From Stacey Solomon's organisational wizardry to Mrs Hinch's cleaning hacks, internet, tv and social media are awash with tips and tactics to help us keep our homes clean and tidy. But quite often, the perfectly polished and curated images we see on Instagram can feel out of reach for busy mums. Enter The Organised Mum Method. With just 30 minutes a day, this technique promises to help you get your house clean, and stay clean, without adding to your mental load.
As someone who has a tendency to spend hours cleaning at the weekends, inwardly (and often outwardly) raging at the rest of my family, the thought of spending just 30 minutes a day cleaning, and reclaiming my weekends, is very appealing. So I caught up with the creator of TOMM, Gemma Bray to find out more.
What is The Organised Mum Method?
The Organised Mum Method is a simple (but extremely effective) housekeeping routine that will keep your home looking great with minimal effort. It centres around an eight-week rolling plan, with just 30-45 minutes of cleaning each day Monday to Friday (weekends are kept housework free). As Gemma describes it, "it's basically a way of keeping your home clean without becoming all consumed by it. And because it's a rolling schedule, the longer you follow it, the cleaner your house becomes."
It's also a way of moving away from reactive cleaning towards proactive cleaning. So instead of being overwhelmed by the growing laundry pile, the layer of dust on the skirting boards and the grimy bathroom tiles, and not knowing where to start, you take control. "We take people from reactive cleaning to cleaning in an organised way which is proactive, where we're trying to keep one step ahead, so that it doesn't feel like you're constantly trying to play catch-up", says Gemma.
The Organised Mum cleaning method
The Organised Mum cleaning method is wonderfully simple - no need to hold all of those jobs in your head. Each room has its own day so you can almost forget about the rest of the house - another win in the mum vs. mental load battle (it's even easier if you download the App or the free checklists). From Monday to Thursday you focus on a designated room for 30 minutes (Monday - living room, Tuesday - bedrooms, Wednesday - hallway and stairs, Thursday - kitchen). These stay the same and never change. But every Friday, you focus on one room that gets a deeper clean. This means you'll never have to spring clean again and your house will keep on getting cleaner and cleaner! There are also 'Daily Do's' like putting on a load of washing or doing a quick hoover, but these shouldn't take more than 15 minutes (which is probably less than the time it takes the kids to put their shoes on...).
This is where the magic happens. "It's cumulative. It rolls on and your house gets cleaner. So on a Monday, on living room day, set your timer for 30 minutes and do the priority jobs in the living room, nothing else. And next Monday, you're going to do the same thing. And around week four, people start to notice that it's not as bad as when they first started. We get messages from people saying, 'I went into my living room today and it just needed a really quick tidy, dust and vacuum, and I'm sat here and I actually don't know what to do'."
You might still need to speed clean the house after a play date but if the house is clean enough on a deeper level, hopefully this should just involve a surface level clean of tidying away the kids' toys!
What inspired the Organised Mum Method?
The TOM method came about after Gemma had her first baby, over 18 years ago. Like many mums, she'd had romantic visions of pregnancy and birth that didn't pan out quite how she hoped. "I had quite a difficult pregnancy, birth and recovery, and I just thought 'this must be me. I'm failing'. I could see people in the media at the time, all bouncing back into their white jeans and I wasn't. So I put myself under a lot of pressure to be the perfect mum in the hope that if I got one aspect of my life right, it would seep into everything else." For Gemma, this was cleaning. "I thought if I could convince everyone that my house looked great, everyone would assume that everything else was great."
Sound familiar? It took one health visitor's gentle prodding to get her to admit that the cleaning had become an issue. "This obsession with having a clean house had become just that, an obsession. I would clean for hours a day, and it was just all consuming." The health visitor's advice changed all that. "She said to me, 'look, as long as you and your baby are happy, healthy and well, everything else is just sprinkles on your cupcake'."
