HTR Results - My time last week: Running the house

So, I've confessed to no longer putting in 9 hours a day (yes, 9: 8-5 is 9 hours, folks, not 8) on work. In addition, working from home 4 days a week has eliminated my commute - which ranged from 45 - 90 minutes each way. So, what have I been doing with myself?

Between now and my business trip, I am doing what I think of as "vacuuming under the couch". While this analogy comes from house cleaning, I'm applying it across the board in the generic LIFE category.

So, running the household. The premises that I am working from (and these are still under refinement) are pretty simple. The first is the FlyLady philosophy of "Swish and Swipe". I started looking at her site based on a paraphrase from my friend K. K said that "if you spend one minute every day wiping an old washcloth over your counters and throw it in the washing machine, you bless your family." That has done two things for me - provided a method and provided a motive.
Another philosophy that I am playing with this week is a combination of zoning and batching. I'm dividing the house into areas that require similar tools. We'll talk about that more in the details below.

The big driver behind my efforts to do housework during the "work day" is more basic. I need to create some shared family downtime. If I let him, HTH will actually run himself ragged and unfinished tasks might actually tug at him even more than they do me. By completing these tasks during his work day, I create time for us to relax together as a family.

So, what did I actually do? Last week, I spent an 1- 1.5 hours in every room of the house - with the exception of the office (I was wiped out by Friday - so I did it this week) and D2's bedroom and bath. Here is what I did.

• Each room was put into order, dusted/scrubbed, and vacuumed/swept.
• Each room had at least one "project cleaning" thing done. I moved the living room couches to vacuum. In the bedroom, I gathered up the items to be mended and sorted out some of my closet to go to Goodwill. The office meant sorting books. You get the picture.
• I did NOT do all of the project cleaning that needed to happen in each room because I plan to do some every week.
• Every day, sometime after the breakfast dishes are created but before the school/work day ends, I take a break to do dishes and wipe down the kitchen.
  

This week, I'm doing some thinking about batching based on tools that I am using. So, I cleaned the living room today. That required the vacuum, dusting stuff and glass cleaner. Now that I'm on week 2, and have been keeping things fairly neat all week, I realized that this wouldn't take much time today - even with the project cleaning that I had in mind. So, what else could I do? The only other glass in the house is the bathroom mirrors which were just a few steps away. So now I can put the glass cleaner away for the week. Dusting and vacuuming needed to happen in the office, too, which is just a few steps across the kitchen. Both of those got done today.

So, the for the rest of this week I'll continue to look at batches. Dusting and sweeping need to happen in the quiet room, and Donovan's room. Sweeping and mopping both need to happen to the tile (foyer, kitchen, pantry, bathroom). The bathroom cleaning will have to get done on or before the tile day as well. The bedroom could've gone with the dusting/vacuuming work today, but the project clean in there needs to be done first and it wasn't. (The office already had books sorted and the living room project was vacuuming couches and the cat fur area of the front curtains.)

So, using my freed up work time, I spent some time getting the house back into easy maintenance mode last week. Now, I'm moving through "vacuuming under the couch" cleaning projects in each room as I do maintenance cleaning - and I feel like I'm spending much less time on cleaning than I used to with the "I can't stand this anymore, I have to DO something in the next 4 hours!" method. And the time I'm saving from both of those is freeing me up further to take care of other projects! But this is long enough already. Posts for another day!