Time Management Tips to Avoid a Messy House
Let’s look at some effective time management tips shared by expert organizers. Hopefully they’ll help make your life a little easier.
Sometimes the day goes by so fast that you don’t even remember what you did with it. And this can be directly linked to having a messy house and a list of unfinished tasks.
This situation is even more relevant for mothers, since tasks double when there are children in the house.
If you are among the high percentage of people who don’t know where their day went, we want to tell you that we understand.
Effective time management
Time should not be unaccounted for because we all have the same twenty-four hours a day.
Why is it so common to run out of time to clean the house?
Managing our time appropriately is the first step to clearly justifying our time at the end of the day.
It’s good to know that we are not the only ones who waste time. However, effective time management skills are certainly useful for mothers who want greater productivity.
The main enemy of time management is the number of tasks we have to deal with, which always end up taking up our valuable time.
The other enemy is having messes around the house. Although they are justified by lack of time, they are often a limiting factor for effectively accomplishing other tasks.
For example, if we go to cook and the cupboard is a mess, we lose time tidying it up before moving on to the task of cooking.
Laziness and fatigue are also two important factors that can get in the way of doing household chores. However, if we let ourselves be influenced by laziness or blame fatigue, we’ll always have an excuse to have a messy house.
“The only thing that really belongs to us is time. Even someone that has nothing, at least has the same amount of time as any other person.”
-Baltasar Gracián-
Where did my day go?
Each day has 24 hours, most of which are spent on who knows what (possibly even more hours unaccounted for than we spend sleeping).
But do we say the day is wasted when we are busy with tasks?
No. When we are busy getting things done, the hours do go by faster, but they are more productive. We only say that the day is wasted when we don’t do anything we set out to do.
The day also goes quickly when we are responding to suggestions from others, sometimes much more complex than our own tasks. For some reason, there is always someone or something that ends up taking up more of our time than expected.
However, it is our responsibility to quickly return to our to-do list.
We can’t blame someone else for our lack of organization, especially when the cause is our children. Having a messy house is one of the lowest prices that can be paid in exchange for the satisfaction that children give us.
But, if this situation is too stressful for you, we recommend that you follow these tips to alleviate the mess:
- Keep calm and be patient.
- Organize your tasks in order of priority (reflect on what is truly important).
- Make sure that everything has a specific, fixed and accessible location.
- Delegate tasks among family members (children should help when they themselves cause the mess).
- Balance the tasks so you can have control and they don’t control you.
- Stay attentive to changes in your mood and physical health, so that fatigue doesn’t overwhelm you with surprise.
- Dedicate the first few hours of the day to the easiest jobs so that you don’t start off tired (remember to prioritize your other later tasks).
- Plan an exclusive schedule for housework, so you won’t become a slave of order.
- Designate a place in the house for your recreation, which is not affected by the general mess. It can serve as inspiration and motivation.