Spring cleaning: Who has the time?

Officially, it's spring, though it does seem that Mother Nature begs to differ after yesterday's blustery snow squalls.

That means it's time for gleaming windows, fresh scrubbed floors and perfectly organized closets. At least in theory. (To help get you started, I recently shared some of our best cleaning tips, check them out here.)

In reality, it's hard to find the time to give your home an overhaul. It's tricky enough to just keep up on top of the things we have to do - laundry, dishes, general tidying - that working in a deep clean can feel more than a little daunting.

In fact, as I've started to tackle my own spring cleaning, I've become the queen of the unfinished project. Because, of course, one project always hinges on another. For example, I want to re-organize my closet. But that means getting the books that have been hanging out in a box in there out of the way. And to unpack those, I need to hang shelves. So, feeling all kinds of productive, I enlist a friend and start hanging shelves. But I run out of wall anchors. So, for the past three days, "Buy wall anchors" has been written in screaming letters at the top of my to-do list - and more than a week after "starting" the job, my closet is not any cleaner.

(As a bonus, I do have two shelves hung, and they're totally rocking my world.)

Experts say the way to manage these tasks is to make a list - check out Martha Stewart's here (it's a PDF) - and try to tackle just one task at a time. For example, one evening, plan to empty out your medicine cabinet rather than going over the entire bathroom with a fine tooth comb.

So, my first mistake was letting the job snowball. If I was going to tackle a task like closet cleaning, I should have focused on the closet alone, tucking that box away in a corner until the day comes when "Organize books" works its way to the top of my list - somewhere after buying, and hanging, shelves of course.

This way, you make progress in achievable chunks and, hopefully, feel inspired to actually tackle these bite-sized tasks rather than saying "I just don't have time to deep clean my kitchen tonight."

So, tonight's goal: Buy those darn wall anchors. Then revel in a job well done.