3. Use “Speed Cleaning” to Clean Your House

If you’ve reduced your needs for goods and services (#42), you may already have let the cleaning lady go. But, whether you clean your house yourself or hire someone to do it for you, you should read Speed Cleaning, by Jeff Campbell and the Clean Team (available from Dell Publishing). You can read it in less than thirty minutes and it will cut your housecleaning time and expense by more than half.

I consider myself fairly efficient, but I’d never even thought of some of the simple time-saving techniques described in this book. For example, easy-to-follow, step-by-step diagrams show you exactly how to set up the cleaning process for your home, room by room, so you can move from top to bottom and from left to right, all the way around a room and the entire house without backtracking. This tip alone will reduce your cleaning time drastically.

It’s actually possible for one person using the Speed Cleaning system to thoroughly clean a 1,200-square-foot house in little more than an hour. Once you have set up your home for speed cleaning, you don’t have to do the cleaning every week: these methods are so thorough that cleaning every other week or even once a month—depending on your circumstances—will suffice.

The book shows you how to save time, energy, water, cleaning supplies, and, best of all, your Saturdays. It discusses environmentally safe products and the latest tools and cleaning techniques. It even shows you how to get the best from your cleaning service.

It might seem that letting the cleaning lady go would complicate rather than simplify your life, and, if you’ve got a five-bedroom house, it probably would. But if you’re moving toward a human-scale, low-maintenance life-style, you can easily take care of the routine cleaning without outside help, especially if you include all the family members in the process. Teaching your children efficient cleaning and household maintenance techniques will not only make your life easier, but will give them skills for keeping their own lives simple.