FlyLady recommends spending one hour "Blessing" your home by vacuuming (10 minutes), mopping (10 minutes), dusting (10 minutes), wiping mirrors and windows (10 minutes), emptying all trash cans (10 minutes) and changing your bedding (10 minutes).
I spend most of my time vacuuming and mopping, and these definitely take more than 10 minutes, but they don't take a whole hour! It's amazing how little time it takes to complete tasks that you put off for dread of pulling out the vacuum and setting up the mop bucket. Try it out for yourself and set the timer to find out that you can indeed vacuum most of your house in under 15 minutes, upstairs and downstairs, too.
This house blessing hour is meant to be a superficial clean of only the trafficked areas (don't move the couch, although I always DO pull out the dining room chairs). I have found that it "tides me over" while I spend the majority of my cleaning time (only 20 minutes a day, or so) on the deeper cleaning in one of the prescribed "zones" that are trademark FlyLady system.
I will write more about FlyLady as I blog daily, but for today, my message to myself is that I can actually, shockingly to myself, go for the entire week until I vacuum and mop again on the following Monday's home blessing.
I used to rush to take out the vacuum daily, or at least bi-weekly. Now, I let it go as I move on to the deeper cleaning I would naturally neglect.
Most surprisingly, after completing my Home Blessing on Mondays, I often get a wild idea to host a party during the week, and end up spoiling the nice effect of my cleaning. Rather than waking up the next morning to do a deep clean, I don't waver from my prior weekly plan, and I put off the vacuum and mopping until my next scheduled House Blessing the next Monday. I will sweep and do a cursory job of picking up noticable particles, but I am amazed to see that the once weekly cleaning actually has tide me over in each instance until the next week.
There's no need to be a perfectionist or be tyrannized by the drive to vacuum every spec every day. Just let it go and be amazed that your floors can last the whole week.
For the Scripture for today, may I dazzle you with this blessing of blessings! Fr. John Michael Talbot singing his glorious interpretation of Psalm 62:
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