Household chores & tasks

I was raised by a very neat and clean mom known for saying things like “cleanliness is next to godliness” and “don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today”. She used to clean the TV while I was watching it. Seriously.

While in my own adult life, I can’t honestly compete with her standard of clean – modern life is busier, without a doubt – I still have that standard looming in my mind, and its become sort of an unreachable goal. All this to say: I understand how hard it is to really want your place to be HGTV-ready, but not be quite sure how you could possibly make that happen.

 

The problem with so much of the planning strategies out there

There is no shortage of sample schedules out there when it comes to chores and cleaning, and I expect there are people for whom they work really well. But whenever I try to start with someone else’s list, it inevitably starts to feel overwhelming, because they’ve either included things I don’t realistically have time for, like a weekly window cleaning, or because they haven’t baked in the things I uniquely need to do, like make sure my Roomba (his name is Bob) does a floor a day or make sure my kids are picking up their toys I pick up my kids’ toys. 

I want to help you tailor your planning to you, because plans that work have to be your own, and they have to have built-in flexibility. It’s not practical to have a daily list, and then also a weekly schedule of chores, plus a monthly list and a seasonal list you’re expected to keep on top of. Who wants to reference multiple schedules? Plan by the Moon templates leverage a day or two of flexible “item off your deeper clean or project list” tasks that rotate, allowing ALL of your tasks to live in one place. And, the build-your-own element hopefully helps you tailor this to your family’s needs, and continue to issue new and improved versions as you learn what works and what doesn’t. Because it can be surprisingly hard, actually, to understand what has to be done to keep the house afloat, versus what you’ve simply come to think needs to be done every day. This is an approach that doesn’t aim to have everything perfect all the time, but it does aim to be realistic and therefore sustainable – which I hope can help keep you perfectly happy, a state of being that’s much more important to achieve than perfectly clean, in my opinion.

One solution for working parents is to outsource the cleaning, and I completely support this if you can afford it. I don’t think we can expect to create extra hours in the day, and firmly believe that collectively, we need to be more reasonable about what’s feasible for any one person or couple to accomplish. In my situation, we’d rather not pay for cleaning, because we’re really focused on saving right now. But the clock stops for no one, so we needed to get real about which tasks were truly the critical ones to keep our household running smoothly, and which we could let go of a bit and do more seldomly. Once we agreed on those– and that can be an iterative, trial-by-error process– it was easier to create a chart of who does what when.

 

How do you decide which tasks are critical?

  1. Recognize that this is up to you. This will look different for everyone, and I think the biggest factors are: 
    1. your space and what kind of unique needs it has (do you need to add salt to the water filter monthly? Is your place small enough that any amount of clutter is intolerable?)
    2. your family/roomates and what kind of “mess” you naturally add to the picture (all I know is, when I was living on my own, things didn’t “spill” in the fridge as often as they do now)
    3. your preferences and which things, if not done, add the most stress for you, personally. Clutter on the counters? Dust allergies? Dishes in the sink? Fingerprints on the windows? As a thought experiment, you can imagine your house perfectly clean, and then envision chores undone one at a time, and try to notice how much the mental image of each bothers you (For me, clutter is the biggest offender, especially on flat surfaces.)
    4. what cleaning habits are built-in for you: will you make the bed or rinse your dishes on autopilot without a second thought? Just keep it simple– no need to build anything that comes naturally into your plan.
  2. Take a stab at which you think are the most important, and commit to doing those for a couple of weeks as a test. It’s important to remember that the best planning is built to be improved upon, and that it’s a much better use of your time to try something, learn from what worked and didn’t and try a 2.0 version, than to obsess for hours about creating the perfect plan, and never implementing it, or implementing it too late to have been useful (not to mention, it’s probably not perfect).
  3. Build in flexibility. Similar to point #2, I like to have a day where my main “to-do” item is to pick a “to-do” item off a longer running list of projects. That way, I don’t have to reference a weekly schedule and a monthly schedule; it’s all in one place (much more useful). My plan doesn’t go out the window, either, when life changes and different tasks become more relevant; I simply choose the best one for the moment. Plus, I can pick one I’m more in the mood to do (at least relative to the others), which is helpful. This helps us make progress against those “nice-to-do” items that would otherwise either never get done, or really complicate and clog up a plan if we tried to slot any of them in on a weekly basis.
  4. Start with someone else’s suggestions, if unsure. I’m outlining my more critical and less critical tasks below, but there are plenty of great ideas out there from people with their heads more immersed in this space than me. I like x and y a lot, for example.

