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When you’re squeezing household cleaning into a cram-packed weekly schedule, make sure there’s a method to your madness.
- Make every move count. That means work around the room once. Don’t backtrack. It also means you must carry your equipment and supplies with you so you don’t make dozens of aggravating trips back and forth across the room. Walk around the room once and you’re done, except for the floor.
- Use the right tools. Ah! Here’s probably the major timesaver of the bunch. Give your specialized gadgets to your enemies. You need real tools that cut time to shreds. Most of all, you need a cleaning apron to hang tools on and store cleaning supplies in as you move around the room.
- Work from top to bottom. Always. Period. Don’t argue.
- If it isn’t dirty, don’t clean it. For example, vertical surfaces are almost never as dirty as horizontal surfaces. Upper shelves and molding have less dust than lower ones. Often all that’s dirty about a surface is a few fingerprints, so don’t clean the whole area.
- Don’t rinse or wipe a surface before it’s clean. You’ll just have to start over. In other words, when you’re cleaning a surface, don’t rinse or wipe just to see if you’re done. If you were wrong, you’ll have to start all over again. Learn to check as you’re cleaning by “seeing through” the gunk to the surface below. Then you can tell when it’s dislodged and ready to be wiped or rinsed … once!
- Don’t keep working after it’s clean. Once you’ve reached ground zero, stop! You’re cutting into VLT — Valuable Leisure Time. Rinse or wipe and move on.
- If what you’re doing isn’t going to work, then shift to a heavier-duty cleaner or tool. You’re going to get very good at knowing what tool or product to use without having to throw everything in the book at it. You’ll be learning to anticipate what to reach for before you start a task so you won’t have to shift.
- Keep your tools in impeccable shape. Dull razors scratch — they don’t clean. Clogged spray bottles puff up and make funny noises — they don’t spray.
- Repetition makes for smoother moves. Always put your tools back in the same spot in your apron. You can’t spare the time to fumble around for them. And you can’t afford to leave them lying around in alien places for the dog to carry away. You’ll quickly get so expert you’ll become aggravated if the tool you expected isn’t in the right spot when you reach for it. Progress, progress.
- Pay attention. Almost everything else will fall into place if you do. Don’t think about the revisions in the tax code. Or anything else. In Latin: Age quod agis — “Do what you are doing.”
- Keep track of your time. Get a little faster every time.
- Use both hands. Your work force is half idle if one hand is doing all the work. Finish one step with one hand and start the next step with the other. Or, wipe with one hand while the other steadies the object.
- If there are more than one of you, work as a team. You’re what the biologists call a “superorganism.” If your partner gets done ten minutes faster, the team gets done ten minutes faster. And that is a wonderful thing. You can’t stop being vigilant for one moment about what will speed up or slow down your partner’s progress.
That’s it. Like any new skill, Speed Cleaning must be learned, practiced, reviewed, and perfected. It’s worth it. The payoff is that you will save hours every week. Hours that add up to days that you will spend not cleaning the house.
Excerpted from Jeff Campbell's Speed Cleaning.
Pick Up the Pace: Created on April 14th, 2003. Last Modified on January 21st, 2014
