Life is busier than ever. Careers and family schedules make the front door to your home feel more like a revolving door to your life’s demands. You may feel overwhelmed with keeping your career and home both running smoothly, but there is hope! A few adjustments can make a big difference.

Before anything else, take a deep breath, then exhale. Having a healthy attitude about your home and yourself needs to be your starting point. If the thought, “I don’t measure up” crosses your mind, stop and ask yourself who you are trying to measure up to, and who set the bar. While your family has clean clothes and dishes, you really don’t need to feel like you failed because you didn’t wipe your baseboards this month.

Now that you’ve given yourself some leeway, let’s look at ways to keep the house presentable until you have more time for the bigger, more in-depth tasks. We’ve all read many magazines that offer many cleaning tips. This is not your most common list, but will definitely help you.

• Invest in a few cleaning tools. A floor Swiffer can keep the kitchen and bathroom floors decent. A small wastebasket in each room encourages wrappers, tissues and newspapers to be thrown away. A small basket or decorative box on counters and dressers will keep small things confined to one space rather than scattered across an area. Floor mats at each door will cut down on dirt being tracked in.
• Delegate fair jobs to the family. Children can put their clean clothes away, empty trash cans and run the vacuum while you prepare dinner, sort through the mail and pay bills. Some families take a short time before bed to do a quick pick-up where everyone participates for five minutes or so. Four or five sets of hands can accomplish a lot in less than ten minutes.
• Clean-up the dishes as you cook. Keep a sink full of hot, soapy water to stay on top of the task, making after dinner clean-up quicker. Some families leave the sink of hot water for each family member to wash their own dishes when they finish. If you don’t have a dishwasher, this makes for easy delegation for the entire family. Also consider more one-dish meals on your busiest days.
• Have a before-bed routine. Have the whole family set out tomorrow’s clothes. Set up the coffee pot. Make sure homework papers are signed. Twenty minutes of night-before prep can change your mornings completely, which gets everyone’s day off to a good start.

Small habits and simple routines can add up to a lot of saved time. You may need to spend some time playing catch-up on your day off, but it doesn’t need to be your entire day. You need time to relax and spend with your loved ones. These little changes will help you do just that.