How Housework Became Part Of My Personal Improvement

photo credit: indigo_jones

Personal Improvement Included Housework

Since when does housework become part of personal improvement?

Like a lot of people out there, I just hate doing housework.  As a single guy, doing any type of housework is the last thing that I want to do.  But I know that if I put this off, my floors and counters will become dusty and my sinks will start getting soap scum as well as hard water deposits.

The water supply here in my town of Mississauga, Ontario is quite hard and deposits do build up on my kitchen and bathroom sinks rapidly.  And even though I don’t really do any messy cooking involving grease or oils, my stove range, microwave and kitchen counters do get messed up.

When my TV starts getting that gray film of dust, I know it’s time to do housework again which I just dread.  I tried putting up with some mess but then I lose some pride of my own home when house cleaning is neglected.  I’m ashamed to let anybody see the inside of my house.

In previous times, it would take me half a day to do the entire house and like many folks, this would be on the weekends.  But I really don’t want to waste half of weekend day either.  So I needed another way.

Putting Personal Improvement Skills Into House Cleaning

So I came up with a way to make house cleaning easier for me.  Instead of doing the entire house at one shot with dusting, vacuuming and mopping the floors, I decided to break up housework into little parts.  To put the personal improvement spin on this, I looked for little time intervals I can access for doing these little spurts of house cleaning.

I identified two such opportunities in time.  The first is during TV commercials if I happen to be watching TV.  The other is when I take quick little breaks from work on my computer.  These are ideal little chunks of time that I would otherwise waste.

Breaking Housework Into Little Chunks

So what I did was when the TV commercials came on, I dusted the room I was in.  I repeated dusting separate rooms and floors during each TV commercial break that by the end of the program, I finished all the dusting in my entire house.

I did the same thing with cleaning my bathrooms and kitchen too.  I used both TV commercials and little breaks from work to do one room at a time.  These little breaks were just the right amount of time allocated for house cleaning that I didn’t dread it as much.

I would also vacuum one room at a time or the stairs during a single break.  Again, with multiple little breaks, I got the entire house done.

This was how the personal improvement side factored in.  I was using better use of my time that otherwise would have been pretty unproductive.  Although I might have to spread out the entire house cleaning process over a few days, it was okay since this task didn’t seem so dreadful anymore when it was finally broken up into little pieces.

I no longer had to waste an entire half day on the weekends for house cleaning.  I could use this time for something else more fun, like taking my Lhasa Apso dogs out to the leash free dog park for example.

When I realized that over the course of a week, I had many more available little chunks of time that I could access, I eventually was able to fit more tasks into them since house cleaning didn’t require a week’s worth of breaks or TV commercials.  This was a big personal improvement for me as I was finding ways not only to do the tasks that I didn’t really like doing, but was able to fit them into my time efficiently.

Effective housework was actually something that I should have but forgot to put in as part of my action plans which I detailed in my book The Life Champion In You.  I will definitely add it in to solidfy this into my routines.

So when it comes to housework or other tasks that you hate, consider fitting them into little chunks of time that you can access.  It will make life easier for you.

By the way, I cleaned my entire second bathroom which is allocated as our dog room during a break I had when writing this particular blog post.