8 ways to keep your home tidy without feeling overworked or overwhelmed
Less time cleaning, more time living.
Keeping your home clean and tidy can feel like a never-ending chore, especially for busy women.
Organisation expert Bridget Johns, from Be Simply Free, is here to help you spend less time cleaning and more time collecting moments, not things.
By implementing these six tips, you can keep your home organised and clean without feeling overwhelmed.
1. Less is more
The less stuff you have, the easier it is to clean and keep tidy. Bridget encourages clients to ‘sort, simplify and systemise’.
Be clear of what you have by sorting like with like. Simplify by decluttering the excess and systemise by making sure everything you keep goes into a place where it can easily be found again.
2. Mums are not maids
Keeping a tidy home is not just one person’s responsibility. Everyone is capable of picking up after themselves. Have a family meeting and get everyone involved.
This can create a sense of ownership and responsibility for everyone in the household.
“Keeping a tidy home is not just one person’s responsibility.”
3. Set your home up for your family not your visitors
Stop trying to keep up with the Joneses. Your family are the people who use the spaces 95 per cent of the time, so set it up for you. Just because everyone else has something in their home, doesn’t mean you should too.
Choose family-friendly furniture, display artwork and photos that you like, have a reading nook if you love books, transform a spare bedroom into an office, or a formal area for a more chilled zone to relax in.
4. Use 1% of your day
Did you know 1% of your day is 14.4 minutes? Instead of spending your whole weekend cleaning, break down household cleaning tasks into 15-minute blocks (1% of your day) and do them throughout the week so your weekends are free for having fun, not cleaning.
Write out a list of each space in your home, allocate them to different family members and then do a 15-min block each morning and night, Monday to Friday.
“Your family are the people who use the spaces 95 per cent of the time, so set it up for you.”
5. Everything has a home (and if it doesn’t goodbye!)
Follow the old adage “A place for everything and everything in its place.” Don’t let things build up on horizontal spaces. Put things straight away to reduce clutter build up. If it doesn’t have a home, say goodbye to it.
6. Kitchen reset
The kitchen is the centre of a home and gets messy quickly. There will always be food that needs to be put away and dishes to get home.
Get the whole family involved and after dinner, work together to reset your kitchen before you go to sleep. ‘Future you’ will be grateful to walk into a clean kitchen in the morning.
‘Future you’ will be grateful to walk into a clean kitchen in the morning.
7. Laundry schedule
Sometimes the biggest clutter is the clothes folding pile that never gets put away. Build a laundry schedule so you can wash, dry and put away a load of clothes within a 24-hour period. Remember if kids can use an iPad, they have the skills to put the washing machine on.
8. Stop, focus, notice
Just because you have always done something one way doesn’t mean you can’t change it. Before you do anything, stop and take stock of what is actually happening. Take five minutes to focus on what the actual issue or problem is and get it out of your mind and onto a piece of paper (or the notes section of your phone). Talk to other people the problem involves. Then notice what options you have for solving the problem and try one option.
