When you are trying to run a household while looking after kids, working, meeting up with family, and a whole host of other responsibilities, it can be very easy for the housework to cause you all sorts of headaches. If you don’t make an effort to stay on top of it, more than likely, it will start to overwhelm you. So, here are just a few of the best ways that you have available to ensure that the housework doesn’t overwhelm you.
Establish A Routine
To begin with, it can be so helpful that you establish a regular routine rather than simply doing everything in an ad-hoc manner. This way, you know exactly what needs to be done and when. While the housework may not be the priority in your routine, once you have scheduled everything else in, you can then work out the gaps in which you can squeeze the housework. This way, there are no surprises and you know exactly what needs to be done and when.
Make An Order Of Priority
This can help form part of your routine, but making an order of priority certainly helps you out in knowing what needs to be done when. For example, doing laundry is a daily task that needs to be a priority as part of the routine but dusting your shelves doesn’t need to be done as often. If you look further ahead in your routine, you may well be able to squeeze in other jobs that you had put on the backburner for months on end.
Clean As You Go
Rather than letting everything become a terrible mess and not sorting it out as needed, it can help you out in a big way if you keep on cleaning as you go. For example, when you are making dinner, it makes an enormous difference to put things in the dishwasher or rinse off bigger items as you go. This will save you time in the long run as it means that food is not going to get stuck on the items, which will always require a bigger scrubbing job than you would have to do otherwise.
Never Go Anywhere Empty Handed
This may well be an old adage that you have heard time and time again in the past, but never going anywhere empty handed is so useful as it means that you are putting things away and taking them to where they need to be as you go. This means that the tidying is taking place without you having to think too much about it and you are less likely to end up in a situation where you look around a room in horror as there is stuff all over the place. While it may take a bit of time to get into, it can really make all the difference. What can help out even further is if you are able to enlist the help of other members of the household to keep on getting things sorted as you go.
Enlist Some Professional Help
Despite all your best efforts, you may simply find that it is impossible to do everything that you wanted. In this situation, you will get an enormous amount of help and support from a professional cleaning service. Alternatively, if there are DIY jobs that need doing around the home, there are plenty of apps that offer you a host of people who have the skills to do them so you aren’t spending ages and ages watching online videos without being sure of what you are doing.
Give Yourself A Limited Time
When people are working up against a deadline, they tend to be able to work so much more effectively than if they are left to do things over an indefinite time period. So, once you have found time within your schedule, set your timer to however long you have and race against the clock. You may well be surprised by just how much you can accomplish over a fixed timeframe. There are plenty of online influencers who have tried this method and it has proven to be extremely effective, so there is no reason why it can’t work for you as well.
Divide Up The Work
The problem with a lot of housework is that the brunt of it tends to fall on one member of the household – and this is more often than not the mother of the house. However, taking on a divide and conquer approach can help to stop everything getting on top of you and being totally overwhelming. This is going to require the help and support of all the other members of the household. Making a classic chore chart will help to establish what needs to be done, by when, and by who. When you are trying to get your kids involved, it often helps to incentivise them with rewards to help to establish good habits right from an early age.
Make Sure Everything Has A Home
One of the big problems with tidying up is that you end up with more and more stuff at home but you simply don’t have anywhere to put it. Having a place for everything makes a huge difference as it means that there isn’t too much stuff sitting out and you have no idea where it needs to go. Ultimately, ensuring that you have enough storage devices and solutions will help to remove the mountain of stuff from getting all over the place. Even if you don’t have a huge amount of space available, you need to utilise what you do have to ensure that nothing is left without a home.
Ensure You Have The Right Cleaning Equipment
They say that a craftsperson is only as good as the tools that they have available, and the same is true for cleaning as well. So, you need to make sure that you stock up on a whole host of quality cleaning products. This means that you are not left scrubbing away with something that simply doesn’t do the job as needed. At the same time, when you are looking to buy new stuff like a vacuum cleaner or even a dustpan and brush, it can be such a worthwhile investment to pay a bit more as it means you are not going to be left struggling with stuff that simply doesn’t do the job.
Give Yourself A Break
Even if you take care of everything on this list, there are times when your house is likely to still get a bit out of control. During these times, you should learn to give yourself a break and accept that not everything can be perfect all the time. Of course, not everyone can live this way, but if you learn to accept a little bit of disorder, this can help to give you peace of mind and makes it less likely that you will get totally overwhelmed.
If you put all or some of these top tips into practice, this should certainly help you to feel less overwhelmed and more on top of all the housework. A big part of this comes down to organisation and ensuring that you take care of what needs to be done in an effective and efficient manner. However, it is also useful making sure that you get the help of other members of the household as you don’t want to feel like you are fighting a losing battle all by yourself. Setting a time limit can also make all the difference.
Meg is an author at Cinnamon Hollow. She writes on a variety of topics sharing tips and ideas for daily life.