You’ve carefully planned, saved, scrimped and donated and you think you’ve just about offset your carbon foot-print. When you can you bike to work, public transport is crowded and stuffy but you grin and bear it thinking of the fresh air that the polar bears are still enjoying. You enjoy the zoo, but you don’t go as often as you’d like because you’ve got a system limiting your trips out. None of the cleaning supplies in your home have a single toxic chemical. Each time you’re tempted to take your gas sipping Prius for a joy ride, you stop yourself and think of that exotic tropical bird you saw on TV. But wait, is that really you? If so, kudos to you, but there are very few of us that can attain your level of environmentalism (yes my spell-check approved that word). For most of us mere mortals we have so much going on that we can’t focus so much energy on saving a far flung jungle or iceberg–heck we can barely spare the time to petition a renovation for the park around the corner.

So do we hit ourselves over the head and bemoan our lack of respect for mother earth? I think not, and I believe true respect for our planet comes from within us. The only way to change the way we treat our environment is to first change the way in which we occupy it. Rather than hunkering down and trying not to hurt a flea, we should be celebrating our surroundings. Take some time the next time you’re outside (nearly all of us spend at least a few moments outdoors), just pause even if you’re at a busy downtown intersection–and try to find a bit of nature. It could be a small bit of grass growing between the cracks of concrete, or perhaps a small garden area just outside a office building lobby. Whatever it is there’s something about nature that seems to cleanse your mind and body even if just for a brief moment. Trust me it’s worth the extra moment!

While many of us reflect on what we have, how we got it or how to get more of what we want, there’s a lot to be said for thinking first about the why. When it comes to a clean home, or a tidy yard, many of us first start with the desire to have this thing we think we want, and from there we address how we’re going to get it. Are we going to hire a gardener, a housekeeper or are we going to try and tackle it ourselves. But really we’re getting ahead of ourselves by thinking through things in this manner, we should first be addressing why we want that better condition for our living spaces. Are we hoping to invite more of our friends over to visit–something we’ve put off more than not lately because we’re always a bit ashamed of how things look around here. Or have we been feeling foggy and unfocused and subconsciously we know that some of those cobwebs in our brain would be more easily removed if we improved our environment. Or perhaps you’ve got kids and while you try your best to keep things clean you just never seem to catch up, but you don’t want them to adopt an attitude of apathy towards the upkeep of their surroundings.

You’d be surprised at how much easier it is to stick to a goal, to follow through on a task or make sacrifices when you’ve got a reason beyond just a want, when you have a real why–something that is deeply motivating for you personally. Sometimes the motivation is more or less universal, other times it’s deeply personal, but either way this is a much more powerful motivator than almost anything else–even more powerful than the threat of shame. Think about the goals you’ve set, many of them with the best of intentions. How many of them were you able to keep? Now think about the goals you set in which you were forced to recognize the underlying reason you had to have this goal reached. If you’re like most people your “batting average” with these goals with a why attached will be much higher.

So the next time you’re tempted to just shove all the kids toys, clothes and shoes into a big pile in the corner of the closet rather than carefully filing everything away–reflect on the whys for a moment. Maybe the product of that reflection will be a decision to have the kids take care of the massive mess they’ve created, or maybe not–but at least you focused. For you non-parents out there, take some time to catalog your goals, the things you’re working towards–this is a great exercise and can be very cathartic. As you review each goal first rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, write those answers down, then go back over and rate the why behind your goal on a scale of 1 to 10. I know as I went through this exercise I was surprised at how many things I’d promoted to a place of high importance that weren’t nearly as important as some other things I’d let slide.

Any one of us in the course of our lives have probably attended a large event, be it a football game, a state fair or a convention. The palpable energy from the masses of people and their anticipation for what’s the come–a chance to mingle, witness a piece of history, or simply to see something new. These massive events certainly have their appeal and can be a great driver of economic activity.

However have you ever considered what happens after all the crowds have gone home? Massive event clean ups are unique especially when it comes to the logistics. As you can imagine you’ve got to deal with mountains of trash, usually a great deal of equipment that you’re either trying to clean or clear out of the location, or both. The quantities of trash extracted is anything but ordinary. The Superbowl generates on the order of 75 tons of trash, that’s 150,000 pounds or 600 overflowing cans of trash of the variety you wheel to the curb each week.

Event clean up has come a long way in the past 30 years, with the advent of recycling trash at major events doesn’t have nearly the impact on the environment it once did. Governments and communities that are just coming to grips with the massive clean up involved in the aftermath of large events include China and India. The recent Olympic games in Bejing, China generated over 5,000 tons of trash per week–compare that to the super bowl and instead of 600 trash cans–we’re talking 1,000 trash trucks.

The amazing thing is the amount of ingenuity we all have in making stuff, but when it comes to throwing it away it’s like we lose all our creativity and suddenly become mindless drones. I sincerely hope for all our sakes that we become much more creative with the ways in which we dispose of our waste. There are some glimmers of hope on the horizon, one of them is the advent of recycling at these major events, and another I’ve seen evidence of recently is the reclaiming of energy from the trash by way of methane vents.

