How Often Should Chores Be Done? + How to Define “Clean” for You

Whether you’re a new homeowner, in a new phase of life, or just find yourself in need of some structure and consistency in caring for your home – we all eventually find ourselves asking:

How often should chores be done?

How often do I clean everything in my house?

How often do maintenance tasks need to be performed?

What household chores should be done daily, weekly, monthly, seasonally, semi-annually, annually?

It’s a lot to consider.

While there are MANY resources available online, I have done my best to compile the most exhaustive list of potential home cleaning, maintenance, and decluttering tasks – all in one place.

In Part 1 of this post, you will see over 100 household chores and tasks outlined with a recommended frequency based on the general consensus online.

However, remember that this is simply a recommendation and only a starting point.

In Part 2, we will discuss how to choose wisely how frequently you perform each task in order to make the most of your time and create the biggest impact on your home environment and budget.

PART 1: HOW OFTEN SHOULD CHORES BE DONE 

Bedrooms

Bathrooms

Kitchen

Laundry Room

Office and/or Electronics

Exterior and Garage

Home Maintenance and Safety

Household and Miscellaneous

Other Rooms and Storage

Basement (if applicable)

Additional Decluttering Tasks

Bonus: Common Daily/Weekly Tasks

Interested in generating a custom schedule of these tasks?

Get only the ones you need, however often you choose to do them, delivered to your email through Home, Clean Home. Learn more here.

PART 2: HOW TO DEFINE THE IDEAL “CLEAN” FOR YOU

I have written about this several times before: I am a huge proponent of customizing your cleaning schedule to meet your home’s needs, your time constraints, and your personality.

With so many cleaning schedules out there (including the recommendations above), we can easily put a lot of pressure and burden on ourselves to measure up to other people’s standards.

However, I want you to approach your cleaning schedule with a sense of empowerment, freedom, and discernment of what’s best for your family and your situation.

Your home is a tool that serves you by providing shelter, a place of rest, and a space to gather. All of your efforts in maintaining, cleaning, and decluttering should primarily support those goals and serve you both mentally and physically. And you’re in charge! 🙂

To make a cleaning list/schedule that really works for you, you can let go of others’ expectations and:

• Choose which tasks apply to you / your home, and omit the rest
• Change how often a task “should” be done in your home

(For help generating this automatically, don’t miss the info at the end of the post.)

3 Categories of Caring for Your Home

In Part 2 of this post, I want to introduce you to 3 ways to think about cleaning. Each will help you decide how to customize, adjust, and prioritize tasks to accomplish your goals – efficiently and effectively.

• Preventative – needs to be done to keep things maintained and prevent repairs and other issues
• Preferential – focuses on what makes you feel at-home and at-peace in your environment
• Proactive – makes it easy to clean, rather than letting messes build up

1. Prioritize preventative maintenance. 

Let me start first by saying that preventative maintenance items are usually best done as recommended. Many are related to the structure of your home, function of important systems, and your family’s safety. Examples include:

• Changing HVAC filters
• Inspecting or servicing home systems and appliances
• Checking fire extinguishers or smoke detectors

By taking care of these items, you will save significant time and expense by avoiding issues and repairs down the road.

Fortunately these tasks don’t make up the majority of the tasks involved with taking care of your home, nor are they usually time-consuming.

Prioritize these preventative tasks in your cleaning schedule by adding them first.

2. Prioritize areas that make the biggest impact to you.

This is the “preferential” cleaning – something we don’t always give ourselves freedom to consider, but that is essential to making a cleaning schedule that works for us.

One of the most empowering frameworks I’ve come across for choosing what to clean and how often to clean it is Melissa Maker’s “MIAs”.

Melissa, author of Clean My Space and a blog by the same title, defines “most important areas” – MIAs – as the areas in your home that make the most difference to you when they are clean and/or tidy.

Using the categories & tasks above, think through the areas of your home – on two separate bases – to identify:

• Which areas do I feel most stressed or unsettled when they are messy?
• Which areas do I feel most stressed or unsettled when they are cluttered?