 

Most critical – do once a day More critical – do once a week Less critical – do once in awhile
Laundry Cleaning bathrooms Windows
Dishes Vacuuming and washing floors Fridge clean
Make the bed Watering any plants Car clean
Picking up toys, mail, etc that builds up
over the day as you go		 Trash Dusting
Kitchen cleaning- wipe up right after you
cook each time, including the cabinets/floors that may have been splashed		 Edging (dustbuster work) Weeding, leaves, other lawn projects
Prep lunches & lay out clothes for next day Mowing lawn Clean couch/pull out cushions

 

Again, these are just examples of what I’ve found to be more and less important in my home; yours may look entirely different.

 

How does Plan by the Moon come in?

The iterative nature of this process and the household maintenance templates you’ll find here allows for periodic revisiting of the plan. So, you create a template in November, give it a try, and then in December, you can update it and start afresh. This is helpful not only because you improve upon your planning, having learned in November what worked well about the original plan and what didn’t, but also because you can shuffle tasks among household members to keep everyone from getting bored. (This is especially helpful with kids.) So no, there’s no rule here that you need to update monthly on a “by the moon” schedule, but it might be a good rhythm to start with first, and then realistically, this process can fall under the “some other moon” category, where you still might have your weekly cleaning schedule rhythm, but you might not need to change it more than quarterly. That’s the spirit of planning by the moon, though: embracing change, and harnessing efficiency.

 

Ok, but what should the schedule look like?

No one should have more tasks in their day than are reasonable, and the schedule should be easy to adapt. Those are pretty much my only two rules.

 

But it can be daunting to put a schedule together. Not to worry, because I have a great template for you! It’s easy to edit, so you can iterate as much as you like. This is roughly based on my own family’s current plan, and it’s not perfect – we sometimes struggle to keep up with weekend tasks, while other weekends feel like the only time to get things done– so that’s my next moving target. Like I said, plans are supposed to keep getting better. But, this template is the outline of the plan that has worked, by far, the best for my family out of all of the chore schedules we’ve ever tried. We like to put ours on our fridge; you could also put this up in a command center, or keep it digital and easy to access and edit, leave it on the dining table for regular discussion – the choice is yours! We hope you find it as useful as we did.

(Template coming soon!)

 

What about assigning chores to kids?

If you want to get your kids involved in household chores, there are many approaches to doing this, and they’ll depend on your family’s needs and style. You’ll want to think through whether you offer an allowance for chores, and I think there are good rationales for offering and not offering and it’s going to come down to your preference. Personally, I like offering kids an allowance to help teach them about money, but I also don’t tie it super closely to chores, because I do want it to be clear that there are certain things we just do as part of a family to help each other. If my kids want to pick up extra work for extra allowance, that’s something I’m open to; I’m not super jazzed about paying them to pick up their toys. So I broadly try to separate the two.

I’ve found that my kids really love being part of the family schedule, and thrive on a good plan. But not all kids will be the same, and if a schedule feels too rigid for yours, you might try simply telling them they need to pick up after themselves, plus get rotating assignments from you as needed, and when they’re ready to do their chores, they should check in with you (this can be great in that you can assign whatever you need the most help with in the moment, but can be more challenging for everyone to make this approach a habit).

If you are putting your kids into the schedule of family chores and tasks, just remember to keep things age appropriate, and I do suggest switching their tasks out once in a while to avoid boredom. At 5 and 7, here are some ideas for chores that have worked well for mine:

  • Picking up toys daily (this is the one I care about most. I really want to teach them to put away the things they’ve played with, as otherwise, I have time to do nothing but pick up the toys they’ve strung all over the house. That said, it’s really not until your kids are around 4 or 5 that this even starts to be possible unassisted, in my experience, and it won’t be perfect at that age either, necessarily.)
  • Dustbusting the edges of rooms with high traffic and mess like the kitchen
  • Closing all the blinds at evening time
  • Setting or clearing the table
  • Pulling weeds
  • Dusting (a limited amount for younger ages)
  • Bringing their plates to the sink, and basic loading of dishwasher
  • Moving the laundry from washer to dryer and starting the dryer (my younger son LOVES cleaning the lint trap. It’s weird, but awesome.)
  • Watering plants
  • Making birthday cards for upcoming parties (I’m telling you, it’s pointless to spend $7 on a card – and man are they getting expensive! It took me awhile to realize that the smartest people giving us birthday presents were letting their kids design cute cards to go with them. Meaningful and a money/time saver.)