Manage the stuff you accumulate.
The more things you own, the more time you will spend taking care of them. Knick-knacks collect dust. If you don't like a certain item, then give it away, sell it, donate it or toss it. Whatever you do, don't add some "thing" to your home that you don't love or at least enjoy. Don't bring home things that will only add more work to your life without adding more in enjoyment or utility. Cutting down on the "stuff" you own will free up your time, your home will seem larger, you'll spend less time cleaning the stuff and less time trying to organize everything. If all you're doing is buying more containers to hold your stuff, it's probably time to unload it.
Learn to throw things away.
When learning how to keep your home clean, the best thing you can start doing is to get reacquainted with your trash can. If you are a pack rat or someone who just likes to save all the paper and catalogs and magazines that come into your home, you'll need to train yourself to use the trashcan. Toss the junk mailers as soon as you can. Open the mail right next to the trashcan so that you can toss envelopes, advertisements and extra packaging. Once you finish reading magazines and catalogues, pass them on to a friend or donate them, otherwise get them in the trash by the time the newer editions arrive.
Don't go to bed with dishes in the sink.
By the time you end one day, make sure the messes from that day are cleaned up and managed before going to sleep. There's no worse way to start a day than to wake up confronted by the previous days' dirty dishes. If you have a dishwasher, at least fill the washer and get the cycle running before you turn in for the night. If you don't have a dishwasher, then quickly wash them, set them up to dry and then call it a night.
Manage the laundry every day.
Depending upon the size of your family, you may need to do at least one load of laundry each day. It is much easier to do a load per day than to save up mountains of clothes and expect to wash them, dry them, fold them, and put them away all in one day. You can do it, but why would you want to spend your weekends buried under clothes? Each morning after everyone has showered, start up a load of wash. By the time you get home from work, you can pop them into the dryer or have one of the kids do this part of the task. After dinner, you can fold them and put away or have the kids each fold their own clothes and be responsible for hanging them up or putting them in dressers. One load of laundry takes very little time to deal with using this approach and you'll get your weekends back for relaxing.
Take the team approach.
Keeping a home tidy is a job for everyone living in the home, not just the adults and certainly not just the mom's job. Each resident - if they can walk on their own, they can pick up after themselves - needs to be given explicit instructions on what is and is not acceptable. Leaving all the work of maintenance up to one person only builds resentment and turns upkeep into a full-time job. Simply putting things away after their use and cleaning up messes as they are made is 90% of keeping a home tidy.
These are just a few tips for managing your home in order to keep it tidy but without having to spend weekends doing all of the cleaning. For more tips and suggestions for keeping up your home, here are some other articles that could prove helpful:
Having a clean home that is presentable and relaxing will help you feel better, happier and comfortable. You'll save time, you'll feel more organized and you'll enjoy inviting friends over for dinner or coffee. Just remember that having a clean and tidy home doesn't have to be a chore, it can be managed easily if you approach it as a team and do small tasks each day.
