Once a Month Cleaning

I wrote a blog post on this article I read (see below).  Do you guys spend much time thinking about this?  I really function better with a certain level of cleanliness.  I think everyone has different levels and that's great.  My mom was helping a sister in her ward clean and pack before a move and she was, well, horrified by the state of that sister's house.  She called me wondering if her priorities were totally whacked and if she had incredibly high standards of cleanliness and perfection that no one could ever hope to meet.  Uh, no.  She just had a different standard.

But my actual thoughts were more along the lines of balancing the need to have a relatively clean house that's used and lived in but not trashed, and the need to have time to do the fun stuff in life.  We were talking about the adult skills and the reason I have not done them as much as I would prefer is really a matter of time constraints.

So currently my basic daily schedule looks something like this:
8am Morning Prep (dressed, bed, breakfast scriptures, family prayer, etc)
9am Family Work (includes music practice for older kids - they do jobs when they are done practicing) 
11-ish  Free time for 30-60 min depending on how quickly we work
12pm lunch
1pm school
extra-curricular activities - usually start at 3pm and go till 5pm on various days of the week.  This is the time when I start thinking about dinner so even if we don't have any outside activities, I'm loathe to start a major project at this time.  If the kids are home, they are playing or reading.
5:30pm Dinner and clean up
family time
8pm bedtime!

So what occurred to me as I read this article was that if I could cut my cleaning time down to 30 minutes each morning, we would have 2 full hours available for projects/adult skills/reading, etc. 

The article is linked from my blog.
http://coastcrew.blogspot.com/2011/04/once-month-cleaning.html