According to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, a docket “is calendar of business matters to be acted on”. That sounds pretty important, right? I love to make lists and I love to cross off things on them. My learning style is one that if I can cross something off of a list, it’s probably going to get done. When I have a docket in front of me for the week or month, it’s going to be treated like “business” and it will be acted on.
When I started roaming around the Internet a couple of years ago looking at blogs, I saw a lot of ideas for list-making and calendar making that have all been so helpful. I’ve tried other people’s lists and printables and decided to morph them into one that works for my schedule and cleaning style and there you have my Weekly Docket. I print out at least four at a time and write the dates on them so I have a month’s schedule at a time. I put them on a cute clipboard and work away. I use them to meal plan, keep track of kid activities (I try to do a theme every week with my littles), and I have household tasks that I do each day. Every day I always do laundry, sweep the kitchen, clear clutter (mail, bills, etc.), and wipe counters. Then, every day of the week gets its own special task (that’s what’s in my sidebar) – Monday is bathrooms, Tuesday is dust the house, etc. This is how I stay on top of the daily grime – it works really well for me. I never spend more than 30 – 45 minutes doing housework on any given day – it’s nice.
Spring Cleaning – every day a little something is added to my Weekly Docket  (daily grime) schedule. For the month of March I’m doing a little something extra just to check some items off of my list and to get my house clean for spring. I decluttered in January with the Zone Cleaning and now I’m doing some of those deep cleaning areas that I won’t do this summer because we’ll be outside playing. Once March is done, I’d like to keep going with something that I work on each week through the rest of the year to keep my house tidy  (like vacuum bathroom exhaust fans, clean under appliances, etc.) – hopefully you’ll want to follow along for that once your home is a cleaned up and ready for spring to rush through your windows.

If you emailed me for a template (clean.mama@yahoo.com) you have a copy of what we’re doing every day for the month of March . If you’d like my standard template that I use (there’s a link to the picture of it on my sidebar) let me know by emailing me with Weekly Docket in the title. See you here Monday!