I think house cleaning is a ‘know yourself’ type thing. There are various types of people with various tendencies that make various types of problems worse (or better, I guess) for them, so one size fits all solutions simply don’t exist.
Do you generally run your life by having regular routines? Like, you always go bowling on Tuesday night? Always grocery shop on Saturday? Then a system based on making a suitable chart for daily/weekly/monthly tasks will suit you well, once you manage to develop it as a habit.
If you’re more a free spirit, I do (whatever) when it (needs to be done/comes to my attention/feel like it) then those chore lists just won’t work for you.
For you, figuring out how to ‘engineer’ certain tasks out of existence might have a better payoff. Like, you will NEVER have to dust your venetian blinds if you don’t have any. And a once every so often outside cleaner can be a great solution. Yes, it costs money, but maybe you’d find working a few extra hours at your job now and then, or doing some Uber driving or baby sitting at times to cover the bill, is less unpleasantly regimented for you than trying to remember to do laundry every Thursday evening or polish your furniture the first of every month.
My own HUGE failings are that I 1) rely on visible reminders to get things done and 2) never developed the mindset that “the job is not done until all the detritus is dealt with and all the tools are put away.” So, a bill comes that needs paying? I put the opened envelope right on the middle of my household desk to remind me the next time I sit down to handle such tasks. So, I’m supposed to bring a baked good for church coffee hour next Sunday? I put the recipe right out on the counter. Often I pull out the (non-refrigerated) ingredients and put them there, too, as part of checking that I indeed have a cup of shredded coconut and enough cupcake papers and such on hand.
This works pretty well – I’ve never had to pay late fees because I forgot about that tax bill and I’m reliable at turning up with whatever I’ve agreed to turn up with – but it creates a constant level of ‘out of place’ stuff. Those House Beautiful shots of flat surfaces with nothing on them except a vase of flowers and an artistically chosen ornament? Not my house.
And I lack the follow-through, so after I pay the bill, do I automatically file the bill stub, throw out the now unneeded envelope, and put the checkbook away? Well, no, but I’ll get to it ‘soon,’ right? And after I baked that cake and washed the the gear I used, did I automatically put the rarely used Bundt cake pan back in its normal relatively out of the way storage location, and put the left over coconut bacj into the pantry? (I’m sure you know the answer by now.)
For me the solution was developing an iron-bound habit. I CANNOT leave any room until I have done ONE TASK towards promoting general order/tidiness. I look around to find something out of place or messy – like the mug from the morning coffee, the checkbook on the desk, the screwdriver left behind from doing whatever – and pick it up to put it away or take it back to where it belongs. Or maybe I deal with the dust on the window sill. Or wipe down the counter beside the stove that magically accumulates crumbs.
That’s basically my entire ‘routine.’ Just one little task, mostly stuff that takes less than a minute, but since I do it EVERY time I leave a room it means I do it dozens of time every day, and so my clutter-y bad habits never get a chance to create chaos.
So that’s my advice: figure out what about your personality /way of operating causes the mess to accumulate in your house and target your solution to offset your particular version. Note: I didn’t say what caused the mess to occur, that’s obvious. You needed to eat food. You needed to wear clothes and now need to wash them. Dust just occurs. The problem is what causes those little messes to accumulate rather than going away almost automatically.
