleaning Routine: How I Went from Overwhelmed to In Control.
And remember as you are writing down your routine, take at least one day off where you don’t do any cleaning or laundry because everyone needs a day off!
7) The Cleaning Task Organizer
That last step used to be the end of the cleaning task creation… but as I was creating Put Your Home on Autopilot I realized that you also need a way to organize those long-term tasks. And that is why I created the Cleaning Task Organizer.
So if you have the Autopilot Workbook, grab the Cleaning Task Organizer and put your Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual tasks in the correct column.
Then as you go through the year and complete the tasks, just put a tick by one of the little circles next to each line so you can keep track of what you still have to do.
If you don’t have the Autopilot Workbook, you can easily make a template with three columns. At the top of the columns write “Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual”
In each column write several lines for you to write the tasks on. Then write the proper number of checkboxes next to the items. (12 boxes for monthly, 4 for quarterly, and 1 for annual.)
Now I’ll show you what I have on my Cleaning Task Organizer, but only if you promise not to judge me! Remember that everyone will put different things in each column based on the size of their house and their
Here are the Tasks that I have on my Cleaning Task Organizer:
Monthly:
- Dust Downstairs
- Dust Upstairs
- Clean the Microwave
- Declutter one area of the house
Quarterly:
- Wash the Ionic
- Wash the Highlander
Annual:
- Clean the Baseboards
- Vacuum the Couches
- Clean the Stove
- Clean and Organize the Garage
8) Test It Out
The last step to creating any cleaning routine is to test it out.
It can be really easy to write things down on paper and have it look really good, but in reality, it may not work as well as we had planned.
So test out your new routine for a week or two before you decide it is set in stone.
And if you find any glitches in your routine, go back to whichever step you need to and create a new routine!
If you find that no matter what you do you can’t seem to fit all of your cleaning in, try using a bi-weekly cleaning routine.
For that, you just split your cleaning up between two weeks and rotate between the cleaning tasks. If you are using the Autopilot Workbook, you can just print off an extra page of the Weekly Cleaning Routine and put Week One’s Items on one page and Week Two’s Items on the second page.
It is better to clean your bathrooms every other week if that is tripping you up than to never get around to cleaning them because you are too overwhelmed to get it done every single week!
I hope this helped you create your weekly cleaning routine! let me know in the comments how you set up your schedule!
Be sure you grab your free Easy Home Management Checklist to see every routine that will help simplify your life.
Ready to Start Easily Managing Your Home?
If you are ready to get organized and make a plan that will help you run your home without stress, check out my course Put Your Home on Autopilot!
This course walks you through the steps to get your home practically running itself!
In Put Your Home on Autopilot, you will learn how to set up effective cleaning systems, set up your day for success, and start making time for the things that matter most.
In just one month you will go from feeling overwhelmed to in control. And if you have any questions along the way, I’m only an email away!
I hope to see you inside the course!
(Or if you are more of a do-it-yourself kind of gal, you can just grab the Autopilot Workbook and work through it yourself. 🙂
