How can people have a clean home ALL THE TIME? No matter at what hour of the day you visit their place, and you’ll find everything clean and shiny. No dust. No pet hair. No clutter. How do these people do this? How do they have a clean home?
It’s what they do in morning. It’s a fact that morning hours are the most productive hours in a day. What you do during this time will bring you best results. Writers wake up early to write. Bodybuilders wake up early to work out. Entrepreneurs wake up early to strategize. And people with a clean house wake up early to do the home cleaning.
However unreal and unattractive that may sound, that’s the truth. The work from home moms and the homemakers who love cleanliness practice particular morning rituals that help them kick start their day.
What are the morning rituals that can help you maintain a clean home?
1. They begin early
The first thing they do is wake up early. The question is how early? It depends on the workload you have and your whole day’s schedule. Do you need to leave for office at 9? Or do you need to be at your work desk by 11? What if you don’t have any time constraints, and you can spend hours at home cleaning if only they worked to make your house really clean?
First of all, rule out the thought of working on cleaning your house for hours. That won’t get the job done. Eventually, you will feel too exhausted to donate even a few hours in a day to this chore.
Now, you need to figure out how much time you require for cleaning. For a general morning ritual that includes doing the dishes, laundry, making beds, cleaning the kitchen, making breakfast and doing dusting, you will need maximum two hours.
It might take you a few more minutes when you’re beginning out, but most of the people reach this basic time limit to work on cleaning chores in the morning.
Back to the original point, at what time do the people with clean homes wake up? At least two and half hours before they’re expected to be done with the entire house cleaning work.
2. They make a list
What’ the first thing you do when you wake up? Just get to work straight away. Well, that’s not a great thought. You shouldn’t be just getting to work. You need a specific plan in your mind regarding what work you want to accomplish in the morning.
People with clean homes struggle hard to make a proper list that can help them maintain a clean home. This list is a combination of essential chores that need to be performed daily and one task that can be done once or twice a week. For example, you’ll need to do the dishes, laundry, dusting and make beds daily, while tasks like vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms, deep cleaning cabinets, etc. must be scattered during the week. They then go through this list every morning, make the immediate changes and then start their day.
A perfect list will ensure that all the tasks are covered within two weeks, and no corner of your house stays untouched or unclean for anytime more than a month.
What should your list contain? Should you just copy the list of these weird people who always have a clean home? No, certainly not! You need to develop your list. Copying those home cleaning checklist from popular mommy bloggers might help you give a head start but wouldn’t take you a long way.
Just take a week or two to make your list. Then assign the tasks to different days. Keep changing and refining until you have a perfect list that no longer needs to be modified. Put it on your refrigerator and learn it by your heart.
3. They don’t procrastinate
Wait what? Do you think the article is getting long, and you’ll probably read it later? Well, that’s exactly why you have a dirty home. You procrastinate everything you know you should be doing. You delay home cleaning.
Say, you made that list and doing the dishes is, of course, a daily task. Tomorrow you wake up and see there are only 4-5 utensils that need to be cleaned. Would you do the dishes or leave them until you have a big enough pile for the dishwasher? I understand about saving energy part but doing 4-5 dishes would hardly take five minutes. Why not do those with the hand?
Procrastinators are just unable to understand the importance of ‘now.’ You need to finish the tasks ‘now’ to make sure you have a clean home ALL THE TIME. That’s what people with clean homes do.
4. They keep themselves motivated
All of us have a bad day. Sometimes we wake up in an awful mood. A fight with the spouse or sudden phone call from office is enough to give a bad start to our morning. At times, even the most disciplined people don’t feel like working. But do you know that individuals who maintain clean homes still follow the list in such a situation?
Keep aside the fact that home cleaning helps a lot in dealing with stress and lift up your mood. We’re going to talk about how you can still feel like working after you’ve had a terrible start to your morning.
It’s through motivating yourself. There are numerous ways to get motivated to follow your cleaning schedule. Giving your self a reward for finishing off all the tasks on the list is one way to do that. I reward myself with $1 every time I finish everything from my daily chores list. Similarly, set an alluring reward for yourself and make it like a competition.
It’s also crucial to be mentally aware of the fact that your mood to not work today is totally because of things that happened in other spheres of your life and they have nothing to do with the cleaning. Being self-aware is one of the best ways to get motivated. You would know that it’s not fair to harm another aspect of your life because of one bad incident with the other.
Every person is capable of finding his/her way to stay motivated. You need to find yours and stick to it.
5. They decide to follow a routine
If there’s one thing that’s common with people who are successful and people who have clean homes, it’s the habit following a routine. Successful people put in a lot of efforts to build an effective routine that’s full of the things to help them grow and that they want to do. Once such a method is set up, achieving success is easy.
People with clean homes also build routines that can help them maintain a clean home. It’s not just about morning rituals. It includes everything they do in a day to contribute to this cause of having a cleaning house. It can always be putting the things in their designated places, doing the dishes at night, decluttering before going to bed or anything that they feel helps them in achieving their objective.
Making a productive routine is a tough task. But it can be done. Once you have an appropriately customized cleaning routine in place, you will feel as if your house gets cleaned automatically.
They focus on the power of habits
Wait! If you’re not yet asleep reading my article, the last line would have boggled you. How can something as dull and unattractive as cleaning can be done automatically unless you hire a home cleaning service?
It’s possible through developing habits. When you have a habit of doing something, you do it almost unconsciously. Doing the dishes won’t seem like an overwhelming task if you do it every day, so many times that it becomes your habit. Once it’s your habit, you will never realize when you finished that daunting task.
Don’t you feel all these are pretty basic things? Yes, they’re. But are you doing all of these right now? Be truthful. If there’s a ‘no’ to any of the above points, you need to work on yourself. I hope this article will give you a good start. Read it over and over again, note the points down and remember. Happy cleaning!
