Finding Time & Motivation To Maintain A Clean & Tidy House

How wonderful it feels when your home is clean and not messy. It is important to keep your house neat and free of germs. All things should be in their proper places so that you can easily find them when required. However, most times, this is easier said than done, specially when you have kids at home.

When there are kids your workload can increase to keep the house clean. Even if you clean things up, very soon you will find the house has become messy again with toys and other stuff lying around everywhere.

For working people, even if there are no kids at home, it might become difficult to keep their home neat and tidy as they feel tired after getting home from a long day at work and don’t have the energy and will to clean up things. They might lazily throw about clothes and stuff here and there. You might put off doing work and eventually the work will pile up so much that it feels like moving a mountain. The important thing is to not let the work pile up big time.

Let us divide this article into 3 parts:

#1 — In first part we shall address the problem of how to find time and inclination to clean the house, even if you are tired and just reached home after a hectic day at work.

#2 — In this part we shall discuss tips and strategies to get the help of other house members in maintaining cleanliness.

#3 — Here we shall discuss ways to find inspiration to want to have a neat and beautiful house so that you start finding it easy to do the household chores which you used to run away from earlier.

Part 1 — Finding Motivation to Keep House Clean

How many times people plan on cleaning their house only to find they aren’t motivated enough or tired, and thus decide to do it later. How can we solve this problem?

The solution to the problem may not be simple but it is definitely doable. It is recommended that you take small steps.

For example, if you come home from outside and find your room is a complete mess with clothes lying all around, and also your kitchen sink is full of unwashed utensils, what do you do in such a scenario?

If you decide to handle all of this right now it will make you feel overwhelmed. So what do you do? You decide that you are only going to clean the room today. If even that feels too much you may think , ‘Oh ok! I will give just 20 minutes of time to clean up the room. Whatever I am able to sort out within this time I will do it, the rest will be done tomorrow.’

So you decide on a time frame which feels comfortable and doable to you. Do not go for a timeframe which makes you cringe and makes you want to avoid this unpleasant task.

After deciding on a time frame, start immediately. Do not think that you will first have a cup of coffee and then start cleaning. This is a trick your mind is playing on you to make you avoid the work. If you fall for the trick you will end up having a cup of coffee then another thought is going to pop up in your mind, ‘Oh! I will just check my email for 5 minutes as there is something urgent to check’.

The important thing is to start immediately. If you feel like procrastinating, remind yourself that you are just doing this only for 10–20 minutes or whatever time you have decided.

Once the time is up, it is up to you now whether you want to continue for some more time or stop. If you want to stop there is nothing wrong with it. But mostly what will happen is that you will want to continue further. This is the power and effectiveness of getting started and having small targets which you can easily reach.

#2 — Enlisting The Help of All Household Members

It is not an easy task to maintain cleanliness in the house all by yourself. You would need the help of others. So we shall address this issue now.

First up, if you are living with your family then enlist the help of your spouse. Talk to him or her and tell them that we need to take some time out everyday, even if it is as little as 10 minutes to do our bit for the house.

Try to divide different tasks so that each person can be held responsible. As an example, you might take over the responsibility of washing the dishes while your spouse will do the vacuum cleaning or some other task.

It is important to get the kids to help you. The benefit of this would be that it would inculcate a sense of neatness in them and develop in them a habit of doing the tasks they are responsible for, co-operating with others in getting some work done, overcoming procrastination and laziness. These habits can carry over in their adult lives and can prove very beneficial to them.

While enlisting the help of others make sure to assign each small, do-able tasks. Aim for small targets which do not make anyone feel overwhelmed, at least initially.

#3 — Tips to Get Inspired To Maintain Clean House

Finally it is important to always be inspired and motivated to have a neat and clean home so that you will do the household chores on time and not put them off.

You can paste pictures of clean and beautiful looking homes at different places like on the refrigerator, doors etc. In your kitchen, you can paste a picture of clean looking kitchen with the wash basin empty and not filled with dirty unwashed dishes.

You may find these pictures in magazines, newspapers or search on internet then take large, color printouts.

Also when you feel laziness in doing any task, remind yourself how good it will look when the task is done; how clean your house will look and how satisfactory it will feel when you have been able to overcome your laziness and get the work done.

However if you are too busy, sick, have a large house and feel the above tips won’t work for you then you can enlist the help of Green Ladies Cleaning services to maintain your house.