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10 Tips for Setting Up a Household Chore Routine

I’ve been thinking and talking a LOT about home routines and chores recently (in large part because of my series about making the most of the weekends which included a section about balancing weekend fun/relaxation with the household chores necessary to keep your house running smoothly).

I opened an Instagram question box about household chores and routines and one of the clear messages was that many people struggle to set up a routine that works for them.

Whether it’s managing laundry, meal planning, vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms, or whatever other tasks you find burdensome, there isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all routine. You’ll have to figure out what works for YOU based on your own schedule, energy levels, budget, home and family size, and personal levels of caring about a task.

Here are ten of my best tips for how to think through and create a routine that works for YOU:

10 Tips for Setting Up a Household Chore Routine

Pick the ONE biggest pain point and work on that first. It’s so tempting to want to create ALLLLLL the systems at once, but almost none of us can jump into the deep end like that and not have it all fall to pieces. Decide what is the ONE thing that would make the biggest difference and work on creating a feasible routine for that. Maybe it is laundry. Maybe it is dishes. Whatever it is, ignore everything else and focus on creating a routine just for that pain point.
Keep it simple. Once you’ve decided on that one routine, don’t create a routine that is so complicated you’ll never be able to manage it. For me, with laundry, I don’t sort my kids clothing before washing it. I just toss it all in together, darks, lights, and whites (and guess what? It’s fine!). I also don’t iron almost anything, I hang up as many things as I can because I find hanging easier than folding, and I throw my workout clothes in the dryer (spoiler: they’ve also been fine for many many years).
Don’t do it alone. One of the reasons I can get all my laundry done in one day is because while I run all the loads through, I’m not solely responsible for the putting it away. My husband folds and puts all his laundry away. My two younger girls (6 and 8) fold and put their own laundry away (my two older girls – 10 and 13 – each do their own laundry, start to finish, on their own days of the week), and my husband and I remake our bed together. If you have other people who live in your house, they can help clean the bathrooms too or clean up the dishes or vacuum the living room before bed. The more that people help, too, the more they appreciate the effort required and the more (when my girls started folding and putting away their laundry, they stopped changing their clothes as often because they realized that the more laundry they created, the more they had to fold and put away!).
You can pivot. If you’ve always done laundry multiple times a week and it’s not working great for you, try doing it one day a week. You’re not committing to do it one day a week forever! Try it for a few weeks and if it’s not working, try a different routine. And as seasons of life change, you’ll probably need to adjust your routines anyway.
YOU get to decide on the frequency. If you want to vacuum your house every day, GREAT! But there is no rule that it needs to be done that often. Sheets don’t have to be washed every single week. Bathrooms can be cleaned every other week instead of every week. Setting a standard you can’t maintain or don’t even actually care about maintain benefits no one. Pick how often something needs to be done for YOUR happiness and don’t worry about the neighbor who washes her towels every single day or mops her floor 4x a week. That’s great for her and it doesn’t have to be what you do.
Pick a time that makes sense. For me, I’m high energy at the beginning of the week (and pretty worn down by Friday), so its makes sense to do laundry on Monday when I have the energy to make it happen. I clean out the fridge most Mondays when my groceries get delivered because I’m already working in the fridge.
Remember that the system is to serve you, and not the other way around. It’s easy to let the system become your master but the job of the system is to serve you. If it’s not serving you, it’s not a good system. So I do laundry on Mondays but if we’re out of town or it’s a holiday, then I just push it forward or backward a day or two.
Don’t manage something that doesn’t need managing. I got SO MANY questions about paperwork filing and the truth is that I file maybe 10 papers a year. You do not need to keep paper copies of most things. Bart and I turn off paper alerts for everything we possibly can – we don’t get paper copies for our house payment or our phone bills – and I don’t save virtually any paper. I don’t save much of my kids art work or school work because I don’t want to manage all those coloring sheets for decades.
You don’t need a routine for everything. I love a routine when it helps make my life easier, but if suddenly I have fifty routines to mange, now that feels more burdensome than helpful. I take my donation bin in when it gets full and I know I’ll be driving near the donation center – I don’t need to have a certain day of the week or month that I do this. In past periods of my life, we’ve had a set day for visiting the library when it was a longer drive or when we attended weekly storytime. Now I have no set routine for visiting the library because I drive by the library almost daily and so I can stop in whenever it feels convenient.
Don’t make extra work for yourself. You know how often I clean the baseboards? Maybe once every ten years. And nobody cares. We’ve cleaned our outdoor garbage cans maybe once in our entire married life. Chores will NEVER be done – you could literally clean endlessly, so you have to be the one to decide what you’re willing to spend your time doing and what isn’t going to make a noticeable difference in your life.

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Janssen Bradshaw

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