5 Tips How to Keep Up with Your Home

As a person who deals with anxiety, I sometimes struggle to keep up with my home. We have a fairly large home with five people and three dogs living everyday life. It can get extremely overwhelming. Constant laundry, dirty dishes, and little messy feet all over the floor. Unfortunately, when things build up and become too much I tend to shut down. This has made me change the way I’ve been doing things lately and I’m excited to share what’s been working for me! Here are 5 tips on how to keep up with your home, without getting overwhelmed.

As Moms we always have a to-do list a mile long, sometimes it’s hard to really know where to start. I found that breaking it down into smaller every day tasks has really helped me! Here are the things I do every single day.

1. Make the bed.

Start each day by making your bed. Honestly, try it! I’ve never been fully convinced that this made an impact on the day, but it truly does. Create a habit of waking up and making your bed right away. Doing this little task will make you feel accomplished and will set the tone for the rest of your day. It’s so simple. I know for me, getting that one thing done so early in the day helps motivate me to get other things done as well!

2. Do one load of laundry.

Laundry is plentiful around here. My youngest loves to change five plus times a day. I’ve tried a lot of different laundry routines and this is the one that works the absolute best for me. After I get up and make my bed, I immediately throw a load of laundry into the washer. That way I know I can fold and put it away by the end of the day. I tend to forget about laundry in the wash, you know how that goes, so I give myself plenty of time. When I’ve caught up on clothes, I wash towels, rugs, sheets, blankets etc. I find that I never truly run out of something to wash!

3. Spot clean throughout the day.

Do you ever find yourself walking past clutter? Telling yourself you’ll just take care of it “later”. Get rid of that mindset. It’s something I am continually working on. With a family of five, things can really start to pile up. If you see anything during the day that needs a little tidying, take a couple minutes to just do it right then and there. This eliminates clutter and for me, that means I become way less overwhelmed by my home.

Another thing you can do is identify your “hotspots”. I’ve talked about this in my 15 Ways to Keep Your Home Decluttered blog post. These are spots in your home that always tend to to pile up with clutter. Once you know which spots these are, you can keep an eye on them and clean up when needed.

4. Pick one room/space to deep clean.

Okay, this one is BIG! There are a lot of spaces in a home, it can be so hard to keep up. Recently I found myself not being able to get past my kitchen/living room or I just couldn’t even figure out where to start. That’s when I decided to break the house up into spaces and focus on only one each day. Even if it’s a small area, it doesn’t matter. Every space needs to be clean eventually anyway. Focus on cleaning the floors, the window sills, dusting, absolutely everything. After you’re done, it’ll feel so good to have at least one space really clean! Eventually the whole house will become more and more clean as you make this a daily habit.

5. Use a planner.

I’m the type of person that loves to write things down and check them off once I’m done. There’s just something so magical about looking at a list of to-do’s and seeing them all checked off! Just recently I’ve learned about digital planners and I am absolutely loving using one. I have a Samsung tablet, so I’m using the Penly app. If you have an Apple tablet, you can try checking out Goodnotes. I love digital planning because you can always switch things around if needed. I found that sometimes my day doesn’t go like I originally wanted, so I love how you can easily change things. Plus, you can really customize it to whatever works for you.

Honestly, there is so much I could say about using planners and to-do lists. I’m going to have to make another post on this topic!

For now, let’s just talk about creating a manageable daily to-do list. This list is going to be things that you really want to get done during a particular day. The key is making it manageable. If it’s not realistic, don’t even write it down on your daily list. You can always create another list for things you’d like to get done eventually. This list doesn’t even have to be the same every day, just do what works for you each individual day. Once you have your list made, stick to it. Start with the top and work your way down. Once you get through it, you can relax and know you did everything you needed to that day.

That’s it! 5 tips on how to keep up with your home. These five tips might seem like a lot at first, but I promise once you start making them a daily habit it won’t seem like a lot anymore. Most of these take a very small amount of time, the bulk of your time will be in whatever space you choose to deep clean. Combine all of these, tweak them however you need, and get a handle on your home again!

If you want some cleaning motivation, make sure you go check out my YouTube channel! I just did a bathroom deep clean with me, where I focused on my master bathroom.