Cleaning Routines for Busy People

If you’re the kind of person who’s on the run all day and you feel like you don’t have time for anything else, these cleaning routines for busy people will be great for you and make your life much easier.

Pepa Tabero, expert in domestic organization and author of “Manual for a Clean and Tidy Home” teaches people how to optimize their time so they can keep their house the way they like it. She bases her method on doing a little bit every day so that chores don’t build up.

Example of a cleaning routine for busy people

If you don’t have much time but you like to keep your house clean, neat and organized, this is for you. Pepa offers some key tips so you can enjoy the home that you dream of without having to spend the whole weekend working on it. Take notes!

Keep an agenda

In her book, “Manual for a Clean and Tidy Home”, Pepa Tabero suggests keeping an agenda with all the house chores. After all, this is exactly what you do with your personal and work tasks. In this agenda, you should write down the chores that have to be done, especially the less common ones such as flipping mattresses or washing the curtains. This way, you won’t forget about them completely until they get really dirty.

Organize your time in blocks

Marie Kondo preaches cleaning according to categories; it’s time to organize your cleaning into blocks of time. This guru recommends that you work in small blocks (5, 10, or 15 minutes). Managing to do 5 minutes a day is easy, no matter how busy you are, so start there.

Setting a timer is a must. You can use a common oven timer, an alarm clock, or your cell phone alarm. But you have to stick to the schedule.

Cleaning for busy people – dividing the house into areas

Get a paper and pen and draw a diagram of the house with a clear outline of the distribution. Then, use a marker to divide this into areas and dedicate one week to each area. Focus on these areas from Monday to Friday, and leave Saturday for weekly tasks (more about this later). She recommends tidying the house a little every day in a simple way, without spending too much time on it.

Once you have everything defined, it’s important to write it down in your agenda. This way, you’ll have a clear plan and you won’t miss any details.

Cleaning for busy people – set up “de-bugging” routines

Pepa Tabero recommends that you learn to distinguish between trash, that is, everything that looks like trash at first glance; junk, which refers to those objects that should be useful but that you don’t use; and stuff, everything that you use regularly but that is never where it should be.

To get things in order and be able to find what you need, she suggests breaking chores up into two types: routine chores and special chores. The first kind can be summed up as ‘never leave a room without taking three things with you’; these three things have to go. The second kind is more complicated.

Establish daily cleaning habits

There are three key times in the day: in the morning when you wake up, in the afternoon, and in the evening after dinner. Taking just a few minutes during those times will help you keep your house clean without much effort. The key to achieving this is to make a list of chores and write them down in the agenda. On top of this, she recommends pinning up a schedule that involves the whole family.

… and weekly habits

Another of Pepa’s ideas is to designate two specific days a week for a go-over and a mini-go-over. She says the first involves the daily routine but in more detail. You should do the mini-go-over on Mondays to clean up after the weekend, for example tidying up things that are left strewn about.

When you have a busy weekday schedule and you get home late, planning your agenda helps keep everything organized, even though you’ll obviously skip the daily chores some days.

That’s how easy Pepa Tabernero’s cleaning routines for busy people are. Why not try it out for a month and see if it works for you? It’s about finding habits that you feel comfortable with; if you’re not comfortable you won’t keep on top of them. But commitment is also essential.