Recurring Chores

I'm not generally a New Year's Resolution type, but this year I seem to have some, and they're all the stereotypical ones, one being to keep my house better. I've been trying FlyLady again, without complete success. If I get on track with zones, I seem to fall down on weekly tasks. One step I took that I think was helpful was to split my own house into zones that work for my house: 1: Family room and Mudroom (which are connected), 2: Kitchen (which must take 80% of my cleaning time), 3: Bathrooms, Laundry room & sewing room, 4: Bedroom and Office, and 5: Living Room. I also printed out one of these calendars and marked out six day periods and labeled the weeks with zones. That way the family and living rooms don't get shortchanged.

Then I rediscovered Motivated Moms. I must have looked at it before, because I have the free 2002 calendar on my hard drive. Like any system, it doesn't fit me perfectly, but isn't that weekly checklist awful cute? So then I spent obsessive hours trying to figure out how I can make my own Motivated Moms calendar, with my own tasks and intervals that are right for me and my house. I want to be able to easily move a task if too many tasks end up on the same day, and I want to print it out. I looked at Outlook and Microsoft Project and a bunch of pages Google turned up, and didn't find anything that does what I want it to.

But it turns out that Palm Desktop will. I have a monochrome Sony Clie with DateBk5 and it handles recurring tasks pretty well. But I don't always look at it, and the tasks start to build up after a while and become daunting! But Palm Desktop will print out a weeks worth of my calendar. The only fault as far as I'm concerned is that it displays each task with a diamond rather than a check box. I'm surprised it's so difficult to figure this out. I wonder how Motivated Moms makes theirs?

And how does my house look? Well, I just moved the office into the living room so that the new carpet can get put in on Thursday, and it's a wreck!