Years ago when I was working and traveling for my job, my husband was working, and we had a new baby we decided to hire a cleaning service for our house.  It sounded great and it was, but I learned some important lessons along the way.

Lesson #1.  The night before our cleaners were supposed to come for the first time I looked around my house and panicked, there was stuff everywhere.  How could they clean with all this stuff in their way?  We had to pick up, and we had to do it that night so the house would be ready for cleaning in the morning.  We de-cluttered as fast as we could before finally falling into bed exhausted.  As I looked around the house I realized it looked somewhat “clean” with all the debris picked up as long as you didn’t look too closely at the sinks, floors, and bathtub.  It was enlightening; I realized that clutter gives the feeling of “dirty”.  I also realized that the biggest job in our home wasn’t the actual cleaning it was the de-cluttering.

I haven’t had a cleaning service in many years.  If they would de-clutter and then clean I might consider it.

Lesson #2.  When we ran around the house de-cluttering we didn’t bother organizing, we put the stuff back where it belonged or just plain out of the way.  We didn’t have time to organize it all.  The goal was to get the house de-cluttered enough to clean, not to get it organized.

The same rule applies whether you are doing the cleaning or you have a service doing the cleaning, you can only do one thing at a time and cleaning, de-cluttering and organizing are all separate activities.  Cleaning is actually getting the dirt off of things, whether it’s the mold on the shower walls, the baked on crumbs on the stove, or the muddy foot prints on the floors.

De-cluttering is getting physical items out of the way, putting your coat back in the closet, removing the magazines from the floor and re-stacking them on the coffee table, putting your makeup back in a drawer.

Organizing is creating systems for your stuff.  It’s deciding what goes in a closet, whether to keep a magazine and how long to keep it, which drawer your makeup should go in.  Organizing is the bigger job; it is also the job that makes all the others jobs easier to do.

It is really easy to get side tracked when cleaning or de-cluttering and to start organizing, don’t!  Usually you will get discouraged because a simple cleaning job becomes a large organizing job that you aren’t prepared for.  Just de-clutter as best you can and get whatever it is cleaned.  When you want to organize set aside the time, don’t bother cleaning, and spend the time doing just that.  Right before company arrives is not the time to organize.  Clean when you need to clean and organize when you have the time.