As Gemma describes it, this lifted a weight and gave her permission to stop. But she still had to clean, so came up with a way of compartmentalising it so it didn't impact the rest of her life. She did this for years just in her own home before her son dared her to start sharing her tactics on Instagram. "I didn't have a clue, I didn't have Instagram but I just took him up on the dare, and I started talking about it. And it turned out that it really struck a chord with lots of mums. It felt like I was giving people the same permission as that health visitor gave me all those years ago to be like, 'look, this doesn't have to be perfect. We're all working this out."
How do you start The Organised Mum Method?
If your house is a state, it can be hard to know where to start. The Organised Mum Method has two options. You could begin with the Bootcamp where you take a different room each day of the week and blitz clean, following a handy list on either the app or the free downloadable checklist. Or you can just start with the daily 30 minute cleans and stick with it. As Gemma says, it's important to recognise that you're never going to be done with the housework. "I could do eight hours cleaning today, and there's going to be more to do tomorrow. You have to shift your mindset and say 'I'm just going to start and I'm not going to have a picture-perfect house, there's always going to be laundry, there's always going to be dust, there's always going to be kids spilling Cheerios all over the floor. It's going to be part of my life for a period, so I'm just going to do the very best with the time and the energy that I have today'."
At its heart, this is what TOMM is all about - getting your house to the point of clean and tidy that works for you and your family, while recognising that it doesn't have to be perfect or all-consuming. Those curated images of filtered perfection that we see on social media aren't real life. Real life is chaotic and messy, and that's absolutely fine.
Dealing with the overwhelm of housework
Sometimes, knowing where to start can be the biggest hurdle. I tend to wander aimlessly from room to room, making mental lists of all the jobs that need doing, before crashing out in an overload of overwhelm. Gemma recommends writing down everything that's in your head and separating it into three columns: 'Emergency', Important but can wait', and 'Not important'. "Get rid of the 'Not important' list, and look at the rest and if you can pick three quick wins from that list, it does so much for the dopamine in your brain. You're switching from 'I don't know where to start' to 'I do know where to start. I've got three things here. I'm going to set my timer for 30 minutes, and I'm going to do them'.
Regaining your time, and yourself
As a mum you often lose yourself in the midst of nappies and cleaning and sleep schedules so when I ask Gemma for any success stories that stand out, she tells me it's watching mums get their spark back. "People get lost in parenthood, I think. And I say to people all the time, what do you do for fun? And half the time there's just silence." The Organised Mum Method aims to give people back their free time, so they can rediscover the hobbies or activities they used to enjoy, before life got busy. "It's giving people permission to compartmentalise the housework. You weren't put on this earth to cook, clean and look after everybody else. You're an autonomous being who had a life and you still have one, go out and live it. It doesn't matter if you still have dirty dishes in the sink, you've done your best." I don't know about you, but that's certainly a cleaning hack I can get on board with!
The Organised Mum Method books
Fancy learning more about The Organised Mum Method? Pick up Gemma's book which includes life-changing tips, tricks, cleaning schedules, shopping lists, meal plans and quick recipes that will help you get your housework done fast.
This book takes the time techniques from The Organised Mum Method and applies them to the rest of your life. It provides the tools - and the headspace - to allow you to create a framework for your life which will help you know where you're supposed to be, what you're supposed to be doing and when you're supposed to be doing it. It will help you to not only get your to-do list done, but also free up time for anything else you might want really to do.
The Organised Mum Method Journal combines the techniques from the previous Organised Mum books into an interactive, motivating journal that will help you stay on top of every element of your life. From space for to-do lists, meal planning and shopping lists, to schedules that will keep you on track and free up time, it's a motivating guide to sort your life out, one day at a time.
About the author
Rebecca Lancaster is a Digital Writer for Mother&Baby, drawing on ten years of parenting her two children to help others navigating their own parenting journey. As a freelance writer, she spent ten years working with leading lifestyle brands, from travel companies to food and drink start-ups, and writing everything from hotel reviews to guides to the best British cheeses. She’s particularly interested in travel and introducing her children to the excitement of visiting new places, trying different foods (less successfully) and experiencing different cultures.