How To Use A Cleaning Tracker In Your Bullet Journal
Hey! Masha here from Masha Plans and welcome back to the blog.
Springtime is a time for new beginnings! But! There can be no new beginning whatsoever if you still have the junk from the past holding you back, so for me, it always made sense to have a huge cleaning during this season.
Moreover, now that we are all stuck at home, it creates a great way to spend your time. After all, there is only so much Netflix you can watch non stop before it gets boring.
Also, before you ask, yeah, I’ve already reached the point when Netflix became boring, quarantine is killing me!
But doing cleaning chores can be the wonderful little change you need to take a break from being a blob (which during these days, it’s perfectly understandable!), to remind you that the couch is still the happiest place in the house.
In case you didn’t get it yet - today we are talking about cleaning and how you can use your Bullet Journal to help you organize the process.
SUPPLIES
There will be quite a few trackers I’ll be sharing with you today and of course, I wanted to take time for an honorable mention of the supplies I used.
Notebook: B5 Archer and Olive. The best. Nothing more to say here.
Except for maybe that you can get 10% off your Archer and Olive order if you use my code MASHA10.
FIneliners: as always my favorite Faber Castell Pitt Artist Pens.
Color: I love my Zebra Mildliners and I feel like their bright colors are perfect for cleaning trackers. Makes cleaning look more fun, bright and playful.
CLEANING TRACKERS
I’ve never lived in a house so I honestly can’t even imagine how difficult it must be to keep it clean. So far I only had to deal with apartments and even with that little space, I always struggled with cleaning.
Everything gets dirty so fast and honestly, it kills me every time to spend my precious weekend cleaning instead of having a well-deserved rest.
The key here is to have the plan and the list to remember all the chores.
Creating a list of chores and then adding how often they should be done, helps a lot. Like I’d probably never EVER turn my mattress twice a year if I didn’t have it in my BuJo. To be honest I didn’t even know it had to be done until I started my spring cleaning research a few years back!
Ok, so as always, here, your Bullet Journal is a great help and creating a list is always a good first step. But I would take it even one step further - create a tracker.
Trackers are a great instrument to remind you to do things and create a perfect routine, so you automatically clean out the house little by little.
CLEANING TRACKERS
Generally speaking, I divided all cleaning trackers into several types. I’ll introduce them all here with explanations on what are the pros and cons of each and you just figure out which ones you’d like to use.
Annual Cleaning Tracker
This is my favorite kind of tracker since here you can write down ALL the cleaning chores you need to make sure you keep your house at it’s best.
The idea is pretty simple - you divide your cleaning by how often it should be done. As you see I didn’t really create a tracker for daily things, but weekly cleaning chores are trackable - just be sure to color the box with the week when you complete them.
I love this format because it includes it all and it’s a great reference point for the future. When you plan your week or your month, you can easily take a look at this big tracker and plan out your cleaning that way.
I know it sounds quite weird to plan cleaning, but planning is basically half the battle, as I personally always try to plan the things I don’t exactly enjoy doing since otherwise, I’d probably procrastinate until the last moment.
Actually, I even have a “plan with me” video about creating this tracker, so take a look if you’d like to create something similar.
Weekly Cleaning Tracker
Another way to keep your house clean is by creating a daily cleaning routine.
Think of all the chores you have to do during the week and assign different days to them, according to what makes sense.
This allows you to spend just 15-20 minutes daily on cleaning but by the end of the week, you’ll already have a completely cleaned house.
This way of cleaning is probably the most efficient. You only need to make sure you add the cleaning to your daily routine and it becomes the habit.
This doesn’t include any big cleaning projects you might wanna do a few times a year, so maybe you should consider also having a separate list of big tasks together with this tracker.
Cleaning By Area
Finally, you can approach your cleaning by dividing your house into zones and tackling one zone at a time.
In that case, in your tracker, you write all the cleaning tasks that need to be done for a certain zone.
I figure this is a pretty useful tracker when you tackle a full-on spring cleaning, but it might not be so useful for day-to-day cleaning.
Nonetheless, I decided to include it here, since for some of you, this might be an easier way to keep up with the cleaning.
DOODLES
If you want to create your own cleaning trackers, you probably want to decorate it with some doodles - we all want our pages to be cute, even if it’s about cleaning.
After all, a cute page is something you’ll look at more often and it will hopefully give you more motivation to just do it.
So I thought I’d compile a page with different cleaning doodles, so you can get some ideas on how you can decorate your trackers.
FREE PRINTABLE
There is more! I also created a free printable cleaning tracker, so you can start with your chores right away!
If you’ll create a cleaning tracker after this post, please be sure to tag me (@mashaplans) and @archerandolive on Instagram, we always love seeing your creations!
And remember: Keep Bullet Journaling and Don’t Be A Blob!
2 Comments
Thank you for sharing such a cute cleaning tracker for free! This will help regularly clean my house without stressing about forgetting something. :D
Hi Masha. It was fun to see someone else’s cleaning tracker. I use one with different things to do on certain days, plus a coup!e of extra items on some days fortnightly, monthly, or every two months, so everything on the list is completed in two months. Also, I have a ‘When Did I Last …’ tracker which I picked up from another post for the other things you don’t do that often, but need a prompt to do or need to remember how long ago you did it last (surprising how time goes!).
Thank you for sharing!