The amount of house cleaning you have to do may be more or less proportionate to the number of children in your household. The little bundles of joy, exuberance, and inspiration are also really good at rearranging your bookshelf into a configuration you never could have imagined on your own. As fun as they are they certainly create some clean up tasks you wouldn’t otherwise have to deal with, besides just having a few more dishes or pots and pans. If you’ve got boys it can considerably increase the amount of time you have spend deep cleaning your bathroom, if you have creative girls art projects or princess tea parties can have unexpected endings that make the room they’ve occupied look like world war 3.

The little tykes, depending on their size can certainly help with some of the cleanup, whether it’s just staying out of the way by being engaged in a low maintenance activity while you clean up or by helping complete parts of the task. You wouldn’t want to put a toddler in charge of cleaning a toilet, but he may be able to help with wiping a table. It also instills terrific work ethic and consideration when they have to clean up after themselves from a young age. Some parents complain at length at how their children are little terrors–but then treat them as if they are royalty when it comes to cleaning up after them without any assistance. Granted a 6 month old baby can’t do a whole lot to help clean up after him/herself, but once they’ve learned to walk there’s little tasks they can start with.

Cleaning also happens to be one of the most rapidly gratifying tasks anyone can engage in, this is because you see the surface or area you are cleaning right in front of you–so you can draw satisfaction from your task while it’s in progress.

You know the feeling, that sad sinking feeling you have when you glance outside and realize that the beautiful, invigoratingly gorgeous day that inspired your spring cleaning project is drawing to a close. The worst part is realizing that you hardly enjoyed the splendid afternoon outside, instead you’ve been inside digging through storage or scrubbing crevices. Seems almost as if you’ve been cheated out of something, even though you made the decision plain and simple to do this cleaning project! But it doesn’t have to be this way, you can balance the outdoors and the indoors. Start by making a list of the cleaning you need to do indoors, next if you have a patio, garden, or even just a small porch look for projects that extend into the outdoors.

Prioritize your list by the size of the task, put the large indoor tasks first, followed by a few outdoor tasks, and finish with a couple little things you’ve been meaning to get to but just haven’t. You’d be surprised how easy it will be to dig in and really make some progress. This works for several reasons. First, at the beginning of any job you generally have the most momentum to get moving from a dead stop and the most energy to see a long task through to the end; there is some wisdom to the concept your parents taught you when they told you to eat your least favorite vegetable first. Second, the extra oxygen you’ll be exposed to on your outdoor tasks will hit a kind of reset button that should make for a 2nd wind. And third because you’ll be energized not only from your jaunt outdoors but also because of the positive momentum you’ve built up over the course of the project on your way back into the house those little tasks will be tackled quickly and easily.

The energy to get the job done has always been an issue, but perhaps never more so than in the category of keeping your house clean and neat. Task that require repetitive motion and at least moderately elevated levels of physical activity benefit a great deal more from more adrenaline than more creative tasks like writing or painting. Caffeine is especially ineffective at boosting productivity when it comes to tasks that require careful reflection like designing complex human systems or trying to simplify very complex subjects. The task category that may get the worst score for bringing about breakthrough progress is in philosophical thought. Caffeine can tend to put your mind in a state that generates a great deal of horsepower but not much finesse.

Now that I’ve explained scenarios that caffeine is not helpful for, I should get back to how it can help you in your house cleaning. Like a good tune piped into your ears by headphones, caffeine can give your body and mind a rhythm to operate on. If you’ve ever found yourself breezing through a workout that you normally struggle through, with the only difference being the music you were listening to you’re on the right track to understanding what I’m talking about. Though neuroscience doesn’t yet understand why exactly this is, we think that it has to do with the corresponding patterns in the rhythmic nature of the activity and the same patterns in the sound. Another interesting theory is that you’ve trained your body over time that music results in physical activity, so your body more easily transitions into heavy physical activity when induced to do so through music.

Caffeine doesn’t have a rhythm, but by stimulating adrenaline production it primes your body at a more basic level than music does for physical activity. It also awakens your mind making it more likely that you can delegate the route scrubbing, scouring, scraping and sweeping activities that accompany house keeping to the part of your brain that is in charge of gross motor function. This allows the executive branch of your mind to imagine and explore more interesting ideas–thereby decreasing boredom and maximizing fulfillment.

Put your backs into it! Ever heard that coming from a drill sergeant or a slave driver in any number of movies? How about “Put your hearts into it!”, maybe in so many words from a sports coach or a teacher? Both of these are meant to motivate the hearer to put more effort into the task at hand—but which type of effort is more effective at getting the job done? While raw physical effort is one approach to a physical task, nothing beats “heart” Of course nobody means to actually remove your most vital organ and place it into a task, what we all mean when we talk about putting our heart into something is committing to it completely and determining to complete it no matter what, as if our heart or life depended on it.

