Let's be real, cleaning and organising your home each day can be overwhelming.
Every day you have to make the bed, clean up after meals, tidy up the living room, and take out the bins. Plus, the weekly laundry haul and hoovering can seem like a dauntingly large task on top of all the other things you must do around the house.
All these tasks may seem like they could fit into your schedule, but one thing or another usually gets forgotten and, over time, small overlooked details can have a big impact on the overall tidiness of your home.
There is a simple solution that's helped many people with their house cleaning checklist — list funnels.
List funnels are meant to organise your house cleaning tasks in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming and can help you actualise your goals. But before explaining how they work, let's go through why the alternatives don't.
Where our current house cleaning checklist are leading us astray
To-do lists stink. They are a combination of things that need to get done now, big projects in the future, small items that don’t require a lot of work, and tasks that will need to be worked on over a span of time.
This thing of adding small tasks to a seemingly ever-expanding list can take the focus away from the bigger, more important tasks, causing us to stress out and get overwhelmed by every little thing on the list.
So, how do you fix this?
By making a series of house cleaning checklists, not just one big one.
This is where list funnels come in, a concept conceived by Laura Mae Martin in her book Uptime: A Practical Guide for Personal Productivity and Well-being.
Let's put this list methodology to use...
The Fundamentals of a List Funnel
Learning and starting a new way of organising yourself may seem overwhelming, but try it out. You do not have to implement every little aspect; only the parts that resonate with you. Have fun with your house cleaning checklists and apply what works for you and your household.
To get into the swing of things, Laura diagrams her list funnels as follows:
Step 1: The Main House Cleaning Checklist
List every chore that needs to be done around the house. From the smallest details to the big picture stuff, ie: making the bed, cleaning out the fridge, etc. These tasks will be broken up into categories which you can see in the template provided below.
Download your Main List template here.
The main goal here is to see all the categories that need to broken down in a way that is easy to decipher.
Step 2: Weekly House Cleaning Checklist
Kind of self-explanatory, this is everything you need to get done that week.
Download your Weekly List template here.
Figure out what works for you, either by adding managing details to the template or subtracting what you find unnecessary.
Step 3: Daily House Cleaning Checklist
Every day make a new list with the tasks and priorities for that day. Break it down by the hour.
Download your Daily List template here.
Remember this can be an hour doing one of those long-term goals you had set out for yourself, such as cleaning out the closet.
By breaking down these long-winded lists into bite-sized and manageable daily tasks, house chores have never been so easy. Daily house cleaning checklists help you check in and refocus on what needs to get done at that moment. This leads to a more productive outcome and doesn’t add up to stress as there’s a plan laid out for future tasks that you know you can hold yourself accountable to. List funnels make it easy to look back and see what you’ve accomplished that day and not fret about what you didn’t, as those are tomorrow's tasks.
