Ops Mgmt: Cleaning a House

My fiancé and I recently purchased our first home and one of the biggest challenges we have been facing while adjusting to life in a home is keeping it clean. At first, we were overwhelmed with the added work that came along with moving from a small 1-bedroom apartment into a spacious 3-bedroom house. We tried to clean the entire house every Sunday in an effort to keep on top of it. Before we knew it, the stresses of trying to clean the entire house every weekend became too much. Now we employ a more strategic approach. We have a list of all house cleaning tasks that need to get done and have created a schedule of when they should be completed. This way we are cleaning the house step by step instead of all at once. This has enabled us to have more time on the weekends for other chores as we are now knocking off tasks on our cleaning list every day. Keeping the tasks to small items that may take an hour at most has kept the idea of cleaning the house manageable. Before we decided to organize the list this way, we would be overwhelmed and dread Sunday mornings when it was time to clean. Now we know that if we just spend a little bit of time every day, we are able to keep the house clean and not get overwhelmed.

This idea of creating a task list for a big project and then managing the individual pieces, as to not get overwhelmed with the entirety of it, can be applied to many different aspects of life. I know that I use these same techniques on a regular basis in my Finance position at Pratt & Whitney. We have many large projects that take upwards of a month to complete including what I am currently working on, next year’s financial plan. If I tried to finish this projects or others all at one time, without a list of what needed to get done, I would be extremely stressed out and would not be as productive. By using the same tactics at work as we did with our house cleaning, I am able to keep on track to finishing these large projects in an efficient manner.