It amazes me how fast a house can get messy. We clean the house up for company to come over, and shortly thereafter it’s a mess again.

Mostly that’s due to having three young children. Kids just love to play, and that means messes happen. It just takes a moment to forget to ask that they clean up after themselves and the mess just increases from there.

Keeping the house clean is one of the challenges work at home moms deal with. They’re at home, and that means that right or wrong there’s this expectation that they have the time for housework too, and so their house should be nearly spotless. If only it were that simple!

I don’t keep a perfect house. Matter of fact sometimes the mess comes close to driving me crazy because no one cleans without me reminding them, or so it seems much of the time. But I do have some tips to keep things up at least somewhat respectably.

1. Don’t Stress the Mess

Some mess isn’t so bad. If the house is clean enough that you won’t be too embarrassed to let the kids have a friend over, it’s probably not that bad. Depending on how easily you embarrass about house clutter and chaos, that is.

So often my oldest has had a friend over and I’ll feel a bit bad about how the house looks, but their mom comments that her house is about the same or doesn’t say anything. That many people don’t keep a perfect house is something you can learn by visiting your children’s friend’s parents when the kids go to play.

You want things clean enough to be healthy and safe. That doesn’t take perfect, dust free surfaces and constant scrubbing.

2. Get the Kids Cleaning

Kids can start cleaning pretty young. My oldest two are regularly assigned to empty the dishwasher, clear the table, sweep and mop the kitchen floor, clean two of the bathrooms and their own rooms. Plus toy general pickup, of course. Laundry assistance will soon be added to the oldest’s list

It takes time to teach kids to do a new chore correctly, and it’s harder than doing it yourself. I often have to help them get the sweeping or mopping done correctly, but they improve over time and eventually they won’t need help at all.

All other adults living in the home should be helping to clean as well.

3. Quick Cleaning Spurts

You may not have time to really get into the details of cleaning your home every day, but you can probably spare 5-15 minutes here and there to get some work done. That’s time enough to load and unload the dishwasher. Time to sweep or vacuum one room. Time to pick up some clutter.

4. Declutter

One of the biggest sources of messy homes after children is clutter. If you have a lot of stuff, it’s harder to keep it all clean. Simple as that. Take some time and get rid of the stuff you don’t need, and organize the rest.

5. Decide If You Can Afford a Cleaning Service

A cleaning service can work wonders for getting all the cleaning done that is so hard to get to. You still have to have your house generally tidy for them, but they’ll take care of cleaning surfaces, sweeping, mopping, dusting, vacuuming, stuff like that. It can be really nice to have someone else scrub down your bathroom for you.

You don’t need to keep your home absolutely perfect. Most of us don’t manage that. Clean enough to be healthy, messy enough to be happy is more fun than perfection.

One of the big things I work on with my sites is making content. It’s a lot of work but one of my favorite parts of running a website.

The only trouble is… not everything really does all that well.

That part should be obvious. I mean, we can’t expect every little thing any of us writes to be brilliant. It would be nice but for most of us it just doesn’t happen.

Some people are fans of writing something for their sites every day. That’s nice, but the problem is that it can encourage you to create clutter, rather than meaningful content.

Take a few minutes to think about what you’re writing. Is it good quality? Do you think the search engines will like it? How about your regular readers? And the people who find it through the search engines?

Writing just to get something written may mean that your site is constantly updated, but that’s not the end all, be all of website or blog ownership. Make sure that what you’re writing is meeting your goals too. Otherwise it’s just clutter.

You do know your goals, right?

Not everyone has the same goals for their sites. My main goal is to keep earning enough money that I can work at home, rather than having to work outside the home. Beyond that, I’d like to earn enough to let my husband work at home.

No mention of content there, you notice that?

That’s because creating good content is a part of those goals. If I’m not finding ways to bring people into my sites, I can’t make money. The quality of my content is what gives me a chance to earn from my sites.

Oh, and I also want to enjoy what I’m doing.

For others, blogging or owning a website is all about sharing their thoughts. Earning money is secondary. For still others, it’s money, money, money and they’ll promote anything and everything if there’s a chance it will earn something for them. And of course many are like me, wanting to earn a living by being helpful and providing useful information.

