How to get your spouse to clean the house

Pick the right time
Discuss your need for more help at a time when your spouse won't be distracted or resentful – not while he's watching his favorite sports team on television and not the moment he gets home from work and needs to unwind. Otherwise, an angry undercurrent will scuttle your discussion.

Provide training
Women often know exactly how to perform cleaning functions, but men often don't, Beckwith says. Tell your spouse the key things he needs to know about loading the dishwasher, for instance. ("There are men who load the dishwasher with the glasses face up," she says.) Make sure he knows where the detergent is, how much to put into the dispenser, and how to operate the controls. Provide any training by showing how it's done – not telling.

Lower your standards
This may sound condescending, but it's not. Some women's standards for cleaning are "ridiculously high," says Beckwith. If you criticize your spouse's cleaning efforts or redo his work, he'll quit helping. Be happy that some amount of cleaning was accomplished, even if it's not the way you would have done it.

Stick to your guns
If your spouse is supposed to handle a particular cleaning task and he doesn't get around to it, don't do if for him, says Newman. That's a trap: The workload will drift back to the same old inequitable arrangement.

Schedule the work
You grandmother probably had a rigid schedule for housekeeping duties – there was a wash day and an ironing day each week, for instance. Modern homemakers tend to approach their tasks randomly as they find the time, says Singer – and that often means that work piles up undone. Small, self-imposed deadlines will help you and your spouse keep up with the work. For instance, Singer makes sure she has all of the breakfast dishes put away in the dishwasher before the kids leave for school in the morning, and she changes the sheets every Tuesday.

Praise and reward
No matter how lacking your spouse's cleaning effort might have been, find something nice to say about the job – and throw in a reward: "Wow, shiny bathroom faucets! Why don't we drop the housework now and go to a movie?"

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Excerpted from How to Cheat at Cleaning: Time-Slashing Techniques to Cut Corners and Restore Your Sanity by Jeff Bredenberg, copyright 2007. Excerpted with permission from Random House of Canada. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced except with permission in writing from the publisher.