Every home can benefit from a deep cleaning every few months, and what better occasion than springtime? As the weather warms up after a long winter, it’s only natural to want to reorganize and freshen up your indoor space.
However, it’s also work.
Depending on the size of your house and the number of tasks involved, spring cleaning might stretch over days or weeks. To help you organize your spring cleaning this year, consider making a digital checklist. With a realistic time assessment and breakdown of each facet of cleaning—things your digital checklist can define and detail—you can make spring cleaning easier and more effective than approaching it piecemeal.
Step 1: Choose the right tool
While you may want to just dive in headfirst, effective spring cleaning starts with lists. These lists cover not only the tasks themselves, but also the cleaning supplies required, the estimated costs, and the time you expect it will take.
But take care! What started as one to-do list can quickly balloon into notes upon notes if you’re not careful.
A disorganized system scattered across multiple apps—along with handwritten notes, Post-it™ notes, clipped coupons, and so on—can derail your spring cleaning before you even start. Instead, use one centralized organizational app to keep all your plans in one place.
Power tip: Use Tasks in Evernote to put together your initial plan. Then sync up your cleaning steps with the rest of your life by connecting Evernote with your Google Calendar and allocating the time you’ll need to make it happen.
Step 2: Know your goals
The goal of any spring cleaning project is to make the house look sparkling and refreshed. But you need to set more specific goals in order to achieve that bigger picture.
What precisely needs cleaning in the household? What needs to be addressed immediately, and what can wait? Does cleaning entail outdoor projects, such as raking and gardening?
Structure your checklist with intent: Know what you hope to accomplish with each task, and how long it will take. This will help you from biting off more than you can chew, focusing instead on practical steps. Eventually, these smaller, realistic goals will build into a transformation of your whole home.
Power tip: Use the Build a Plan template to customize notes before integrating them into the overall plan. Write your thoughts down on one note or many: the app keeps them organized for you regardless.
Step 3: Separate your lists
With your primary goals ironed out, it’s time to break your general tasks down into smaller, achievable goals. This will give you a sense of how many tasks you can complete on any given day, and help you prioritize more urgent steps. Some tasks have to be done in a strict order—you can’t mop the floors of a given room until after you’ve removed and cleaned the rugs, for example.
Categorize duties by intensity, necessary components, or any other criteria you deem important. Perhaps you’ll also find that you can consolidate certain tasks, such as purchasing supplies for the entire spring cleaning in one go. Take this time to assign tasks to family members as well, ensuring that younger children get easier tasks that they can readily accomplish.
Power tip: Tasks allows you to customize lists to your heart’s content. Set up larger overarching goals while keeping daily to-do lists separate…all in the same place!
Step 4: Capture ideas as you think of them
While spring cleaning involves a lot of moving parts, the planning process should be relatively straightforward. With the right tools, it shouldn’t take you longer than a lunch break to come up with an actionable set of checklists.
But inspiration can strike at any time, and you may find yourself brainstorming new ideas or better organizational strategies when you’re in the middle of another task. Discarding those ideas just because you can’t jot them down is frustrating—as is scribbling them down on the fly and losing your note.
Power tip: Write down tasks in the spur of the moment with Tasks. No need to worry about remembering them later—they’ll stay in the same spot as the rest of your spring cleaning organization.
Step 5: Revise and finalize
Don’t be afraid to revise your digital spring cleaning checklist to accommodate changes in your planning as you go. Unexpected costs, work, and school obligations, or any of a thousand other factors can (and will) pop up. On the other hand, you may suddenly find that you can take on more projects in a given period of time than you thought. Or perhaps it turns out that a lower-priority task on your checklist needs to rank higher.
Whatever the reason, don’t be afraid to revise your list at any time. A digital spring cleaning checklist makes this effortless—add, rearrange, or discard items as you need.
Ready to spring into your tasks?
Spring cleaning is never easy: There’s a great deal to do, and limited time to do it. But a well-designed checklist and organized plan can help you streamline the process, sparing you a lot of stress and confusion.
A digital solution allows you to keep everything in one place, while also making it easy to add or change details as you go. Armed with your digital checklist, your spring cleaning will be a breeze.
Not to mention, seeing all that you’re going to accomplish listed out can boost your motivation right out of the gate. Happy cleaning!
