How to clean your house with FFISH

Ok, I’m not going to tell you how to scrub your house with a fish. It’s a method or frame of mind that will make cleaning your house less mundane. You can then take this methodology and apply it to any process. It’s call FFISH (Find, Focus, Improve, Stabilize, Hail (Reward)).

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Fish (optional)

1. Find – The FIND process is the root cause analysis of the FFISH process. For cleaning your house this step is an easy one…the root cause of why your house is dirty is simply you live there. It’s going to happen.
2. Focus – You should pick the room that you can complete the quickest and easiest. This is not necessarily the smallest room. It’s the room that will take the least time. I find doing the master bedroom is usually the easiest. It’s mostly putting away clothes, making the bed, dusting and vacuuming. It’s important that you focus on this room and do not use a shotgun approach to cleaning (doing a little something in each room).
3. Innovate/Improve – This step is simple. Clean the room. But again how you clean the room should be using FFISH as well. So you’ve picked the room but again you should stay focused on one task (1. cleaning up the clothes, 2. make the bed, 3. dust, etc).
4. Stabilize/Control – This is not an obvious step and can be the most difficult. When looking at cleaning your house you can, however, put controls in place. Make rules that you don’t go to bed until you put clothes away or you don’t go to bed with dishes in the sink. These controls don’t stop the dust but the can help control the amount of manual effort that cleaning takes when it’s time to clean.
5. Hail/Reward – This is a mental step. Celebrating getting one room clean can catapult you to the next room and get you excited about moving to the next room. This is simply positive reinforcement. I’m not saying your one of Pavlov’s dogs but it’s much easier to stay motivated if you celebrate the small victories. Then start FFISH all over again.

Tips & Warnings

• Complete 1 task before you move on. It’s better to have 5% of your house 100% clean instead of 100% of your house 5% clean.
• This is a proven method for improving or creating any process.