Cleaning: Little and Often
A new phrase has entered my vocabulary recently. “Little and Often”. It came from Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management
Little and often means you do a little bit of a task often. I started thinking about how that applies to cleaning.
Cleaning Often Vs. Cleaning A Bigger Mess
One thing I realized is that if I wait until something is really dirty, it takes me a long time and a lot of effort to clean it. If I don’t clean the bathtub until it looks gray, it takes me a good hour to get it clean again, and I usually end up using nasty chemicals. Same with my desk. If I let the papers pile up for a few weeks, it will take me half a day to make it clean again.
Advantages of Cleaning Often
There are advantages to taking this approach to cleaning:
Less Mess
The amount of dirt/clutter you are dealing with is smaller.
Less set-on mess/Less effort
If I let my Crockpot sit overnight before I deal with it, I usually end up chipping things out. By dealing with it right away, I have a much easier time to get the stuff out. Same applies to cleaning. If I dust regularly, I never have to spend time with the compressed air blowing dust out of the crannies of objects.
Less Overwhelm
I am easily overwhelmed. If I see a sink full of dishes, I will immediately assume it is going to take me hours. (And I’ll probably avoid it). By dealing with the dishes as they come in, a few at a time, seems like nothing at all.
Seeing Dirt Means You Need to Clean More Often
One thing I have learned is that when I actually see the dirt, that means I’m going to spend a long time getting it off. Conversely, if I do a light cleaning when it looks clean, I never have to do the deep cleaning. So if I see dirt on something in between my periodic cleaning, I need to clean more often.
Example from my life: Bathroom
When I was newly married, I did no housework during the week. And weekends were generally filled with stuff…until we looked around and realized the bottom of our bathtub was gray, the shower curtain was filled with mildew, and the toilets, well, let’s just not go there. Between my husband and myself, it would take the better part of a Saturday to clean the bathroom.
The thing is, there are other things I want to do with my weekends other than clean the bathroom. So once a week, I scrub the shower floor, quick clean the toilet. It never looks dirty, but I haven’t had to spend a Saturday cleaning in six years. Even when I knew my mother or mother-in-law was coming.
Photo by Joe Shlabotnik
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[...] until things get really dirty, we will end up putting in major amounts of effort to clean them (Cleaning: Little and Often) By setting up a household rotation, you can clean a little at a time, and never end up doing a [...]