As much as you may hate cleaning, there’s nothing like the feeling of coming back to a clean and tidy home, and with a few cleaning habits under your belt, there’s no reason why your home can’t be clean and tidy all of the time. Alternatively, you can choose to spend your free time doing other, more meaningful things, and leave the cleaning to the pro’s by hiring a cleaning agency.
If you do decide you want to try and keep your home a bit cleaner, here are a few good habits you can develop that will help you do exactly that:
Begin with a list of habits
The aim is to get the following simple activities to become automatic habits that we always perform, and often without even thinking about it too much. Practise them one at a time, and see how long it takes for them to become part of your daily routine:
- Hang your clothes up, fold them and put them away, or put them in the laundry basket immediately
- Wash the dishes (or load the dishwasher) as soon as you’ve finished a meal, and clean the sink
- Pick up items of clutter from around the home before leaving or going to bed
- Put things back in their place once you’ve used them
- Make the bed as soon as you get up every morning
- Keep surfaces such as desks, counters, and tables free from as much clutter as possible
Take each task one at a time, and you might be surprised at how quickly you begin to carry them out without a second thought.
Tips for dealing with each habit
To support yourself as you try to make the above tasks into habits, do the following:
- Write down your activities and goals
- Keep a daily log about your habits, recording whether you were successful or not
- Reward yourself for every successful day
- In case you fail, think about the reasons why you did so, and how you can prevent yourself from failing in the future
Each activity will gradually become a simple routine for you, and as you master each one, you’ll then be able to move on to the next.
Are there such things as bad cleaning habits?
Without a shadow of a doubt! There are many bad cleaning habits that we may have developed over time, and some of the more common ones can be found below:
- Accumulating paper clutter
- Using dirty tools
- Leaving dirty dishes in the sink
- Stacking up food in the fridge
- Not making the bed every morning
- Using cleaners without reading the directions
- Using cleaners that are too harsh
- Dusting last
- Wearing your outside shoes inside the house
Have a good long think about the following bad habits, and see if there are ways that you can stop yourself from doing them; swapping them for good cleaning habits.
Good cleaning habits are easy to think about and implement, but not so easy to stick to. If you’ve tried becoming a cleaner, more houseproud person and have failed miserably, don’t worry, you’re not alone – if you were, such things as professional cleaning companies simply wouldn’t exist! To spend your time doing things that are more fun than developing good cleaning habits, call up the pro’s and have them do it for you.
