Smart Organizing by Sandra Felton

Author:Sandra Felton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: House cleaning;Time management, HOM019000, SEL021000
ISBN: 9781441233271
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2004-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Others get real complicated with their plan, schedule each job, and take it all very seriously. This is not our approach. That is beyond the Bare Bones Way.

Keep it really simple. Remember that we are aiming for finding the golden 20 percent that makes an impact.

Maybe scheduling only fifteen minutes seems crazy. There are problems to consider and solve. The cleaning plan won’t be effective if you or your family is dirtying up faster than cleaning up. There are certain contributing factors to think about if the Bare Bones method is going to work.

First and foremost, your family has got to be a part of the solution, not part of the problem. The ideal thing is for them to join in the Fifteen-Minute Frenzy, either in their own rooms or in some area you designate for them to clean.

The house has got to be reasonably well organized, as suggested earlier in the book, for this fifteen-minute plan to move forward successfully. You and your family have got to be working the five habits of order maintenance (see chap. 2) as a regular part of organizational life, so the house will look reasonably neat. Something is not quite right if you try to keep your house clean while it is cluttered. A vacuumed rug with stuff piled on it, or even one sock in the middle, doesn’t bring about the effect you desire.

Cleaning makes sense only if you have a house that is easy to work in, at least the parts you and others see. You need to have the house look neat for your own sake. The truth is that it is very difficult to work up motivation to clean (as in vacuum and dust) a cluttered house.

Some will say they clean for health reasons, but that is a secondary motivation and is not inspiring. Health is important, but the primary motivation for anything we do in the house is aesthetic. Cleaning enhances the basic good look of the house into which you have already built beauty by organizing and decorating. You want your heart to leap with joy when you walk into your beautiful, and now clean, house.

WHAT DO I DO FIRST?

Don Aslett wrote the book Do I Dust or Vacuum First?[1] The question reflects the problem of deciding what order to use in cleaning. The logical pattern for cleaning is twofold: top to bottom and in to out.

Top to bottom implies that in the house you start from the upper floor and work down to the lower floor. That may be all in one day (I faint just thinking about it!) or over several days’ time. In an individual room, it means dusting or cleaning what is higher and working down until you get to the floor.

Cleaning from in to out implies that you clean the closets, drawers, cabinets, and the like first. Then you work from the walls outward into the middle of the room.

Although the logic of this is indisputable, there are obviously some cases in which special areas will require a change in the pattern.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.