Much Needed: Help Cleaning House

I've slipped again on my housekeeping. I've mentioned before that I can only seem to keep up on so many things at one time. My work is doing fine, thank-you, and I'm getting back into the swing of things with my church responsibilities. But my housework is SCREAMING at me... I need HELP cleaning house!

And now that school is starting soon, I can no longer afford to neglect it.
So, I'm jumping back on the bandwagon with a great system I found a few months ago at a blogging conference that I went to. I met an amazing woman, named Marie Ricks, whose business is geared to poor, pathetic, unorganized and distracted girls like me that need help cleaning house. She created the House of Order system to make getting your house in order a simple, manageable process.

I started using the system back in May and saw a HUGE difference in a matter of days. The system is relatively simple, but that's the magic. Even though I mocked the program for a long time (because it utilizes a bunch of index cards - one more thing for me to lose), it's pretty easy to follow and it makes a noticeable difference.

Basically, Marie gives you a few tasks that need to be done on a daily basis: tidy the kitchen, a load of laundry, empty the dishwasher, etc. If you do these things every day, they only take a short amount of time and your house will stay presentable, at the very least.

There are also weekly, monthly and quarterly tasks for an even deeper clean and more orderly home. The beauty is that you can start where you are and build up as quickly or as slowly as you need to. I never got past the weekly tasks (and I didn't even always do those), but my house was getting more organized, I was finally catching up with laundry and I felt comfortable having unexpected visitors.

Some of you, no doubt, will think it's silly to need a system or help cleaning house. But others of us (and there's more of us than you would think) really need the guidance and structure. Marie is patient and kind and she really knows her stuff.

So, my new school year resolution is to pick it back up and get things in order before all of the school papers start to pile up again and take over our lives. I'll let you know how it goes...

What do you do to keep your home orderly without spending all day to do it? Really, please comment - I NEED all the help I can get.
(Photo courtesy of BoredLA.com)