The House Day Nobody Schedules and Why Your Week Falls Apart Without It
Updated: 1 day ago
Nobody schedules a house day, and it is easy to see why. The list that lives under house and life admin is not fun, it rarely feels urgent until the moment it suddenly is, and it gets nudged to the bottom of every week by work, family and everything else that arrives with a deadline attached. Everyone's schedules are so full that the house and life admin simply never gets a turn.
The trouble is that the jobs never actually go away. They sit in the back of your head, adding up, until you are overwhelmed by how much there is to do, convinced you have no time to do it, and tired before you have started. At The Rather Odd Company we run our week a little differently, and one of the odd choices we make is to give the house its own day.
The list that lives in your head
House and life admin is the stuff nobody sees you doing and everybody feels when it is missed. The forms, the phone calls, the replacement for the thing that broke, the appointment you meant to book weeks ago. Because it has no deadline of its own, it loses out every time to something that does.
The first fix is almost embarrassingly simple: write each task down the minute you think of it. Getting it out of your head and onto paper is a relief in itself, and it means the list is waiting for you on house day rather than nagging at you through the other six days.
The Quickies List™
Here is the part that tends to surprise people. Most of these jobs take somewhere between five and fifteen minutes. We call the list that collects them The Quickies List™, and on house day you work through all of it in one sitting.
Because the individual jobs are so small, the list feels far heavier than it really is. Put the same tasks into a single protected block and they fall away much faster than anyone expects, and the satisfaction of crossing off a whole page of things you have been avoiding is hard to overstate.
Our founder, Yanika Cordina, is often surprised by how quickly a house day gets through the list.
"You will be amazed how much you can get done in such a short space of time. The thought is definitely heavier than the actual action of getting it done." Yanika Cordina, Founder of The Rather Odd Company
The Quickies List™ - A4 To do list Notepad - House & Life Admin
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House day is also the day for appointments. Ideally you book them on this day, and attend them on it too: the dentist, the doctor, the boiler service, the car, anything personal or to do with the house. We appreciate that this will not always work out, because appointments land when the surgery or the engineer says they will, and every one of us has to attend them whenever they fall. But if you aim to book them on house day, it organises your list far better, and it stops appointments competing with work and starts treating them as the ordinary part of life they are.
Planning the meals and the food shop
The next job on house day is planning the week's meals and building the food shop around them. When you know what you are cooking, you know what to buy, and you can do the food shop online from a list that is already finished, which is far quicker and more time effective than going into a shop. You also know what you have to look forward to eating, which makes the whole week feel a little more organised.
It also does something quieter. Planning your meals ahead lets you see whether you are getting enough nutrition from what you are actually eating, which is far harder to judge when you are winging it each evening at six o'clock. Not to mention that by then you are usually exhausted from a full day of work or family commitments, which is exactly when the easy, less nourishing option wins. If you are going to do only three things on house day, we would start with the Quickies List, the meal plan and the food shop.
Weekly Meal Plan - A4 Meal Planning & Food shopping list
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The cleaning, and the space you wake up in
We include cleaning on house day as well, and whether you take it on yourself or hand it to someone else is entirely up to you. To make it easier, we have put together a complete house cleaning list that you can use in your own home.
The Cleaning List - A4 House cleaning To do list
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Here is what we think will encourage you rather than put you off. Some of the jobs on that list take mere seconds and others a few minutes, but they feel enormous right up until you actually do them and watch the clock.
You do not have to finish the list in one go either. Tick as much or as little as you like, and let it keep you on track rather than make you feel behind. The reason we bother is simple. Your home is where you wake up every day and where you relax at the end of it, so a clean, organised space tends to reflect and support the way you think and organise yourself.
"The house is not going to run itself." Yanika Cordina, Founder of The Rather Odd Company
Why a house day beats fitting it in as you go
The usual approach is to fit these jobs in as and when, a few minutes here, a spare half hour there. In practice they slide further down the list each time something more pressing turns up, and before long the pile is large enough to be overwhelming. Doing a little, often and unplanned, sounds sensible, but it rarely survives a busy week.
A dedicated day changes that. You are no longer squeezing admin into the gaps, you are giving it room, and it turns out that room is all it needed. It also brings an unexpected order to your thinking, because once the house and life admin has a home in your week, it stops taking up space in your head.
We have tested this ourselves, and the Quickies List and the food shopping list are both used constantly. Having them to hand has been life-changing, and the cleaning list gives us something to work down at our own pace during house day, so the home stays on track without the day turning into a marathon.
What if you cannot spare a whole house day
We would be dishonest if we pretended this fits every life. If you work five days a week for an employer, you have two days to catch up on everything and also rest and reboot, which makes a full house day a hard thing to protect.
In that case, aim for half a day. Choose one stretch on your day off, put the Quickies List, the food shop and any appointments into it, and see how much you get through. Most people are amazed at what half a day of focused effort can do.
If you run your own business, the answer may be to look honestly at how you spend your time and restructure the week so the house day has a place in it. It can feel like time you cannot afford, but it is worth asking whether you are really living if most of your hours go to work, with nothing set aside for your home and personal life. That is a bigger conversation, and one we will return to in another post, but it is worth looking within.
If there is a baby or toddler attached to you
Not everyone can hand over a whole day, and little ones are the most obvious reason why. If you are running after a baby or a toddler, a complete house day is unlikely, and you may finish it feeling that you achieved very little.
Do it in pieces anyway, around nap times, and you will still stay on top of things.
"When I have a baby attached to me, I fit the Quickies List, booking of appointments and meal planning around nap times on my scheduled house day, and it still keeps me on top of things." Yanika Cordina, Founder of The Rather Odd Company
When the children are at school, or you have a day with nobody to look after but yourself, that is when the house day comes into its own. A single uninterrupted day can clear what weeks of fragments never will.
Rather odd, we know
Giving a whole day to housework and admin sounds like an odd thing to do, and we are happy to own that. But the week we run is built on giving each day a purpose, rather than slicing every day into a little of everything and finishing none of it properly.
The house day is the one almost nobody schedules, which is exactly why it makes the biggest difference. Start with the Quickies List, plan your meals, book the appointments, and see what happens to the rest of your week.