But There’s a Catch…

There’s one big catch to creating quality content. If you aren’t getting any traffic, it may as well be clutter. No one is reading it. No one is being helped by it. It’s not even helping you.

Well, unless you’re writing for the love of it or just for practice. But if you want to earn money, getting readers matters. A lot.

I’ll readily admit that I don’t enjoy marketing nearly as much as writing. I’d probably have a much more popular site if I were better about my marketing efforts. I’m working on it, and I figure I’ll get there eventually.

There are a lot of ways to market your site and even individual pages, and many really are in essence other kinds of content creation.

Social media sites, for example. Posting on Twitter and Facebook are certainly in part content creation even as they market your site.

Article marketing is also a form of content creation. You’re just doing it for other sites in the hopes of building links back to your own site, and maybe even some traffic. The same goes for guest posting on someone else’s blog.

Each of these types of marketing has advantages and disadvantages. Social media marketing is more social, and takes time. Too much time if you aren’t careful about how much you let yourself get into them. But it is often easier to get Twitter followers than it is to get email signups, and you can automate the posting of your blog posts to Twitter if you like. Be sure to think about how much personal interaction you want to give.

Article marketing takes the time you could be spending on creating content for your own site. You need to know that you’re doing it in a way that will build up your site. They shouldn’t all just link back to your home page, for example. You need to think about what the action is you would like for readers of your distributed articles to take.

These tools can be great for taking the clutter potential away from your site. Write something great? Tweet it! Share it on Facebook! Link to it in your article marketing efforts. Do what you can to make sure it gets out there. It may not work every time, but you have to keep trying.

One nice thing about moving was getting all the stuff off my desk. Finally a reason to just throw all the stuff that somehow ended up on my desk into a box.

Most of it’s still there, so why is my desk cluttered again?

Mostly it’s paper, and I know who’s to blame. There’s a second grader in this house, and guess where all her school work ends up when she gets it back?

Ok, ok, I could give it back to her after I look at it. Blame it on me. Really. Just go ahead.

A little of the clutter has to do with bills received as I work toward making all our bills go on auto pay. Once all that’s settled I won’t have to worry about keeping track of who’s been paid.

And I suppose I can throw out the catalogs for the school fundraiser now that it’s over. No point in being tortured by those pictures of cookies anymore. The cookie dough will get here when it gets here, in late October.

I know I’m not the greatest at keeping paper clutter under control, but I do still have a few tips for managing it.

1. Have a safe place for bills that need to get paid.

Don’t let these get buried in the clutter. Put them someplace where you’ll find them in time to pay them. Get on auto pay if you like… I love it. Even pay them as soon as the bills come in if that’s what it takes. Just don’t lose track of any of your bills.

2. Have a safe place for checks that need to be cashed.

Motivation to get these taken care of quickly should be even greater than that for paying bills. But sometimes checks sit a little until I can make it to the bank. Giving them a safe place to sit ensures that I don’t lose any and need to ask for them to be reissued.

3. Give it back.

I’m not so good at this one, as I noted above. I really need to give my daughter the chance right away to decide if her school work is kept or recycled.

We don’t have it up yet, but we have enough wall space here that we’re planning on putting up a board for each kid to put up their favorite artwork and school work. Gives them a place to show off rather than leaving it buried for all time. At least until the boards fill up, as they will.

4. Make friends with the recycle bin.

I just need to get faster about this one. Papers need to go more quickly into the recycle bin than I tend to send them. My desk wouldn’t be half so cluttered if I would make a quick decision as papers come along.

5. Get it filed.

I put this last because really, there aren’t that many papers coming in that I need to keep in a file. Doing that means it will probably stick around FOREVER. Move after move after move. There aren’t that many papers that really need to be kept.

Business records, financial records, important school papers, yes. Every little message from the school, no. You know the stuff you want to keep.

Maybe eventually I’ll be better about keeping the paper to a minimum on my desk. For now all I can do is keep on trying.

At least my habits in this area can’t get much worse. Well, they could, but that would be quite the disaster.