Zone cleaning system
Over five years of real-world testing and extensive trialing, we've perfected an equitable and efficient cleaning system for busy co-living homes. We call it the zone cleaning system.
Once you've set up your zone cleaning system on Cohabit, we're confident you'll see the benefits:
- Efficient - focusing on single areas at a time makes the cleaning go faster
- Simple - everyone knows what they need to do and when with task previews and reminders
- Equitable - everyone does their fair share of the cleaning
- No deep cleaning days - deep cleaning tasks are integrated into the weekly cleaning schedules, eliminating the need for a separate spring clean or deep cleaning days
How it works
Break your home into zones
We start by breaking your home into zones. We recommend keeping these as simple as rooms at first, but you can also subdivide them into sections of a room or a wider area. We typically recommend that a zone should be no smaller than an ensuite and no larger than a lounge.
2 mins with Cohabit
We can help you break your home into zones and quickly visualize your progress.
Write a cleaning schedule for each zone
This is a list of tasks that need to be completed in each zone. Importantly, each list should include both common tasks and deep cleaning ones that you might only do once a month/year.
1 min per zone with Cohabit
Our cleaning schedule generator makes it easy to create a professional-grade cleaning list that reflects exactly the items in each zone.
Distribute tasks across each week
This means taking all your tasks and spreading them out across a full calendar year. Deep cleaning tasks get integrated into the weekly cleaning schedules, eliminating the need for a separate spring clean or deep cleaning days.
Fully automated with Cohabit
Rotate zone assignments
Now you have your yearly cleaning list broken down into individual lists for each week and zone, rotate the zone assignment to each member of the home. You should ideally take into account:
- The duration that each task takes (count-based task rotations don't account for difficult or long tasks)
- How many tasks each home member has recently completed in each zone
- Retaining assignments based on non-completion of previous weeks' tasks
- Private zone rotation (eg. only rotate ensuites to members who share them)
- Keeping weekly task loads relatively even while still trending to overall task completion equity
- Number of members in the home (eg. a home with 4 members should have a higher rotation frequency than a home with 2 members)
Fully automated with Cohabit - learn more about our custom algorithm
Track progress
As each member completes their tasks, mark them as complete. This will update the progress of the zone and the home, and keep everyone accountable. You can perform period reviews of task completion to ensure that everyone is pulling their weight.
Fully automated with Cohabit