10 Ways You’re Making Housework Tougher Than It Needs to Be

All that stuff piled up on the coffee table that you’ll get to as soon as you can? Get to it now. If you’re not continually cutting the clutter in your home, it will accumulate (clutter tends to attract more clutter). If you pick things up and organize them on an ongoing basis, as opposed to letting things go and dealing with it later, you’ve just added eliminated an extra step to any cleaning project by forcing yourself to tidy up before you can actually clean.

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One of the biggest obstacles you can set in your own way is not cleaning as you go. While it’s easy to succumb to the temptation of letting things go and promising yourself you’ll get to it later, procrastination is not going to help your house get any cleaner. Instead, get in the habit of cleaning up after yourself – make the bed every morning after waking up, give the shower a click clean with a squeegee after showering, clean up while you cook instead of afterwards. Doing a number of little things such as these can yield big results that will make life a lot easier in the long run.

The bedroom should be for sleeping, the kitchen for eating and whatever room you have designated for home entertainment for watching TV. When you eat in the living room or set up a mini-office to get some work done in bed, you’re actually creating extra work for yourself by bringing things into a room where they don’t really belong, meaning all that stuff you brought in will have to be removed later. Using a room for its intended purpose means less cleaning up down the road.

If you’re engaged in a constant struggle trying to keep floors clean, ask yourself a few questions: do you ask everyone to remove shoes before they enter? Do you have doormats, inside and out? Do you leave windows closed if there’s a construction or renovation project going on nearby? If you have a dog, do you wipe its feet after a muddy walk? If you answered no to these questions, you’re not doing a good enough job of preventing outdoor dirt from getting inside the home, which creates a constant need to clean floors.

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Housework should not equate to misery. If you feel like cleaning is an unpleasant chore, it’s going to feel like an unpleasant chore. The secret is to making housework feel like fun, even if you have to trick yourself into it. That’s why it’s a good idea to offer yourself a little reward when you’re done or make house cleaning into the time when you can listen to some invigorating music, a favourite podcast or that audiobook you’ve been wanting to hear. The point is to figure out how to motivate yourself into not equating housework with enjoyment, not grim drudgery.

It’s important to use cleaning products and tools that fit with the way you clean, not the other way around. If you find it easier to give your floors a quick sweep or dry mop rather than haul out the vacuum cleaner, then why do you insist on waiting until you vacuum before cleaning floors? Buy cleaning supplies that work with your own cleaning patterns and look for little tricks that will make things easier, such as using dryer sheets to dust horizontal blinds or using coffee filters on mirrors instead of paper towels. Using the right products for the right job is also important and could result in working harder than you should in order to achieve the same level of clean.

When you clean, do you flit from room to room, doing a little of this and a little of that, yet never really getting the sense that you’re making progress? The secret is to get methodical and learn how to clean as effectively and efficiently as possible. Next time you’re ready for some housework, try tackling one room at a time, top to bottom, without distractions. When one room is totally clean, move onto the next. That way, even if you can’t get to the entire place, you’ll be able to enjoy at least one totally clean room instead of a home that’s halfway clean throughout.

If you clean your home when you feel like it, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Creating a cleaning schedule of specific chores to tackle on a daily and/or weekly basis will not only add efficiency and consistency, but it will also keep you on track to ensure you don’t let things slide to the point that what should be a quick and relatively easy job turns into a major undertaking.

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If you have a sink full of dirty dishes, that makes you feel guilty and bummed out every time you walk by it. Stop walking and start cleaning! Procrastination is perhaps the chief barrier to having a clean home and letting messes sit around while you promise yourself you’ll take care of it soon is a recipe for disaster. That pile of dishes is just going to become larger and more daunting the longer you ignore it, so don’t. When you see a mess that needs addressing, do it as soon as possible and move on, giving yourself one less thing to worry about later.

Is housework something that you and you alone are doing? That’s a problem for families when one person is responsible for taking care of the messes made by an entire household. The key is delegating responsibilities, getting other family members involved in cleaning tasks. This is especially true of kids; by involving them in housecleaning, they’ll develop their own good cleaning habits and will hopefully be inclined to chip in on a regular basis, cleaning up after themselves and leaving less work for you.