Want to Keep a Tidy Home? Here are My Five Daily Non-Negotiables to Keep My Home Tidy

How to Define Your Non-Negotiables

The non-negotiables in our schedules or routines in regard to managing our households are the necessary tasks we need to complete in order to keep it running like a well-oiled machine and prevent overwhelm.

If we could keep our houses sparkling clean, we all would without a doubt. It isn’t realistic though to have a perfectly clean home all the time and we need to accommodate our cleaning routines to match our lifestyles.

I follow these five daily non-negotiables in order to keep some semblance of control over my house. My five daily non-negotiables are making my bed, doing a part of the laundry process, tidying surfaces, doing the dishes, and wiping the counters down. Doing these five tasks helps reduce overwhelm and stress from building up from the mundane tasks that we all dislike doing. Remaining consistent and tackling these few things every day truly prevents overwhelm and stress from building up and helps me maintain a tidy home.

To Be Honest, My Non-Negotiables are Sometimes Negotiable

My non-negotiables are sometimes negotiable? I know it sounds counter-intuitive, however, I have learned that life happens and we need to remain flexible with ourselves to stay mentally healthy.

I aim to complete these five non-negotiable tasks in the morning during my morning routine to start my day off on the right foot. However, that isn’t always the case and on those days, I give myself grace. If my non-negotiables don’t get completed at all during the day, I make a mental note and make sure to prioritize completing them the next day.

I call them my non-negotiables because ideally, I would do these five tasks every day (and I try to!) to ensure my home stays tidy and my mind stays clear. Doing these five tasks daily helps me maintain a tidy home and that’s important to me.

My Five Daily Non-Negotiables

1. Make Beds

Making your bed in the morning can sound like a drag when you’re not in the habit of doing it. I find that knocking this small to-do off my list bright and early in the morning helps me establish the mood for my day. It allows me to see my bedroom as a sanctuary – tidy and comforting. When my bedroom has this vibe, so does my mind. Keeping our homes tidy can help keep our minds tidy as well.

I make my bed and my daughter’s bed in the morning. If I appreciate a nice and tidy bed, I’m sure she does too even though she can’t verbalize it. She enjoys her room and enjoys laying on her bed when it’s made. Let’s be honest, I like her room more when her bed is made too.

Making our beds is not a hard task and I make a point to not do it perfectly. My goal is to make the rooms feel comforting and to do this quickly. If part of the sheet is untucked, that’s okay. If the pillows aren’t perfectly centered on the bed, that’s okay. As long as when you walk in the room, the comforter or quilt looks flat and tidy, it serves it’s purpose for me; bringing a sense of calm to the space.

2. Load of Laundry

Doing one step in the laundry process is what I want to accomplish in my daily routine. If I can get an entire load of laundry completed from washing to putting away, that’s great! However, that is not what I aim toward. I have it set in my non-negotiables to do one part of the laundry process, every day. This could look like any of the following:

Loading the washer and running it.
Switching the laundry over to the dryer and running it. Obviously if I have another load to go in, I do that at the same time.
Emptying the dryer.
Folding and putting away the laundry. I do usually empty, fold, and put away the laundry at the same time if time will allow it. Some days the basket sits on the end of my bed to complete later in the day or tomorrow morning. I am not a stickler for wrinkles, so this works for me.

This reduces the chance of laundry building up throughout the day. It also decreases visual clutter and it’s less of a nightmare to put away. I have found that if you do laundry routinely, it is a hell of a lot easier to manage. Take into consideration, I am doing laundry for three people and three indoor pets currently.

If you have more children, you may need to increase your daily loads to two or three. However, I’m confident you can set up a system that works for you and your family.

3. Tidy Surfaces

As my coffee is brewing or warming up, I walk around the dining room and kitchen and clear surfaces. I put back any toys Thea may have left on the table. Cleaning up dishes from her snacks and my husbands snacks form the night before is a must. And if I find any miscellaneous items that are not put back in their homes, I tidy those up.

I make it my intention to tidy surfaces in the kitchen and dining room specifically. If I’m feeling up to it, I’ll tidy the living room up too.

4. Load of Dishes

We are grateful to have a dishwasher in our home, however we haven’t always. I know what it’s like to have to do dishes by hand and it’s not the greatest, but it has to be done. I don’t think many of us can escape this one for our non-negotiable lists, unfortunately. Dishes easily pile up in the sink and on the budding counters near the sink throughout the day. Concurrently, they sometimes build up at night too when there is snacking involved. Without doing at least a load of dishes daily, this can cause our kitchens to feel unbearably cluttered and overwhelming.

I have time in my morning routine dedicated to doing a load of dishes every day before we head out the door for school.

Waking up to a clean kitchen is amazing, however, I enjoy not having to do them at night so much more! I used to try to force it into part of my nightly routine. This didn’t go well. I truly hated holding myself accountable to it and would dramatically peel myself off the couch to slink into the kitchen with an annoyed look on my face.

I would find that by the end of the day, the stress and overwhelm from life would make addressing any chores feel like an uphill battle. By adjusting my routines to accommodate my lifestyle and what flow works for me personally, I have found maintaining my house is so much simpler. There are some days where I’ll run a load of dishes both in the morning and at night, however that’s not my normal. This is what works well for my family.

5. Wipe Down Counters

Wiping down counters is a habit I’ve stacked with tidying counters and doing my dishes. Once the counters are tidied and the dishes are cleared off my counters, I can easily spray my counters with my all-purpose cleaner, walk away, and then come back a few minutes later and wipe them down.

I love the look of my kitchen when my counters are clear of clutter and clean. If you know me and have seen my kitchen, it needs re-done, but I find the joy in having clean counters daily and it makes me appreciative of what I do have. Who knew wiping down my counters could help me practice gratitude daily.

Be Flexible with Yourself

I have said this in previous blog posts and I’ll say it again. Loosen up your reins on what you expect yourself to get done in a day. We are all often so burnt out by setting high expectations for ourselves and having a really hard time meeting them that we end up getting stressed, overwhelmed, or sometimes even depressed thinking about all of our to-dos and how we just can’t seem to get them all done.

You are one person.

I am not saying don’t set expectations for yourself or have goals or intentions throughout your day; but I am saying give yourself grace if you can’t meet them at 100% of the time. Some days we only have 30% to give and that HAS to be okay. Our moods fluctuate and so do our lives.

Find the rhythm to your own life and dance with your days. It may sound cheesy, but without moving with the waves or finding your own personal flow, you’ll end up drowning. Have you tried swimming against current? I haven’t because I don’t swim, but I can imagine how hard it would be and I like this analogy. Float with the current and try to let things happen naturally.

I am a recovering control freak/perfectionist so working on the ability to let things go is a work in progress, but I see the benefits of being able to let go after practicing it.

Conclusion

Setting non-negotiables for your daily routine, whether it’s two or five, will help you reduce overwhelm and help you maintain a tidy home. As many personal development coaches and professional organizers say, when creating a new habit, start small. Small habits are easier to stick to completing and they’re easier to build off of once established.

Adjust these non-negotiables and create a list of daily tasks that would be better suited for you and your current lifestyle.

If you decide to set non-negotiables into your daily routine, let me know what they are in the comments below. I look forward to hearing from you! 😊

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