It is easy to make New Year's resolutions for January. Everyone does it. Nearly every person I meet has New Year's resolutions, and usually more than one. Everyone also keeps to those resolutions for about a month if they're lucky. But why wait? You can make changes anytime with no excuse and nothing pushing you to do it but your own desire to positively change your life. Cleaning is a big deal. When you get to the point where you feel it warrants a lifestyle change, why would you wait?

Why would you want to tackle a new challenge when you are just coming out of the holiday season? Even for those who don't celebrate December holidays, you are surrounded with the rush of the countless people who are. We are covering for their extra days off and dealing with traffic that comes with holiday shoppers clogging the roads. Some of us are dealing with adverse weather. Some of us are dealing with the longer periods of darkness affecting our mood. It's by no means the most opportune time to start a new challenge.

Instead, pick a day--any day. Any day of the year. Then assign that day to be the first day of your new resolution. And just tackle one. Give that resolution the attention it deserves. Better cleaning is a series of habits. It is said in countless psychology texts that it takes 21 days to create a new habit. Habits are not just the way you do something, but also the way you do NOT do something. Either way, it will take 21 days for it to be ingrained in you. So when you make a new resolution, why wouldn't you give each one the 21 days it needs to focus on it and make it last? When you're done with this one, move on to the next.

When it comes to cleaning you want it to be a habit--something that you just do as a course of nature. You might decide to focus on clearing out the kitchen sink each night. For 21 days, you deal with the kitchen sink every night after dinner and wake up to a clean sink. At the end of your 21 days, you no longer need to remind yourself to do this. Suddenly, you are on auto-pilot. Clearing the sink is no longer a cleaning task: it's part of your nightly routine.

And so it goes, habit by habit through your home (and office if need be) until you have created a set of habits that contributes to the order and cleanliness of your environment. This is not something you CAN just take on all at once on January 1 and expect to follow through. You have built a lifetime's worth of habits for how you live. If changing them were as simple as setting a list of resolutions for the first day of the New Year, cleaning services would be out of business!