As a dancer follows a dance routine, you can follow a daily housekeeping routine to keep a clean house. To have your home organized in the most efficient and productive way, requires some planning and scheduling. As a dancer needs a choreographer (that’s you, the housekeeper) and practise will make perfect, the following steps will be all you need to incorporate into your day, to see yourself and your family dancing your way around your clean and organized home.
Why you want to turn daily tasks into routines and habits!
Daily Housekeeper Tasks for an Organized Home
- make the kids beds
- fluff the pillows and fold throws in the lounge
- open the mail (mail system, is coming up soon)
- washing into the dryer then folded and put away
Work out your Housekeeping Tasks for your Routines based on Your Individual Situation
Whatever the situation is in your home, whether you do your daily tasks in the morning, before dinner or after dinner, keep adjusting them until you find the order that works best for you and your unique situation. Not including meals, helping with homework or the length of time the washer and drier goes for, your daily housekeeping tasks, shouldn’t take much longer than 20 minutes to 30 minutes each day. Even quicker once you have them working in a routine and eventually as a habit.
Family before dinner
The before dinner routine
This routine is most important in running your home in an organized and time efficient way. My husband works shifts. I still make his dinner when I make the rest of the families. I’ll leave it in the oven on warm, well covered or if that’s not possible, he has to warm it in the microwave. He’s also good and washes up his plates and any other things, when he’s finished.
If you have young ones, who like to eat their dinner early, or go looking for snacks, establishing a firm time for the cook in the familyto head to the kitchen and start making the dinner, will solve the problem.
In our case it’s 5.45pm. Due to having checked my planner for the nights meal in the morning, meat is defrosted if necessary and I already know what I’m going to cook. (I try my best to anyway) As the homes housekeeper, these tasks, are up with the very most important for the day.
Before dinner tasks
- dinner prep, make dinner and tidy kitchen
- feed the animals
- sweep floors if necessary
- help with homework
- help kids with their before bed routine
Before Bed Routine For Kids
The before bed routine habit will also be highly important in assuring your success in organizing your home. Ideally, the daily cleaning house tasks will all be complete by now, leaving you not too much to do before you get to bed. By establishing this routine into a habit your mornings will run so much more smoothly. Just as I suggested to make a firm dinner prep time, I believe it’s of absolute extreme importance to establish a bed time for your children, if you have them of course.
How Much Sleep Should My Child Get?
12 – 14 11 – 13 Table from www.sleepforkids.org
This is part of an article from sleep for kids organization. Experts in the needs of sleep and importance of routines for children.
They also suggest that:
Children Need And Thrive On Routine
The #1 tip for good sleeping habits in children is to follow a nightly routine. A bedtime ritual makes it easier for your child to relax, fall asleep and sleep through the night.
Typical Bedtime Routine
- Have a light snack
- Take a bath.
- Put on pajamas.
- Brush teeth.
- Read a story.
- Make sure the room is quiet and at a comfortable temperature.
- Put your child to bed.
- Say goodnight and leave.
Helpful Tips
- Make bedtime the same time every night.
- Make bedtime a positive and relaxing experience without TV or videos. According to one recent study, TV viewing prior to bed can lead to difficulty falling and staying asleep. Save your child’s favorite relaxing, non-stimulating activities until last and have them occur in the child’s bedroom.
- Keep the bedtime environment (e.g. light, temperature) the same all night long.
To this list I would add:
- Teach them to put their cloths out ready for the next day as part of their routine
- Put their bags, sports equipment and anything else needed the next morning in a designated spot by the door the evening before also.
organized homes before bed routine
The Housekeepers Before Bed Routine
Just like the kids, you should establish a firm bed time and sleep time for yourself. Here’s an article for you on the optimum amout of sleep for yourself. They suggest 6.5 to 7.5 hours a night.
Now we have to start with the end in mind from your bed time and incorporate the following tasks, to make up your home organization, good housekeeping, before bed routine.
- check your planner/calendar for what you have on tomorrow
- choose your cloths for tomorrow and hang in the bathroom or side of cupboard
- collect any items you need to take with you in the morning and put them at the front door
- tidy pillows and throw rugs in the lounge room
- make sure projects are put away eg: Lego, knitting, magazines *kids to help
- plates and glasses taken out to the kitchen
- check doors locked and curtains/blinds drawn, lights out
- shower and beauty regime
- set alarm for morning
That’s it. The entire home cleaning list, and daily housekeeping routines, for a clean house and good home organization.
Remember though, these are your daily tasks. There are still, weekly, monthly and quite a lot of sorting and de-cluttering to go. Small steps, is the way to handle all of this. No housekeeper could do it all, at once.
If you can master these daily routines however, your home will be far more organized than it was. Everyone will certainly notice, and doing these daily tasks, in routines that become habits, you’ll find, are easier, than doing things in an unsystematic way each day. Why rethink it all everyday, when really, they continually repeat each day anyway right?
Your turn to start establishing your organizing routines now, here’s how:
- Grab a note book and pen and on the top of each page write the following headings
- Morning routine
- (mid morning routine optional)
- Before dinner routine
- Kids before bed routine
- Before bed routine
- Go through the lists of tasks to incorporate into the routines and choose which routine you want to put each task into
- Start with the morning routine
- Choose a dinner time and add it to the before dinner routine
- (choose the kids bed time and add to their before bed routine)
- Choose your bed time and add it to your before bed routine
Routine Habit Notebook
Daily Housekeeping Tasks to Sort into Your Different Routines
- Add all the tasks across the different routines and try them out, in the order that you feel best suits you.
- Remember to keep tweaking them until you feel your getting through them without too much effort.
- Once your achieving all the tasks at the times you’ve decided upon, try and do them, same time same way everyday.
- The goal being to make them into a routine habit for a clean house and home organization.
- Don’t worry if they don’t work all at once. Just keep trying to do what you can each day and still reading what should be done even if you don’t. You know what you have to do and with some perserverance and the knowledge that the home cleaning list part, is only worth 20-30 minutes of your day, I’m certain that in the not too distant future it will all fall into place.
- Don’t forget to adjust where necessary for your personal situation, adding anything else that is important to you.