When it comes to keeping a clean home, having a bit of “heart” for the task at hand can go a long way to not only making it more successful but also making it a lot more fun. After committing your whole self to something, once successful the rewards emotionally and mentally are far greater than if you had been half-hearted in your approach. Because housekeeping is routine some people feel that they can’t be all that passionate about it. Sure you can put your whole heart into winning the basketball championship, but deep cleaning your bathroom? Housekeeping may have more potential for a full hearted approach than many realize, most of its potential in this regard has to do with a very basic fact: you live in your home. And what’s closer to your heart than your place of residence? Does the saying “Home is where the heart is.” ring a bell? So why don’t you feel like putting “heart” into house cleaning? A lot of it has to do with your perspective, if you look at keeping your house clean as a chore, good luck trying to have “heart” while you scrub down the stove. But if you are able to make the mental switch to seeing all these tasks as part of building your nest so to speak you’re golden.

Making time for the little things, the little acts of kindness, and the small favors the beneficiary may never notice or recognize as having come from you is an important part of living a healthy life. You’d be surprised how many people miss opportunities to do those little things that go a very long way.

Maybe you’ve been enjoying a BBQ at a friend’s house, after a lovely time it’s obvious that things are starting to wrap up. Instead of making your way to an exit and bidding the host farewell, do a little something on your way out. Maybe it’ll be clearing the dirty dishes from your table or clearing up some trash that some kids abandoned on the lawn—with a little attention and initiative there’s usually something you can do. Lightening the load for the host in this way, while small is more appreciated than you realize. Not only does it signal to the host that you appreciate their hospitality and are reciprocating in whatever way you can, but it also lets them know that you recognize that you contributed to the mess but you don’t mind helping with the clean up.

If you’ve got kids you understand better than most how large of a task the house cleaning chore can be, so if you brought kids to an event make sure you put in a little more effort in your “on the way out” clean up endeavors. If your children are old enough to help out, having them do a little bit here and there—not only helps to lighten the load on you and your host, but it also instills in them those same gracious habits and manners you are trying to abide by. Believe your children’s future spouses, friends, neighbors, and colleagues will thank you. The thoughtfulness encouraged by starting this training early isn’t restricted to just the area of housekeeping, they’ll take initiative and help carry the load in their primary occupation and even when helping with childcare.

Cleaning high traffic areas can be a big challenge. You don’t always have the time to really do it right because it’s nearly always under heavy use. There’s also the amount of soil you have to get through before you’re actually happy with your work. On the bright side soiled high traffic areas are more rewarding to clean. You can get a lot of satisfaction because of just how great a impact your cleaning has–what was once gray and gloomy is now shinning and white.

Of all the areas of house cleaning this high traffic area issue is one of the more complex. Sure scrubbing the cracks in your shower with a toothbrush is tedious, but you can easily find a groove and stick with it (pun intended). But with a high traffic area execution is so much more important. Poor execution of your cleaning a heavily soiled area can be a downright disaster. Not only can you find yourself, at the end of hours of work, with not nearly as clean an area as you planned, but you can actually make conditions worse through your efforts.

Thankfully like most other aspects of cleaning your home, there are solutions. One of the first steps anybody should do when trying to tackle a task that they haven’t completed before is research. And in todays modern world what better way to do research than to look it up on Wikipedia or Howcast. Granted in this kind of situation a how to video may be a better bet than Wikipedia. Wikipedia may tell you when tiles were invented, but be useless when it comes to cleaning them. Last but not least, don’t forget the search engines, Google or Bing depending on which way you swing. Can help you find forums or communities online that are focused on the task at hand–in this case cleaning. So good night, and good luck–you’re gonna need it.

In our constantly connected world where we struggle to constantly keep up with our online persona. Over saturated with information, input and feedback do we ever really have time to reflect on who we are. Organizing the information we’ve taken in is such an important step, such a key vital part of being human. Yet more and more it’s getting squeezed into a smaller and smaller portion of our time. Some people comment that one of the only times they have is in the shower, or during the commute to work. However these periods are easy to rush or fill in with other things, blue tooth headsets allow us to be on the phone even while we’re driving and we can rush our showers or pipe in a radio program so that we don’t have to slow down.

House cleaning for some people can help fill that need for time to reflect while occupying your hands with a rote task. It’s a great opportunity that not many of us recognize–because we’ve been taught that being always connected, always online is a good thing. Yes it expands our horizons, it removes certain barriers, but it has to be dealt with on balance. We have to take it for what it is–and one way to recognize that is to use our imagination. Imagine for a moment instead of thinking of an online encounter with a friend happened “online” start thinking of those encounters as if they happened in person. At the end of the day or week mentally catalog all those events and encounters and decide if your level of social interaction is healthy or if you need to step back.

One great way to get some time to clean your home, while also having social interaction is doing it with a friend along. Instead of hiring a cleaning service, consider swapping house cleaning with a friend…on the one condition that you do it together, then you can get a conversation in while you work. It’ll be more rewarding and slows things down, even if just for a few hours.