These important areas will tell you what to prioritize and clean most regularly. If it bothers you when it is messy, set a regular task of cleaning it. If it bothers you when it is cluttered, set a regular task of tidying it.

Secondly, after you identify the specific areas, consider how often you notice these things being unclean/untidy. This could be daily, weekly, monthly, etc. This will give you insight into how often you need to address these areas. 

You can find Melissa’s worksheets as part of her book – or you can actually get a free audio version with the PDF worksheets by following the instructions here. (Scroll down slightly and click on “I want to clean more efficiently and effectively.“) I was so excited when I found this resource!

3. Choose the minimal amount of cleaning WITHOUT creating more difficult messes. 

There is a lot to be said for regular cleaning: it prevents messes and build-up getting so strong that it takes MORE time for us to clean it than if we had handled it in the first place.

For example, a male friend of mine in college went months without cleaning his bathroom. (I do not recommend. 😉 ) When he eventually got around to cleaning it, he spent an entire weekend scrubbing the black grime from his tub and all the build-up around the bathroom.

I’m sure this is not the situation you find yourself in, but it is important to remember that regular cleaning is easier and less time-consuming than if we procrastinate the task too long. By sticking fairly close to the recommended frequencies, you will probably save yourself time and effort overall – plus, have the pleasure of enjoying a clean space.

However, on the other hand – we can also commit ourselves to cleaning so regularly that it can feel pointless if there’s not a lot of evidence that the area needs to be clean. This will only lead us to procrastinate, do a half-hearted job, feel resentful or unmotivated, or even give up entirely on our schedule.  

I’ll give you a quick example from my pre-kiddo life. Before our son was born, we steamed our floor every other week. However, with just two adults at home primarily in the evening, not much mess built-up in that time. It felt like a waste of time, and I would regularly put it off. So, we eventually switched to a deep-cleaning once a month with spot-cleaning as needed in between. When it rolled around, I felt like it needed to be done, and I gave it a good effort. That’s the main point. (It probably goes without saying that now I can’t even get a week without steaming our floors thanks to our toddler in the house!)

So, like many things in life, I recommend finding the balance between these extremes. Clean proactively (to avoid messes) but only as often as needed (to make the most of your time). Be kind to yourself by setting realistic, productive, minimalist goals. 🙂

Similar to your MIAs, consider how long it takes until you notice each area in your home becoming unclean. Let this timeframe roughly determine your personal frequency of cleaning that space.

4. Work your ideal frequencies into natural routines that work together. 

Lastly, once you have a good idea of the tasks needed to care for your home, as well as roughly how often you’d like to do them, compile these tasks into routines.

The simplest way to group these is as follows:

• Daily
• Weekly
• Biweekly
• Monthly
• Quarterly and/or seasonally
• Semi-annually
• Annually

Routines help us avoid tasks piling up that “we’ll do later”. It tells us when “later” is – which ensures our home stays clean, tidy, and maintained, without carrying around the mental burden of all those unknown tasks.

► Let Home, Clean Home help!

After several times of manually compiling my own cleaning schedules – assigning frequencies, breaking out tasks into different seasons or months, getting the rotation *perfect* so I wouldn’t have to worry — I decided to create a tool that could do this automatically.

If you’re interested in having a custom cleaning schedule generated based on your input, check out all the details here.

• Over 110 household tasks to choose from
• The recommended frequency pre-selected but COMPLETE power to adjust or remove tasks
• Delivered to your inbox in seconds

Also don’t miss these supporting resources:

Related Posts:

• “No one helps me clean the house!” — 12 Sanity-Saving Solutions
• How to Stick to A Cleaning Schedule: Solutions to 3 Major Obstacles
• 7 Solutions to Make Overwhelming Housework Manageable
• 6 Steps to a Customized Cleaning Schedule that Works
• Why your house cleaning schedule may be failing you*
• Monthly Cleaning & Maintenance in 30 Minutes or Less