Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today.
If you do what you have to do you will have more time for the things you want to do.
How many times have you heard those sayings or something similar? I know I say those to Hailey so much that she gets annoyed, but they are very true, especially when it comes to keeping the house clean. If you maintain your home then you will rarely have big cleaning jobs to tackle. Take the dishes for example, if you wash them right after dinner it’s, at most, a ten minute job. However, go watch TV for a few hours and come back and suddenly you have a mountain of dishes that now need to be scrubbed. Your ten minute job just expanded into thirty minutes. That’s twenty minutes lost to cleaning.
Every night about a half an hour before I head to bed I pick up the house. I think most women do this. I walk around hanging up jackets that were thrown over chairs, putting away shoes and books and DVDs. I carry dirty dishes in to the kitchen; pick dirty clothes and towels off the bathroom floor. All those little things our families manage to trail from one end of the house to the other in just a few short hours.
Ideally this should be part of your children’s before bed routine as well. Have your children walk through the house and anything that belongs to them that isn’t where it belongs they should put away. They can carry their dirty dishes and trash to the kitchen. Hang up their own jackets. Pick up the bathroom when they are finished in there.
I kind of enjoy my bedtime walk through. I straighten the afghan that’s on the back of the couch and fluff the pillows. Rinse dishes that are in the sink and put them in the dishwasher. I get the coffee maker ready for the morning and wipe down the counters. To me this is a relaxing ritual because I know my morning will be smoother.
When I wake up to freshly brewed coffee and a neat, if not clean, house, the day already looks pretty wonderful.