Cleaning with the 80/20 Rule. - The Country Penny

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You spend hours every day dusting and scrubbing only to step back and realize, your house still looks messy.

There’s dishes still in the sink, the toys got dumped all over the living room again, you still haven’t caught up on laundry, and somebody tracked chicken feathers and mud (at least you hope it’s mud!) all through the kitchen.

And then, the doorbell rings. Not only do you have a disaster of a house but now you have unexpected company too!

Please tell me I’m not the only one that this has happened to? It’s so incredibly frustrating!

What if I told you that you can keep your house clean, or at least looking clean enough, and you only had to focus on five major areas and it will only take you around 30 minutes? It’s true! It’s possible thanks to something called the 80/20 rule. It’s also called the Pareto principle, which sounds very fancy but it’s actually very simple.

The idea behind the 80/20 rule is that 80% of your results come from 20% of your work. It can be applied to a ton of different things, but I’m going to apply it to keeping your house from being a complete disaster!

When you use the 80/20 rule you’ll see that if you focus on always doing the 20% of your chores that make the biggest difference in how clean your house looks you can get rid of a ton of extra unnecessary work.

Disclaimer, the whole idea of this method is not to try to get your house to an A+ level of cleaning. It’s the 80/20 method. We’re aiming for a solid B grade. There are times when you absolutely do need to do the other 80% of chores that we’re going to skip over. But as a daily routine, you can leave them out and just focus on the things that will give you the biggest impact for your time without ever missing them.

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s the five chores that will make the biggest impact on your house in the shortest amount of time.

1. Dishes

I know, I know. People are probably tired of hearing me go on and on about dishes. But, ya’ll they’re really important!

Especially if you have an open floor plan you have to get the dishes done. Your house won’t look clean no matter what you do if there’s a huge pile of dishes in the sink. It seriously takes less than 10 minutes to load the dishwasher and wipe the counters. But it is the single most important thing you can do to make your kitchen look tidy.

Nobody is going to notice the crumbs under the table, but everybody will notice the pile of crusty dishes overflowing the sink. Plus, if you don’t keep up on the dishes it becomes impossible to actually use your kitchen to cook. The last thing you want to do is to cook when you can’t even see your countertops.

2. Living Room

You don’t need to spend an hour cleaning the living room from top to bottom on a daily basis. All you need to do is to pick up toys and make sure that people put their things away where they belong. If you only vacuum once a week, and dust every few weeks no one will ever notice (unless your mother-in-law is coming! That is one of the few times I’ll encourage you to get picky about your cleaning!).

Take 5 minutes and gather up everything that doesn’t belong in the living room and put it away. Also, if you find that you have the same clutter every single day, you probably need to find a solution that will prevent it from happening all the time.

One of my biggest sources of living room clutter was the kids’ shoes and coats. My husband has a rule about no shoes in the house and so everybody would take their shoes off the second they walked in the front door and then they would just leave them. It drove me nuts.

So I set up an area just inside the side door and it has become our new main entrance for kids going in and out to play. There’s a bench and a spot for everybody’s shoes and hooks for coats to be hung up. This makes a huge difference in the shoe clutter in my living room. It also makes a huge difference in my sanity.

3. Laundry

Keeping up with laundry is huge when it comes to having a clean and tidy home. It’s impossible to keep your home looking great when you have paths to the front door through giant piles of laundry.

Find a laundry schedule that works for you and your family and stick to it. I suggest doing a single batch of laundry a day. If you only have one batch of laundry to do it makes it a lot easier to make sure it gets completely done and put away than if you have three or four batches of laundry built up. I’ve found that I tend to get overwhelmed when I have to do laundry all day long.

It may take a while for laundry to get washed and dried but it really only takes about ten minutes of active work for each batch so it’s easy to fit in around other cleaning chores. As a note, if you’re always drowning in laundry, it’s a pretty good sign that you have too many clothes. I have a great system for decluttering your closet fast that you can read about here.

4. Bathrooms

I really don’t love cleaning bathrooms, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. What’s even worse than cleaning bathrooms though, is having a gross dirty bathroom.

My solution is to keep a container of Clorox wipes under the bathroom sink. I clear off the bathroom counter, then I take a Clorox wipe and wipe down all the surfaces if they need it.

It takes less than five minutes to wipe down the bathroom and then it never gets disgusting. Plus, since it’s been wiped down frequently when it is time to do a real cleaning it goes so much faster!

5. Hot Spots and Spot Cleaning

Hot spots are what I call those areas of your home that just collect clutter. I’ve shared before that my biggest hot spot is the end of my kitchen counter. It’s just inside the mudroom door and it collects all sorts of random things that don’t actually belong there.

If I take five minutes to clear off the hot spots they never get crazy out of control and take over the whole counter. I do this as part of my quick night time cleaning routine.

I also make sure to spot clean as messes happen. So when somebody drops the egg basket and there’s a big mess I get it cleaned up right then. Or when mud from the garden gets tracked clear through the kitchen, take a minute and clean it up right then.

I do want to make sure you realize that I’m not saying that you should be cleaning up behind everybody else as they go around making messes. Even very young children can and should be helping to clean up their own messes. So don’t feel like all the cleaning needs to fall squarely on you. Insist that everybody helps by cleaning up behind themselves.

This is how I use the 80/20 rule in my house. I’ve found that if I focus on doing these five things consistently my house stays so much cleaner and I’m never embarrassed to have somebody drop by without notice. I do still deep clean, but this is enough to keep my house looking presentable in between the deep cleaning sessions. It also frees up my time to do the other things that I want to do, like baking bread and watching Netflix!

What are the things that make the biggest difference in how clean your house looks? Comment below and don’t forget to share and pin if you liked this post!