How to Create a Realistic Working Mom Cleaning Schedule

Learn how to create a working mom cleaning schedule to keep the mess from taking over your home!

Being a working mom — whether you work outside the home or make money at home — means you’ve got a lot on your plate.

And it’s oh-so-easy to let keeping your house clean slip to the back-burner when you’ve already got so much to do.

Because let’s face it, you probably aren’t super motivated to clean after working all day, running errands or doing all the other busy mom stuff you do each day.

But before you know it, the mess has taken over and your once-comfortable home is feeling more like a war zone.

I know just how it goes, mama.

And that’s exactly why you need a cleaning schedule for working moms.

Having a schedule for cleaning daily, weekly and monthly can make your busy mom life so much easier. And today, you’re going to learn exactly how to create one!

How Do Working Moms Keep Their House Clean?

I’ve been a work at home mom since 2014 and there’s only one thing that’s helped me keep my house clean with two kids, two dogs and a cat making a mess everywhere.

And that one thing is a working mom cleaning schedule.

So why does having a cleaning schedule matter?

It’s really simple. Creating a cleaning schedule helps you develop the right habits for keeping a messy house clean, even when you’re short on time.

Once you’ve got habits and routines in place, you can practically clean your house on autopilot!

Having a cleaning schedule for working moms can be a lifesaver if you’re tired of feeling bogged down by the mess and even more exhausted by the thought of tackling it.

You might also like:

How to Clean a Messy House When You Don’t Know Where to Start

What Is a Good House Cleaning Schedule?

The simple answer to this question is that a good working mom cleaning schedule is one that fits YOU and YOUR life.

Because as a busy working mom, you’ve got lots of things to prioritize besides cleaning.

There’s working and making money to support your family, of course.

But there’s also meal planning and spending time with your kids and oh yeah, don’t forget distance learning or homeschooling for a lot of families.

So a good house cleaning schedule for you is one that:

• Allows you to clean the areas of your home that matter most
• Fits around your work schedule
• Doesn’t make you feel completely overwhelmed
• Leaves you with plenty of time to be there for your kids or maybe even sneak in a little self-care

The most important thing about your cleaning schedule is that it be realistic.

Because no matter how elaborate your cleaning plan is and how great it looks on paper, at some point you have to actually put it into action.

And there’s nothing more demotivating than diving into a cleaning routine only to realize you’ve set the bar too high.

What happens next is you just give up on cleaning altogether and spend the rest of the day hiding in the closet eating chocolate.

And guess what? The mess doesn’t just magically go away.

So as you start putting together a cleaning schedule, the biggest takeaway is to keep it doable.

You might also like:

11 Daily Tasks to Clean House Quickly When You Don’t Have Time for the Mess

How to Make a Realistic Working Mom Cleaning Schedule

Are you ready to figure this whole keep-my-house-clean-as-a-working-mom thing out?

Then here are my best tips for creating a cleaning schedule for working moms that fits your lifestyle!

1. Declutter first if you need to

Okay, so let’s be real here, mama.

If your house is a cluttered mess then even the most perfect cleaning routine isn’t going to save you.

So before you start trying to make a working mom cleaning schedule work you need to deal with the clutter.

And I get how overwhelming that can be. So here are some simple decluttering tips you can try:

• Pick one room at a time to work through
• Set a goal for a specific number of things you want to declutter each day
• Sort items into four piles: keep, throw away, donate and recycle
• Once something ends up in the throw away, donate or recycle pile, LEAVE IT THERE!
• Use the Marie Kondo method to decide what ends up in the keep pile

Decluttering is really relaxing for me because I love to purge stuff. Less is definitely more for me.

But if you’re still feeling iffy about how to do it, be sure to give these posts a read:

100 Things to Declutter Right Now to Make Your Home More Livable

21 Painless Ways to Declutter Your Home When You’re Tired of the Mess

2. Figure out what matters most

Unless you have some superpower that lets you skip out on sleep you’re not going to be able to do it all when it comes to cleaning your house.

Or not all at once, anyway.

So as you get into your working mom cleaning schedule details, start by prioritizing:

• Cleaning tasks that NEED to be done for your home to feel clean
• Cleaning tasks that you WANT to add to the list
• Cleaning tasks that can wait

Then go back to those lists again and really look at what’s a dealbreaker for you and what isn’t.

For example, I can’t go to bed at night without tidying up the living room but I’m totally fine with leaving the sink full of dishes overnight.

You have to figure out what your personal cleaning schedule must-haves are and what’s not as important.

3. Break your cleaning list down

Okay, so by now you might have a huge list of cleaning tasks that are need-to-do, want-to-do and it-can-wait.

And you might be so overwhelmed by the list that you’re tempted to toss it in the trash and forget you ever saw it.

But here’s what you can do instead to make it less stressful: divide and conquer.

