My personalised January challenge

When January comes around I always feel the need for a good tidy up and house reset. For the last few years I've signed up to the Apartment Therapy January Cure - a twenty day challenge with a home related task each day to help you refresh and reset your home. They include things like making a list of projects to complete around the house, decluttering a specific area and getting rid of expired items.

It's a really good idea and I have wanted it to work for me but I had a few problems with it. The main one was that the e-mail with the day's task arrived in my inbox at 2pm, and you can't see future tasks in advance. That's just too late in the day for me, by then I'm winding down ready for school pick up. Another problem was that some days I had lots of time to spend on a task and other days I have less time. Finally some of the tasks didn't really achieve anything, they were either things that I already do or just weren't relevant.

I recently wrote about trying out a bullet journal for the new year, and it seemed like the perfect space to work out a personalised January challenge for myself. I went around the house and looked for the areas that needed a bit of extra attention, then I worked out a list of tasks which would help me to get the house in order. I tried to mix it up with longer and shorter tasks, with some being more enjoyable than others. I knew that I would be away for a few days in January so my list only had 27 tasks.

Then I wrote them all out on a blank page in a bullet journal and put them inside boxes. Usually when I complete tasks in my bullet journal I scribble them out but this time I planned to colour the boxes in. This means that I can easily refer back to the list if I want to make myself another challenge at some point!

It's not perfect - clean kitchen floor was in there twice so I had to divide it into edges/skirting boards and the main floor area! But I stuck to it and got everything done and the house is definitely cleaner as a result. I really liked being able to choose the task I wanted to work on each day, I usually chose a task related to an area I was cleaning that day anyway and I saved easier tasks for busy days.

I'm going to repeat the challenge in the spring I think, maybe for the month of March as we are away for some of April. I have a few specific spring jobs like jet washing the patio and cleaning the garage doors, and of course some of these January jobs will probably need doing again by then! I've found it a really useful way to get some of those awkward areas looking much better.