In November 2020, I did a two-part podcast on the four kinds of work in business The 4 Kinds of Work – Part 1 & The 4 Kinds of Work – Part 2 .
There are also four kinds of housework, that I introduced in The State of the American Home Survey with Sarah Dyson. Many of these business concepts also equate to our homes, we do not think of running our household like a business. We hear a lot about work/life balance as though these are two separate ways of getting things done. There are so many parallels between your day job and your home job.
A few podcasts ago, I shared that Organize 365 is pursuing research about organization. One of the first challenges we faced is that we do not have a common vocabulary around work inside the house as we have for work in the workplace. As part of our research, we needed to define the words we used in the survey questions. That meant, we needed to define housework. This is the first of a four-part series that defines and explains the different kinds of work we all have to do inside our homes.
Today, I want to explain the first kind of housework – cleaning. This is a type of housework that we all think about when we consider housework. But, we rarely agree on exactly what “clean” looks like. I define cleaning as anything that a cleaning company would do inside your house. There is a level of cleanliness that is necessary for health. Cleaning will always cost you time, and sometimes it can cost you money. Regardless, someone is responsible for the level of cleanliness and the frequency of cleaning in your home. Setting rules for cleaning, determining an action plan, and establishing habits of actually cleaning will help you ensure this kind of housework gets done.