What do I mean by that?

Just this: you go back to your big scary cleaning list and divvy it up into manageable bites.

So for example, you could break the list up this way:

• Cleaning tasks you do daily
• Cleaning tasks you handle weekly
• Cleaning tasks you schedule month
• Cleaning tasks that are done biannually or annually

This can make creating a realistic working mom cleaning schedule easier because you’re not trying to do everything at once.

You can go through and create daily, weekly and monthly cleaning routines that don’t stress you out.

For example, your schedules might look like this:

Daily cleaning schedule tasks

• Make the beds
• Sweep the floors
• Wipe down kitchen counters
• Wipe down bathroom counters
• Do one load of laundry
• Tidy up the living room

Weekly cleaning schedule tasks

• Monday – Dust, vacuum and mop
• Tuesday – Clean bathrooms
• Wednesday – Clean the kitchen
• Thursday – Tidy up the bedrooms
• Friday – Pick up the living room
• Saturday – Change sheets and do laundry
• Sunday – Anything that didn’t get done during the week

Monthly cleaning schedule tasks

• Deep clean the kitchen and bathrooms
• Reorganize your pantry if it’s gotten messy
• Rotate kids’ toys out if you’re using a toy rotation system
• Deep clean carpets and wash curtains
• Change out air filters and clean vents
• Wash windows
• Clean walls and baseboards

Your cleaning schedule doesn’t have to follow that exactly. But this should give you an idea of how to make a realistic cleaning schedule as a working mom.

4. Decide when you want to clean

If you know what cleaning tasks are on the list daily, weekly and monthly, the next step is finding time to actually do them.

This is where it helps to take a good luck at your daily routine to see where you have time to clean.

Even though I work from home, for example, I don’t have unlimited hours in the day to clean.

So I pick little pockets here and there to finish off my daily cleaning tasks. It looks like this:

• 10 minutes in the morning before I start working
• 15 minutes in-between lunch and starting homeschool
• 15 minutes after school ends and before we start dinner
• 10 minutes before I go to bed

It adds up to less than an hour altogether but it makes a big difference in how clean our house stays.

So look at your daily routine and see where you can carve out time to clean, then assign individual cleaning tasks to different time slots.

Remember, the key to making a working mom cleaning schedule you can stick to is keeping it real. Focusing on some quick wins you can get done each day can help you stay motivated to keep up with your cleaning routine.

5. Use a timer and don’t try to multitask

One simple way to avoid getting bogged down is by using a timer to clean.

You can set your time for 10 to 15 minutes and challenge yourself to get as much done as possible in that time.

And when the timer goes off, you can focus on the next thing on your to-do list.

Which brings me to another essential working mom cleaning schedule tip: do one thing at a time. 

That’s right. No multitasking allowed.

For one thing, it doesn’t work. And for another, it’s an easy way to get distracted and end up squandering whatever time you’ve blocked off for yourself to clean.

So focus on one cleaning task at a time and do the best you can to get it done in the time you have.

6. Use time-saving cleaning tools

I like anything that saves me time and bonus points if it saves me energy or money, too.

As you build your ideal cleaning schedule, consider making use of cleaning tools that make your life easier.

7. Get help with keeping your house clean

Sticking with a working mom cleaning schedule can go a lot smoother when you’ve got help.

If you’ve got a type-A personality like me then handing things off to your spouse or kids may be hard. But it’s worth it if you’re trying to keep a house clean as a working mom and stay sane.

So go back to your cleaning schedule one more time and look at which tasks you feel comfortable delegating.

Since I’m a single parent, I do the lion’s share of cleaning but here are some of the things I leave to my kids:

• Doing their laundry
• Cleaning their rooms, including vacuuming
• Deep cleaning their bathrooms
• Picking up the living room
• Taking out the recycling

Not having to do those things saves me time. And I’ve learned not to worry about those things being 100% spotless because it’s just not worth the stress.

Getting your family on-board is just one way to get help with making your cleaning schedule work.

If you could use a little extra help sticking with a routine, there’s a course you should definitely check out.

It’s called The Organized Home by Hilary Erickson at Pulling Curls.

And it’s a complete guide to getting your home clean and organized!

You might like this course if you:

• Are tired of feeling like your home is always cluttered and dirty
• Feel like the mess in your home is giving you anxiety
• Want to spend more time with your family and less time worrying over what your house looks like

This course will give you all the tools you need to finally get organized and stop feeling like a hot mess mom!

Learn more about The Organized Home here

Do You Have a Working Mom Cleaning Schedule?

By now you should know the exact steps you need to put a regular cleaning schedule into action.

If you already have a cleaning routine as a working mom, I’d love to know how you make it work!

Head to the comments and share your best tips, then don’t forget to pin and share this post.

And of course, check out the Busy Mom Vault to download your free cleaning checklist!