5 Cleaning Habits of a Busy Working Mom
Bringing up children, working around the clock and maintaining your home neat and sparkling clean is a mean feat. With so many things to balance between, busy moms often find themselves overwhelmed with the number of tasks they are required to cope with on a daily basis.
Yet, negligence and exhaustion will have their say and only in a couple of days your household will be transformed into a pigsty. Consider establishing solid cleaning habits to incorporate in your already hectic schedule. Here is how you do it.
1 Make a good use of your mornings
Sure, it is difficult to clean an entire house or apartment in 15 minutes, yet ‘difficult’ is far from ‘impossible.’ There is only so much you can do in such a short time, but then again, you are not obliged to always go for ‘perfect’ results.
Once you have prepared the little ones’ breakfast, collect the dirty clothes from their room’s floor and toss them in the washing machine to wash after work. Wiping the bathroom’s floor with a mop will require only a minute of your time. Make the kids’ beds and empty the dish washer. That is probably all you will manage to do in 15 minutes, but it is still something.
2 Do the dishes immediately after use
Dealing with a heap of greasy pans and plates after a long day at work is a complete nightmare. Why not use the time this task will require to help your little girl or boy with their homework? I suggest you wash the dishes immediately after you have used them.
It will be easier and less time-consuming to do it by hand instead of waiting on your dish washer to complete its cycle. Of course, if there are too many dishes to wash, feel free to load the washer. Whatever you opt for, do not allow the food residue and grease to dry up as they will be more cumbersome to remove in this case.
Read also – 8 Creative Cleaning Tips for Lazy Girls
3 De-clutter each day
Maintaining your home clutter-free will hardly require much of your time. Take five minutes a day to collect all dirty clothes from your kids’ room. The same applies to toys, stationary, magazines, textbooks and notebooks. Place each item where it rightfully belongs.
It will be easier for you to find what you are looking for, not to mention your home will appear neater and therefore, cleaner when everything is at its place. It is of essential importance to go through this ritual each and every day. Once you allow the clutter to take over your house, you will have to spend hours to tidy up.
4 The afternoon cleaning ritual
I understand cleaning is the last thing on your mind once you come home from work. Yet, skipping on your cleaning chores might be an option when you are single and live on your own, but when you have three kids and a household to look after, neglecting your chores is probably not a good idea. I suggest you spare twenty minutes each afternoon to complete some minor cleaning tasks.
For instance, you can dust the furniture in the living room, iron or fold your clean laundry, straighten up the decorative pillows on the couch and sofas, throw away the trash and remove fingerprints from steel surfaces and picture frames. All these tasks are hardly physically demanding and are quick and easy to complete. Once they turn into a habit, they will require even less time.
Read also – How to Split Chores with Your Spouse When You Are Both Super Busy
5 Set a good example
The easiest way to teach your children to maintain their living environment clean and tidy is to set a good example yourself. Ask your little ones to lend you a hand with some of the chores. In the evenings, you can assign them with an easy task like putting away their toys while you pick out their clothes for the next morning and set their desks in order.
This will help develop a sense of responsibility and the sooner it happens, the better. Remember, when your boy leaves for college, you will not be around to clean up his messy room.
Balancing between so many responsibilities and chores is never easy when you are a working mom. The sooner you transform your cleaning ‘chores’ into habits, the easier it will get to keep up with them. I suggest you start with the cleaning habits I have listed above and see how it goes from there.
