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Last updated on March 30th, 2023 at 03:58 pm
How do you keep your house clean when everybody’s at home? The house is definitely messier with the entire family being home all the time. So it’s good to have some hacks up your sleeve for the days when it’s especially messy.
I’ve been at this work-at-home-mom gig for 5 years now. And I’ve had several instances of messy moments during phone meetings –right at the moment when I turn off my muted microphone to start speaking.
One of those messy incidents happened on a warm spring day while sitting outside on the back patio …I turned off mute the moment Juliana dumped a 16 oz bottle of bubbles underneath my chair. I rushed through my list of items, trying to block out the series of “uh-ohs” issuing from my toddler’s mouth.
I’ve become a master at quick clean-ups so I can get back to work. When it’s time to work, I want to work. But I don’t want to spend my non-working hours cleaning. I want to spend it with my family.
Here are 5 ninja hacks for keeping a clean house while working from home.
Ninja Hack #1: Tidy in sprints
You don’t have to clean all day but you should be cleaning up throughout the day.
Take a 10-minute break throughout the day to tidy up the house.
I clean up during work breaks to keep my hands and body busy as I wrestle with a new work problem to solve.
I clean up after meal times so I don’t have a million dishes to wash right before it’s time to make dinner.
This is the time I get Juliana to pick up the toys she’s not playing with so the playroom isn’t a disaster at the end of the day.
Wanna know what I do during these sprints?
Get the tidying checklist for free right here.
Ninja Hack #2: Batch your housecleaning
My favorite productivity hack is batching. And while most people use it for work, I say, why not use it around your house too?
Do all your house cleaning in one day so you don’t have to think about what you’re supposed to clean on different days of the week. That’s too complicated.
Once you’re in the mode of cleaning, you can get it done pretty quickly. And if your family’s at home with you, you can loop them in to pick up stray items, move chairs, dust, or run the vacuum.
Ninja Hack #3: Use an all-purpose cleaner
Maybe not everyone will go for this, but using one, all-purpose cleaner shaves a little bit of time off cleaning.
There’s no digging through cabinets looking for the right cleaner. Plus, it cuts out some clutter inside your cleaning cabinet (or wherever you keep your cleaning supplies).
My pick for an all-purpose cleaner? 100% Thieves all-purpose from Young Living Essential Oils.
I was getting sick from fumes from all my store-bought cleaning products. So I switched to Thieves.
My house still feels so clean (and it smells like Christmas!).
Ninja Hack #4: Have a daily cleaning routine
For your batch house cleaning routine to go faster, there has to be some upkeep during the week.
We vacuum crumbs on the kitchen floor daily so crumbs aren’t tracked all over the house.
Kitchen counters are wiped and sanitized every night.
I clear our drop zone so we don’t have a ton of stuff to put away.
All these little actions add up to give us a little less scrubbing or work to do on our batch cleaning day.
Which means I can get the house clean in about an hour.
Ninja Hack #5: Put all your papers in one place and deal with them once a week!
Papers can get out of hand fast. (70% of all my organizing gigs are to organize paper.)
Do yourself a favor and have one place for all your papers. Then handle those papers once a week.
If you need a system to do this, you can swipe mine inside the Complete Paper Organizing Formula. I’ve made this Guidebook super affordable because the paper plague needs to STOP!
Working from home and having a tidy house? It can definitely be done.
These ninja hacks don’t seem like much but trust me –they’re part of my secret to having an always organized home that I don’t spend all day cleaning. Mastering these little routines is the secret to it.
Download this free 10-Minute Tidy Checklist to put these hacks into action!
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