Things the Quarantine has (re)Taught Me: Housecleaining

[hrj]

Left to my own devices, I'm a binge-and-bust housekeeper. I'll ignore the clutter (and let the clutter impeded cleaning) until I get the intersection of time and frustration, then it's Clean! All! The! Things! (Also: I do one complete top-to-bottom cleaning on New Year's Day, just because.)

Back in the Oakland house, I finally came up with a chore management system. I identified all the individual routine (or not so routine) cleaning chores for each room, assigned each a frequency, then set them up in a repeating-chore app so I could check them off each time I performed one. I also did time estimates and set my schedule so that I spent no more than 15 minutes a day on housekeeping.

Then  I moved. And I had a long commute that ate away at my time+energy on work days. And I had an entirely different house layout that required a different approach to chores. And I figured I'd just sort of float for a while while I figured out a new system that worked. Ten years later...

Working from home has not only meant having a bit more free time, but it's meant that fitting small tasks in around the work day is not only easy, but it's good ergonomics. However it took me most of the year to get around to applying this fact in a systematic function. Setting up the Roomba after my New Year's cleaning this year was the trigger for finally getting around to systematizing the rest of the tasks.

You see: it isn't even a matter of knowing what needs to be done, or of having the time and energy to do it. The big problem is the mental work of keeping track of what the specific task is that I should do *now*. This is what task checklists are ideal for. Plus: the physical joy of checking things off.

So I once again sat down and systematically identified all the routine tasks for each room, assigned each a frequency (weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, or annual), and drew up a matrix on a poster-sized post-it. My routine now is that at the end of each work day, I glance at the list and pick one task that hasn't been done yet for the current cycle and do it. Often I end up doing more. (The efficiency of doing all the similar tasks in all the rooms they apply to -- like wet-mopping floors--overwhelms the one-task-at-a-time theory.) If I wanted to, I could do all the tasks at the beginning of a cycle and get it over with, but I mostly stick to the idea that I should never do more than 15 minutes of housework on any given day.

Having set it up on a paper system this time (which works a lot better for triggering choosing a task than an app does) I now find I've identified additional tasks that need to be added, so I'll have to draw up a new matrix at some point. (The original draft covers 9 months and I don't want to wait that long to update it.)

It really *is* easy for me, in my current WFH status, to keep the place in a continuously presentable state by this method. But that doesn't mean I should beat myself up for not organizing this sooner, because the creative work of identifying and organizing the task list is nothing to sneeze at. And three factors are big contributors to the success. WFH means that the "15 minutes a day" is not a massive percentage of my at-home time on a workday. Having set up the Roomba, the need to keep the floors clear for it work is a big incentive for avoiding clutter. And having the Roomba take care of the basic vacuum+sweep aspect is a bit weight off the schedule. It also doesn't hurt that I'm the only person I'm responsible to for the results, so I can tailor my system to what works for my psychology. My sympathies to all those who have to coordinate housekeeping among multiple people with different psychologies and different tolerance levels. (I don't always clean to my own tolerance level, but at least there's no one to resent but me.)

Comments

[hudebnik]

We don't seem to even run our Roomba very often because of the prerequisite floor-decluttering effort: a substantial fraction of the floor surface in both our bedroom and our dining/living room is dog beds, which need to be picked up and put on top of some other article of furniture before vacuuming, and there are things plugged into things, which means the power cords have to be picked up and put on top of something, and there are chairs whose legs Roomba can't fit between, which means they need to be picked up and put on top of something, and so on.

My mother has a "cleaning woman" come in on a regular schedule (every week or two), which forces her to declutter equally regularly the day before. We used to have a friend over to play music every week or two, which likewise forced us to declutter at least the guest-facing portions of the house that often, but one such friend moved farther away, another died, and a third moved farther away, and then Covid suspended the practice of "having friends over".

So we very much need to develop a regular chore schedule like that.

I was brought up to believe in (if not always practice) the ideals of "a place for everything, and everything in its place," and "put things away when you're done with them." And when I was single, without a lot of possessions, I actually did a decent job of that. When we got married, we suddenly had two apartments' worth of stuff in one apartment, and many things simply didn't have a place to be put away. Then my father-in-law moved out of the ancestral home into a smaller place, and we inherited more stuff, so more things didn't have a place, and my mother and stepfather moved out of the ancestral home into a smaller place, and we inherited more stuff, so more things didn't have a place, and we keep acquiring musical instruments and many of them don't have a place. So there are Things All Over the Place that don't get put away because they don't have an Away. Which means we also very much need to Get Rid of Stuff.

[hrj]

Yeah, that doesn't sound like a good fit for the Roomba, unfortunately.

[kareina]

The part about the app caught my attention--what app had you been using to keep on top of housework? I have tried using ToDoList to remind me to do things that need to be done occasionally, but what tends to happen is that I don't do them on the day that they come do, and then each day I need to reschedule everything "overdue" to "today", and the list just gets longer and longer, and I am still not doing it, but now, instead of being nicely spread across the calendar, all of the "do it every six weeks", "do it twice a year", "do it once a month" are now all supposed to be done today...

I would love a robot vacuum cleaner...

[hrj]

I don't remember at this point -- it stopped being supported, so I don't have it any more. Basically it was a "repeating events" template, where you set categories and frequencies. It wasn't designed for specific calendar schedules, but for "once you've completed this cycle, it moves on to the next cycle."

[threadwalker]

I like your post. Triggered lots of thinking for me.

[hrj]

You, of course, have the complication of more bodies involved.

[katerit]

I really need to do something like this. Clutter makes me unhappy - and basic maintenance makes life so much smoother.

[hrj]

The sustainability is the tricky part. I need a system that is resistant to letting things slide, but is forgiving of variability.

[choirwoman]

What do the cats think of the Roomba?

[hrj]

They are wary, but mostly indifferent. I've seen them sit there as it trundled by a few inches away. They haven't tried riding it yet...

[evil_macaroni]

The list-making nerd in me salutes you! I love that you have set up such a good system that works for your current space. I've evolved systems that work for me but yes, it is more complicated to deal with other humans in the space I'm trying to maintain.

[hrj]

The list-making is maybe the most important part of managing tasks that are difficult for me. Even when time-stress isn't what makes things difficult, it's the "thinking about and prioritizing what needs to be done" that keeps me from doing things. I can gamify that sort of task identification and prioritizing if I do it outside of the context of actually getting the work done. (Like: if it's distraction from something *else* I should be doing.)

In general, I'm a serious proponent of "make your quirks work for you." I love spreadsheets, so if I c an make spreadsheets part of getting something done, it feels like fun. I like watching data do things. So when I go through periods of tracking what I eat and tracking my weight, I can treat it as a numbers game and dissociate it from my body.