App Review: Home Routines
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to keep the new house nice and clean. I really only stick with goals if I can track them. If I don’t track them, I get distracted and end up spending all of my goal time playing Xbox. So I went in search of an app to help me along the way.
I first tried the basic task managers. Things like Any.Do and Remember the Milk. And while those apps are great for things like “go to the bank” and “get something for dinner” they are lacking for repeated daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. Unflith Your Habitat is great for “I need to do something but I don’t know what,” but lacks a scheduled consistency that I need. In comes Home Routines.
Home Routines has three default time tables. Daily (broken into morning and evening), weekly, and monthly (which rotate every week) all preset with selected chores. The preset chores are just a suggestion, and can be removed completely if you wish. To populate my Home Routines list, I did some Googling/Pinteresting of daily cleaning schedules and added the applicable ones to the app. Over time I started to realize where things needed to be tweaked, and have gotten to a maintainable schedule.
I’ve tried several times to find a way to stay on top of housework, and Home Routines is the first thing I’ve found that works for me. I don’t have to work at it to keep it up to date, and it’s just easy to use. Plus, at the end of the day I get a list that shows me all the things I did which gives me a sense of accomplishment. If you find yourself struggling trying to remember what all needs to be done around the house, you’ll likely find it helpful too.
Home Routines is for iOS only, and you can get it from the app store for $4.99.
I haven’t thought of using an app for keeping up with chores, I should look into it. Usually I just watch Hoarders, which has 2 results for me; I either feel better about how my house looks, and slack, or I get motivated to do some cleaning. Clearly, I need a better system. lol