Tracking Your Cleaning Tasks

I have been managing my house for almost three years now and besides meals, one thing that takes much of my time is cleaning and organizing the house. With two growing kids, the house often becomes a playground, and I am always on my toes to keep it in order.

In these three years, I have come up with many tips/tricks and steps to complete my cleaning chores efficiently. I have tried and tested many techniques to make the cleaning tasks process-oriented. Creating a cleaning tracker is another step in the same direction.

Why a Cleaning Tracker

Lately, I have been noticing that I am cleaning certain spaces in my house more than once. Sometimes it’s due to the mess my kids make and sometimes I just can’t remember when I cleaned it last and end up cleaning it again. It is clearly not a good and efficient way of maintaining the house as you are doing chores repeatedly which should be done only once in a day or in a week.

Also, I always wanted to keep a record of tasks I do around the house, just to understand my workload. So, to combat this habit of repeated cleaning and to make my cleaning tasks more compact and time bound, I have come up with a cleaning tracker.

This cleaning tracker helps me mainly with the following two things:

1. To really understand how many spaces and things I clean on a regular basis. This gives me an idea or an overview of my daily and weekly workload.
2. To make sure I clean the allotted spaces on a scheduled day and don’t go about cleaning everything every day.

This cleaning tracker can help you bring all your cleaning responsibilities to one place and you will be able to review them on a daily or weekly or monthly basis. I started working on my cleaning tracker in February 2022 and it went through many iterations based on its practical implementations. After two months and many iterations, I have finally come up with a cleaning schedule or tracker that is working for me. And I am sure, it will work for you too.

How does the Cleaning Tracker Work

I have added all the activities that I do, not just daily or weekly, but monthly or in three months or six months. For example,

1. Brooming/Vacuuming, mopping, and cleaning of Bathroom 1 are daily or alternate day activities.
2. Cleaning bathroom 2 (Which is a guest bathroom) is a weekly or fortnightly activity. So are the following activities:
   1. Bedsheet changing
   2. Soda and vinegar in drains
   3. Water filter/flask cleaning
3.  Some activities I do monthly like, kids toys almirah, Oven, and Pooja Temple cleaning
4. Once in three months, I clean dishwasher and washing machine. I also do floor polishing once in three months.
5. Sofa cleaning is done in six or seven months or during the spring cleaning (once a year)

My Cleaning Tracker

Here I have given the screenshot of my tracker and how I have filled it. Once a week I check this tracker and enter the dates especially for the weekly tasks. I do not necessarily put dates for the tasks I do daily and simply use a line to denote a duration. For the weekly and monthly tasks, I also put the future dates for my reference. You can see those entries made in blue ink. It gives me an idea of upcoming tasks. Once those tasks are complete, I make a check mark with pencil.

When your sheet is full and you start with a new sheet, the “Last Performed Date” column will act as a reference point for you. It will help you check when was the last time you cleaned a certain a space. It is especially useful for activities that you perform monthly or in 3 months or 6 months.

Other Formats

You can create your own format based on the cleaning activities as per your house requirements. In three to four trials, you will be able to come up with an exhaustive list of all the cleaning tasks you do in your house throughout the year. You can also create a tracker that will clearly distinguish between your daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, and quarterly tasks. I am giving you such sample tracker here.

You can also find lots of Cleaning Tasks schedule or Cleaning Tasks tracker templates on the Internet.

The idea behind maintaining a tracker is to have a control over your time and schedule. Once you have listed all the tasks you do in your house along with the dates, you will be less overwhelmed and better prepared. Trust me, when I look at this tracker in a week, I realize the amount of work I do around the house, and I get a sense of accomplishment.

I am now in the process of finalizing a similar tracker sheet for self-care tasks such as meditation, running, reading, writing, pedicures, head massage, hair mask, etc. I can write more about it if any of you are interested. For me, my self-care tracker has put my self-care routine on the table, right in front of me. As compared to my cleaning tracker, which is passive (as it is a reflection on my work which I fill after completing it), my Self-Care tracker is an active/stimulating tracker which encourages me to take care of myself.

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A Tip to End With…

Not all the tasks you do in your house can be put in a list. Keeping your house clean and organized is a continuous process. You do the heavy lifting for an hour everyday but for the rest of the day, you keep doing little things here and there. Doing these little things on the go, without any schedule helps you keep your house in a certain condition so that next day, you are not waging a war again.

1. Try not to leave the bathroom or kitchen counter dirty or unkempt after you have finished your work.
2. Do a 5-10 minutes of “picking things up” round in your house once in the evening. You won’t believe how much you will accomplish in those 5-10 minutes.
3. The day you order or buy bulk grocery items, that should be the day to re-organize/clean and label/re-label your pantry boxes and bottles.

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