How to Create a Home Maintenance Checklist

Owning a house is a whole lot of work. And for any of you who are homeowners or car owners or pet owners or owners of something, you know exactly what I'm talking about. It never ceases to amaze me how certain people can just go through their week and all of a sudden remember, oh, it's time to change the water filter. I don't have that gene. And I'm guessing neither do you if you're watching this video. Because today I want to talk about how those of us who aren't that superhuman level of memorization machine are able to still maintain our home, maintain our cars, maintain the things that we own in our personal life by being a little bit more preventative and proactive when it comes to the systems we have for personal productivity. The fact is, more than half of the battle of maintaining anything in life is just remembering to do it. And once you remember to do it, you need to do it. And then there you go. You've solved the maintenance trouble. Whether we're talking about cars or houses or fitness or anything else in between, it is simply a matter of remembering and doing. And while I cannot sit here and say, I've got the magical cure that will give you the motivation to do the things you're supposed to do, I wish I did. I do have a way for you to help with the memorization or remembering side of the equation, which is what we'll build together in form. Four steps throughout this video. Ready to get started? Okay. Step one of the process of building yourself a memorization machine, especially for home maintenance, is to create a go to spot. What I mean by this is to pick a location, whether it's a piece of paper, an agenda or planner, or a piece of software, and decide that's where I'm going to put my tasks. That's it. It's that simple. This step should take just a few minutes for anyone. If you are someone who's comfortable using technology and you're kind of, you know, should I use paper? Should I use technology? If you're comfortable with technology, I would recommend going that route because the steps that we have coming up later are going to be a whole lot easier if you're using something digital in order to organize these tasks. Three softwares you might want to check out if you're looking to get into this digital world of task management. Might be something like ClickUp to Todoist or Trello, depending on how you like to organize things. However, I do have a video that I'm going to put up at the top, where I do talk about all the different tools out there and which might be best for your personality type. But to keep it really simple, these would be the three I would look to as starter tools. If you're looking to get your home maintenance organized, you're okay with tech, but you don't want to go all crazy with it. These three are all solid choices, and all three of them would be really solid choices on their free plan. No need to spend money or invest in some fancy software just to organize your home maintenance. You can usually make do with the free plan of any tool you choose to use. But whether you're choosing physical piece of paper, a whiteboard, a bulletin board, a calendar, or a piece of software, step two is still going to apply. In the same way we need to define what exactly it is that we need to do. Now, I know this actually sounds really simple, but honestly, this piece takes more time than any other step in this process. Or what I want you to do is take your piece of paper, your agenda, your software, your ClickUp, whatever it is, and start dumping out of your head every single thing you need to do for home maintenance or whatever you're maintaining in order to have that thing remain in tip top shape. To demonstrate what this might look like if you're using a digital tool, I'm literally just going to create a new task in my tool of choice, which is ClickUp in this case, and I'm just going to create a task for each thing I need to do. I know, water the plants. It's kind of a home maintenance task, right? Clean the gutters, change out water filters, pay property tax, et cetera. I'm just going to keep dumping all these on the list. This is how we can start getting routines out of our head, whether it's a piece of paper or a digital tool. The first step is just figuring out what the heck do I need to do to prevent issues from coming up for me. In addition to just these normal tasks like taking out the trash or cleaning the gutters, I I want you to also take time to include some preventative care tasks in here. For example, check the leaky spot in the basement to ensure it's not leaking. Again, this isn't really a task we have to do, but it's a proactive thing to prevent an issue later on. Similarly, maybe we want to get quotes for other insurance companies to see if we're getting the best rate. This isn't an issue, it's not necessarily a task we have to do, but it's proactive and preventative and and ensures that we're always on top of things. Now, when it comes to brain dumping routines, we can go really intense with this or we can keep it quite simple. It really depends on what you consider to be well maintained for whatever it is you're trying to maintain. If it's a property that you're renting, maybe your standards are a little bit lower than if it's your forever home. I don't know. You get to decide that which is the fun part. But once you have decided that you finished step two of this process, we're ready to move on to step three. Three, which is pretty simple. It's just the fact that we need to set up recurrences for each of these maintenance items. So if you're doing pen and paper method right now, the way you'd want to define recurrences is to go forward on your calendar or in your agenda. And if you