An excerpt from a chapter on "Budgeting Your Time" in America's Housekeeping Book, compiled by the New York Herald Tribune Home Institute (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945):
Housekeeping is a real job - a job that needs to be planned carefully if one would avoid becoming a slave to housework or have free time for social activities and outside interests.
The easiest way to plan housework is to make a schedule which assigns each household task to the particular day - or perhaps even the particular hour - when it can be done most quickly and conveniently.
The benefits of such a schedule are many:
1. It relieves the uncertainty and nervous strain of "never knowing when you'll get things done."
2. It allows more things to be done in a given length of time.
3. It allows planning for leisure pleasures with the comfortable, confident feeling that housework need not be neglected.
4. It allows planning the work of a part-time or full-time helper, so that endless repetition of orders is avoided and more satisfactory assistance for the money spent is obtained.
In short, when a schedule has been followed until it becomes second nature, you run your house; it doesn't run you.
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