I like having a clean and tidy home: a clean environment lifts your spirits and I think it probably makes you more productive.
I tend to have one clean and tidy session first thing in the morning, these days after breakfast and dicking about on Hive, and then I tend to chuck in another session around mid afternoon, when I’m flagging with intellectual work.
Overall I probably spend at least 30 minutes a day cleaning and tidying, and typically I aim to have one proper all round ‘super clean’ session once a week.
I have a pretty basic approach to cleaning - I’m not opposed to regular chemical cleaning products - if I’ve got an oven to degrease I’ll buy some ‘regular’ degreaser from Poundland, but I do try to minimise the use of chemicals as much as possible.
Other than that, I just believe it’s a matter of using some kind of detergent product, and then agitation and an appropriate amount of abrasion depending on the object of your attention.
I’m not opposed to a vacuum cleaner or ergonomic brushes or any cleaning tech that works! In general I know that money spent on quality cleaning aids can be a big time saver, my Dyson is one of my best ever purchases, 10 years ago, sadly not with me in Portugal.
My old flat shortly before I moved out.... carpets never got cleaned!
In pure financial terms it is rational for me to hire a cleaner…
I estimate that I spend about 7-8 hours a week cleaning (including laundry), let’s call it 8 hours on average as the occasional spring-cleaning session a couple of times a year will drag that up.
That’s potentially 8 hours a week of lost wages, a full working day, and at my hourly rate which is around £20 an hour, that means the hypothetical maximum opportunity cost of my choosing to do my own clearing is £160 a week, or £640 a month, which i could earn if I did NO cleaning,
That’s quite a sum of money, but I don’t unfortunately have an unlimited tolerance for skank, so some cleaning would be required.
In the UK It would cost me around £12-£15 an hour for a cleaner to come clean my house, and probably do a better job of it than I do, let’s call it £12 as I’m sure there’s going to be an increase in professional cleaners in coming months and years keeping the wages close to minimum.
So IF I were to hire a cleaner for 8 hours a week and work instead that means I’d be able to earn an additional £8 an hour for working extra in my usual paid-work, say for 33 hours a week rather than 25 hours.
Over the course a week, that would mean £48, or almost £200 additional a month if I hired a cleaner and did more intellectual work instead.
In fact, it would be be sightly more than that as I’d save some money on cleaning products.
However, in reality it is NOT rational.
In reality, if I did hire a cleaner, i’d be working for a marginal sum - only £8 an hour, which is a little derisory, AND because I’d be working more my productivity would suffer because of just doing the same old thing over and over again, and I’d have diminishing returns for the extra work - as it is I cherry pick the easy and/ or most lucrative stuff to do, and leave the more difficult or less fun stuff, if I worked more i’d have no choice but to do more ‘drudging’ which would be less well rewarded and not as rewarding.
Nothing like finding all yer single socks after a tidy session!
There’s also a certain meditative beneficiance to cleaning….
100% of my paid-work is intellectual and for the past 30 years I’ve found cleaning to be the perfect balancing activity to this.
I mostly enjoy cleaning and I’ve mostly found that 20 minutes or so in the morning or afternoon/ evening helps me clear my head, and if it’s a morning session it’s quite nice to be doing some natural moving around before a run. After dinner, doing the washing up and so on tends to wake me up a bit and helps prevent an evening slumped in front of the T.V.
In fairness I don’t always appreciate having to clean, and there have been some days and even weeks over the past 30 years where I’ve just let it all go, typically towards the end of term times when I was a teacher.
But one thing I have NEVER contemplated doing was getting in a professional cleaner to help out, not ever, not even though in ‘pure’ economics terms it’s financially rational.
In the broader real-world economic reality, it makes sense to do my own damn cleaning.
Of course, the more you can earn per hour compared to the cost of a cleaner, the more rational it becomes to hire one out!
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