The One Thing Professional Cleaners Do When Cleaning Their Own Homes

When life gets busy, the dust bunnies come out to play a little too often. For some people, hiring a professional housecleaner is a lifesaver. The daily grind of work, carpools, and soccer practice leaves little time for cleaning baseboards and washing windows. Sometimes we put things off long enough they become a real problem, leading professional housecleaners to reveal the grossest things they've encountered in homes. Knowing these chores need to be done often leads to stress and worry for the homeowner. But what if your day job is cleaning houses? For professional cleaners who have been cleaning homes all day, tackling chores at their own homes may require a little extra planning.

One thing the pros do when cleaning their own homes is goal-setting. Like working toward any kind of goal, breaking a large job into small, manageable tasks makes it easier to conquer and less overwhelming. It also gives you more frequent rewards when you accomplish smaller goals. These goals can be simple, such as wiping down kitchen counters every day, or complex, such as decluttering the laundry room. Once the goal is identified and the plan is made, they set a timer, turn on some tunes, and get to work.

To set your own cleaning goals, decide what is truly important to accomplish. Don't strive for perfection; clean and tidy is often good enough, and chasing perfection can make you crazy. If you cook a lot, for example, maybe a perfectly cleared off counter at all times is not feasible. Instead, aim to leave everyday items accessible but keep occasional appliances put away. Or if decluttering the kitchen is a goal, create a schedule to tackle one cabinet a day, and put this goal on a calendar to help keep things on track. Make a cleaning schedule by writing down the goal you want to accomplish, break it into smaller tasks, and assign those tasks to certain days. Spreading the workload over several days or a couple of weeks builds momentum and keeps the feeling of being overwhelmed at bay.

A few other tricks of the trade include minimizing clutter, daily tidying, and keeping high-traffic areas sanitized. A few minutes of daily maintenance goes a long way toward keeping a home pristine so that cleaning days can be devoted to deep cleaning. If you're just too busy to clean at all, it's certainly worth considering hiring a professional cleaning service. Goal-setting can even help maximize every minute of your housecleaner's visit by helping them prioritize their tasks. But if you just need a little motivation to tackle it yourself, setting goals like the pros may lead you to decide you don't need a professional cleaner, after all.