have a task you want to do every week, write that task every single week. Just keep writing it and writing it, writing it to fill in all the future weeks. However, if you've decided to go the technology route, you're going to save a lot of time here. Which is partially why I recommend using software if you can stomach it. And that's because almost every software out there will allow you to have recurring due dates, due dates that repeat without you having to manually type in a task again and again or manually write out a task again and again. In my preferred tool ClickUp here, I have things like water the plants. What I can do is go into the due date area, set recurring, and have this exact task repeat weekly, daily, or maybe even every two days so I can be sure that my plants are always getting watered on the interval that I want. I'll be reminded on every one of these little blue dots to go and water the plants. The task will just keep reappearing on that repeating cycle without me having to manually write it in. Once we have this, we want to repeat this for all of our other tasks. Just add. Add that recurring due date. Add that repetition, either by manually writing things out or by having your due date repeat. If you're not sure how to have your tool of choice repeat and have those recurring due dates, just search the word repeating due dates or recurring due dates along with the name of the software and a quick Google search should give you the result. Another kind of geeky adulting tip I'll share about recurrences here is that oftentimes, if you own things things in your property. Those things usually come with a service manual that tells you exactly what recurrence you need. So I know this isn't home related, but I just bought my first dirt bike. Woohoo. And the dirt bike is telling me that I need to have the the chain lubricated every 300 miles and so I can use that information knowing how much I ride in a week and set a recurring due date for how often I need to have that chain oiled. The same thing might be the case for you. If you have a water heater, the manual will typically tell you hey, change out the filter this often. Hey check the whatever this often. That would be a good resource. If you're not sure what these recurrences should be, check the owner's manual as I know, dorky and adulty as that sounds. Now so far we have established a tool for managing all of our home maintenance stuff. We've defined what we need to do and we know when we need to do it and we hopefully also know who's going to do it. Hopefully it's not all falling on us. But now we're ready for the fourth step, which is an optional one, but I want to throw it here in case this might help any of you. The fourth step here is just to create some tools to make this work easier. And this is going to look different for every single routine. What I'm referring to with tools is just collecting equipment, resources, information, whatever it might be to make the doing of that maintenance easier. So for example, if I want to, you know, go out and weed the garden every single Saturday, a tool I could have is something that would make that easier. Might be having a little bin together with all of my gardening and landscaping supplies so I can quickly grab it and go out to the garden and I don't have to manually find all that information every single Saturday. If for example, we have a routine of cleaning all the windows every month, if that is our routine, maybe a tool we could have could be actually buying a piece of equipment that helps us clean windows, or having all of our window cleaning supplies in one place, or having a stockpile of materials for cleaning windows. All of these things that we can just get and have ready will help us make these routines more easy to do. Now just to throw one more curveball example of a non physical routine we might have, let's imagine that we have to pay property tax on our home. That's part of the maintenance process in my mind, paying for the place. Let's say it costs $1,200 a year. That's a lot. And maybe having that due every August, that feels scary, that's stressful, and we want to make that easier. One tool we could set up here is an automatic savings plan where, say, every month $100 goes from our main bank account to a little savings account we have specific specifically for property taxes, like our own mini escrow. Then that Automation automatically puts $100 in each month. So when that $1,200 payment is due, no stress. The automation, which is our tool, helped us feel less stressed about that routine by making it easier and doing it in smaller payments. Now, I've been talking a lot here about home maintenance and examples of property management tasks that you might have, but I want to remind you that everything I'm talking about here and these tools we're making for ourselves to help our memory not have to do so much work. This applies to all facets of life, whether we're maintaining a dirt bike, a business, a pet, it doesn't matter. It's all the same thing. Speaking of memory, don't rely on your memory to remember to come back to this channel and watch our next video coming out next Friday. Make your life a little bit easier. If you go down to the description below this video, we actually have a link to our newsletter. If you sign up for that newsletter, which I really hope you will, you'll get our next email directly in your inbox and you won't have to stress or remember to come back to this channel next week. But of course, liking and subscribing doesn't hurt either. Thanks so much for watching our video here today. If you have any questions, drop them in the comments below. Hope you join our email newsletter, and until next time, enjoy the process.