You know how to outsource at least part of this task. You call a cleaning service such as Merry Maids or The Maids (incidentally, both founded in Nebraska in 1979) and schedule a weekly or biweekly scrub- down. Give the service a copy of your key, set up a recurring payment, and you won’t have to think about it. In general, unless you’re looking for someone to come in multiple times per week (that is, someone who really would be a household employee), it’s more efficient to hire a service than an individual, because the service will take care of payroll taxes and preemployment screening. If you have an average- size house, expect to pay somewhere around $100 a cleaning, meaning you’ll pay $2,500 to have your house cleaned every other week for a year.
This is not a small chunk of change, though of course, cost is relative. The average family has gotten their heads around paying $876 per year for the convenience of cell phone service, often without giving up the landline. People spend vast sums on clothes they never wear. The average cable bill in the United States is now around $71 a month, or $852 a year, and the average tax refund is now well over $2,000.
Most families treat their refunds as windfalls and spend the money on things like new furniture. A smarter idea if you value your weekend time or hate cleaning would be to adjust your withholding so the money shows up in your paycheck, and rather than buy new furniture, pay a service to clean the furniture you have.
The key thing to keep in mind with outsourcing the major household cleaning tasks, though, is that you might not save as much time as some of the folks who send me e-mail about how of course it would be easier to get things done if only I had a cleaning service seem to think. It takes about 4 professional man- hours to clean my 1,600 square feet of living space every two weeks. While we are not that efficient, I doubt it would take my husband or me more than 5 or 6 hours every 2 weeks to do the mopping, vacuuming, dusting, and toilet scrubbing that a cleaning service handles. That’s 2.5-3.0 hours per 168- hour week (in a world in which the average American watches that amount of television daily). Yet in 2000, married mothers spent 5.1 hours per week on core cleaning chores, and married fathers spent 1.8, coming out to about 7 hours per family. So what fills the balance?
It’s hard to tease the answer out perfectly, but I think a big part of it is the daily maintenance tasks of keeping everything picked up: putting away kids’ toys, putting away clothes, throwing away mail, wiping up spills. The easiest way to cut down this time is to stop caring what your house looks like. If you do care what your house looks like, you probably can’t lop this to zero without hiring a full-time housekeeper like the hedge fund manager I cornered at that party.
But there is one shortcut to making daily maintenance less overwhelming: an uncluttered house looks clean with less effort than one overflowing with piles. Every professional decorator will tell you this. No matter how much time you spend vacuuming your ceilings and washing your windows, what makes a house look clean is clear horizontal surfaces. That means having almost nothing on the counters, coffee table, dining room table, desks, and so on. Your drawers, cupboards, and closets can be as stuffed as you want. Feel free to throw the pile of mail in there if company’s coming over! But when you have clear surfaces, you can make your house look tolerable between biweekly scrubbings with a madcap 15- or 20- minute blitz per day.
I know this. Yet, personally, I have found it quite difficult to get to this decluttered state. At times, my house has looked like a “before” scene on TLC’s Clean Sweep. I’ve always been a messy person, albeit one with enough self-awareness to recognize that. My husband is no better. So, back when my husband, son, and I were living in a one-bedroom apartment, and I had to throw out two bags of trash from my desk because I couldn’t find a document from the IRS that I needed, I decided to call a professional organizer.
The field of professional organizing is relatively new, and is thoroughly a creation of the modern era.
In the past, there was no job title for someone who would help “see to it that my personal things are kept
in their proper place so that I can find what I need the minute I need it,” as Judy Syfers wrote in her famous Ms. essay. Standolyn Robertson, past president of the National Association of Professional Organizers and owner of the organizing service Things in Place, told me that, years ago, she described her vision of organizing closets to a high school mentor. He told her, “You want to be a wife.”
But that wasn’t quite it. Organizing is a skill, just as composing advertising jingles is a skill. In theory anyone can do it, but some people do it much better than others. The hilarity of professional organizing is not that it exists, it’s that in the past all women were expected to have this skill among their core competencies.
Given the messy state of my house, I was pretty sure it wasn’t among mine. Or at least that’s what I thought until I met Janine Sarna-Jones, the New York-based owner of Organize Me. She came to my house for an assessment. For 2 hours, as I studied her methods, she studied my home office and kid space systems, and my commitment to actually doing things differently. She examined my teeming bookshelf warily. She opened the coat closet and asked if I had any idea what was in there. She noted the stack of Pampers boxes supporting a basket with diapers, wipes, and a trash can at changing table level. She took notes.
Then she sat me down on the sofa.
“Here’s the scoop,” she said. “You guys have done an amazing job.” I raised my eyebrows. She explained. We had managed to create a nursery in the former dining alcove of our one-bedroom apartment that looked pretty good. Actually, it looked good because we hired someone else to choose the furniture for it, but that is what it is. We had proven ourselves able to go through stuff and throw things out. Despite our busy schedules, we’d kept our kid well fed (I guess the bar on organization is low). We were not disorganized. We had a more specific problem: “You guys are lazy,” she said. Quite simply, if our messiness bothered us, we would have done something about it. As it is, we had been able to walk, every day, past the car seat and bouncy seat our son had outgrown, knowing full well that there was a storage space in Long Island City that had been leased to us. And yet we put off hailing a cab and going back out there for so long that eventually we were expecting another kid and needed the infant stuff again. “You get eighty percent there,” she said, “and then the last twenty percent you say, screw it.”
I’ve never been one for accepting 80 percent, and over the year since the assessment, we’ve uncluttered our new, larger home in bits and pieces. If you’re looking for practical guidance, I recommend checking out the Fly Lady’s Web site (FlyLady.net). Her colorful suggestions include the “27 Fling Boogie,” which means going through your house with a trash bag and throwing out twenty-seven things. Why twenty- seven? It’s a big enough number to make progress, and an odd enough number to make it a game, especially if you boogie to some music at the same time. Spend 15 minutes each day for a month tackling some horizontal hot spot. Anyone can find 105 minutes in their 168 hours, particularly if you break it up into 5-minute chunks.
In my 5-minute chunks, I created a mail station. I designated a nice shiny tray as my husband’s pocket- emptying zone, where his wallet and keys are supposed to go when he gets home from work so they don’t get splattered over the kitchen counter. I found a waterproof bag for my son’s tub toys and toy baskets for his other things, so he can help pick up. In one of the big shocks of my life, I found out recently that he likes doing this. At our first parent-teacher nursery school conference (don’t laugh), his teacher informed us that whenever they sing the cleanup song, he is the enforcer, racing to put his toys away and then making sure all the other children clean up as well. This realization has given new urgency to the decluttering. Apparently junk really stresses my toddler out.
I won’t claim any of this has been easy. One of the reasons I’ve resisted decluttering is that I worried I might need something later on. This has turned out to be true. Rather than move my fire-hazard collection of magazines to my new apartment, I threw 95 percent of them in the recycling bin. Then, when I was writing this book, I realized I needed a story that I had, in fact, dumped. I only had a vague recollection of
when it had run. It took me 20 minutes of Web searching to figure out the issue date. Then it cost me $20 to order the issue from a collector. Not nothing, but in the grand scheme of things, I guess anything that can be solved in 20 minutes with $20 is not really a problem.
The net result of having clear horizontal surfaces and bins for stuff all over the place is that cleaning is not overwhelming. It takes less than 20 minutes a day to keep it under control. Just don’t open my closets.
Trust me on this one.