This idea of zone cleaning is completely borrowed from The Flylady. If you haven't heard about her, please look her up and use everything she offers on her website. She is a wonderful woman who has no idea how much she influenced me and, not unlike the Maxwells, helped me get my home to a place where even when there is no order, we now know how to achieve it fast!
The idea of zone cleaning is another way of being a good steward of our things as well as allowing us to be more hospitable in the long run. If we feel like our house is in semi-decent order, than we are more willing to have others over which can be a blessing to ourselves as well as to those we invite.
Where is the connection to debt? I'll explain the system and then I'll show the debt tie-in....It's all about the Frustration-o-Meter. We all have one, oh yes. Some women have it on all day at a low level that just peaks once in a while. Others can turn it off entirely which is what I think we should all aim for. Others have it on level 10 all throughout the day which can blow the motor and do a lot of damage to those around them. More at the end.....
Here's the idea: What I've done is taken what I love about the Maxwell's chore system and amalgamated it with the Flylady's system of zone cleaning.
The Flylady divides her house into zones and assigns a different zone to each week of the month. Her zones are slightly different than mine and mine actually change all the time, depending on what I need focused on -
My zones are:
Week 1 - kitchen (this never changes as we always need the kitchen maintained)
Week 2 - mudroom and bathroom
Week 3 - family room and loft room
Week 4 - bathrooms, hall, front entrance
Week 5 - bedrooms and homeschool room
I sometimes change this around as this is week 2 and the loft room needed attention, so I switched week 2 and 3 around this month.
After we are done breakfast and animal chores, we start on the zone area. I only let us work on this for 20-30 min., but we do it every day for that week so it gets a bit of an intense clean. The rest of the house is still generally maintained, we don't ignore it, just not as intense.
At first it seems overwhelming to do this intense clean, but as the weeks go by, we've noticed it isn't as hard anymore as now it feels like we are just maintaining, not always starting from scratch.
For each zone I've printed off chore cards which the kids can pick from and over the course of the week we try to do each card. Some months the cards don't get all done or I pass on some as they don't really need to be done that month, but for the most part, they all get done to some degree.
This has helped my sanity when I feel like my kitchen drawers are covered in crumbs, for example, as now I know it'll get cleaned out in a couple weeks. Or if I'm drowning in disorder in the mudroom, I know next week we can focus on that. My frustration levels stay at a lower level as I know eventually we will get to it.
Ok, here's the tie-in....The frustration-o-meter is always an indication that there is debt lingering around the house....am I right???? I remember, sadly to say, when I only had 3 kids, I felt a low level of frustration brewing whenever I went upstairs into their rooms and found messes everywhere that had been there growing over time that I had simply never noticed. I had no real systems in place at that time, so I literally went from mess to mess (I still do to some degree as now there is a whole new group of trainees living here, but again, now there is a way to deal with it). My poor kids never knew what was making me feel frustrated. I didn't even really know what was bothering me until I discovered a systematic approach to cleaning my house. It wasn't really their faults that I wasn't checking up on how they were maintaining their rooms? I had never trained them, so how were they to know?
Where was I borrowing from? Sometimes debt accumulates, not because you borrow, per se, but because you are simply unaware of how you are spending your money. In the same way, in our homes, messes occur simply because we are unaware of how we are spending our time. We don't even realize how much time is being wasted throughout the day. For us, back then, it was in front of the TV. We had cable then and I would watch a show here and there throughout the day. We have since then taken that out of the home - it was just way too big of a distraction (and a cost), not to mention very little was being added to our lives by watching it. We now have a collection of dvds to choose from, but that is it - best decision we ever made.
We also didn't have a plan back then. Flylady talks about those gifted women who are born-organized - this is not me. I definitely had to learn this which is tricky as it is definitely not my nature. I had no idea how to organize my time effectively. So debt, or mess, or disorder, simply accumulated, slowly but surely, in my life and when this happens it becomess full-blown chaos and we have no idea how it got there or where to begin. Thus, the frustration-o-meter goes through the roof.
Coming across these two resources, between the Maxwells and the Flylady have really changed my life. I consider these people mentors in my life, though they both live in the States. By using their suggestions, I am slowly chipping away at the chaos-debt I've accumulated over my parenting years. I'm not sure if I will ever be chaos-debt-free while there are little ones running around, but I want to be more on top of it for sure. Don't go in my basement.....I've got a ways to go there! If you were to take a Frustration Test to check my levels, you would notice they have gone waaaaaay down. I'm not as easily frustrated anymore.
So to those whose levels are high - it is not too late! Get some systems in place so you won't have a Frustration Attack. They say heart attacks are one of the highest killers for women. In reality, what is killing most families and their happiness is more along the lines of Frustration Attacks! It is another silent (or not so silent judging by the unhappy growls of mothers around the world!) killer in our homes. Turn off the Frustration-o-Meter for good.
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