A daily and weekly schedule that fits the day
Almost every schedule that fails in a Singapore household fails at arithmetic, not at effort. The plan was written as a list of tasks rather than as a total of minutes, nobody added it up, and the person following it has been quietly running out of day every week without saying so.
Write the day in four blocks: morning, meals and care, midday, evening. Put a number of minutes against every line, including the school run, the walking between rooms and the twenty minutes at the end that nobody counts.
Add up the blocks. Compare the total with the hours you actually pay for. If the total is larger, you do not have a performance problem, you have a plan that nobody could finish.
Do it once, together, at the start. It takes about ten minutes and it is the highest-value ten minutes in the first month.
Most people searching for this type the word maid, so if that is how you found this page, you are in the right place.
What the rules say about hours, which is less than you think
A migrant domestic worker is not covered by the Employment Act. (MOM, who is covered by the Employment Act, page last updated 24 July 2025.) There is no statutory maximum working day for her, no statutory overtime rate, and no legal definition of when her day ends.
What is required is adequate daily rest and one rest day a week, under the Employment of Foreign Manpower (Work Passes) Regulations. (MOM press reply on MDW workload, 2 March 2024.) You must also provide three meals a day and proper accommodation. (MOM, rest days and wellbeing, page last updated 16 January 2026.)
So the schedule is not a legal document. It is the only thing standing between a household and a working day that expands by half an hour a week until somebody resigns. That is why it gets written down and totalled rather than described.
The four blocks, with realistic times
These are estimates for a household of three or four people, and they are a starting point to adjust rather than a standard to hit. Children, pets, an elderly family member, a home with stairs or a household that cooks twice a day all change them.
Morning
| Task | Approximate time |
|---|---|
| Open windows or check ventilation where the outdoor air allows | 5 min |
| Sort and start the first laundry load | 10 min |
| Breakfast dishes, kitchen counters, sink and tap dried | 20 min |
| Beds made, bedrooms tidied, curtains opened | 15 min |
| Bathroom quick clean: sink, tap, mirror, toilet, shower dried | 20 min |
| Hang the first load | 10 min |
Meals, shopping and care
This is the block that decides whether the rest of the plan is possible, and it is the one most often left out of a cleaning schedule entirely.
| Task | Typical time |
|---|---|
| Breakfast prepared and cleared | 20 min |
| Lunch prepared and cleared | 30 to 45 min |
| Dinner prepared and cleared | 60 to 90 min |
| Grocery shopping, once or twice a week | 45 to 60 min |
| Childcare, school run, care for an elderly family member, pets | As agreed, and written in |
Midday
The weekly task for the day sits inside this block, not on top of it.
| Task | Approximate time |
|---|---|
| Floors: sweep or vacuum the main areas | 20 min |
| Mop the main areas | 20 min |
| The weekly task for today | 40 to 90 min |
| Second laundry load, hung or folded | 20 min |
Evening
| Task | Approximate time |
|---|---|
| Dinner dishes, kitchen reset, surfaces and sink dried | 30 min |
| Tidy the main rooms, bins out | 15 min |
| Fold and put away the day's laundry | 20 min |
| Set up for tomorrow: bags, uniforms, what needs defrosting | 10 min |
The weekly rota
One deep task a day, not six on a Saturday. A week that ends in a pile is a week that gets abandoned the first time a Saturday is busy.
A workable spread: bathrooms deep cleaned on one day, bed linen on another, kitchen appliances and inside the fridge on a third, high surfaces and fans on a fourth, floors under and behind furniture on a fifth, wardrobes and shoe storage on a sixth. The seventh is her rest day and carries nothing.
Monthly, separately and marked in the calendar rather than remembered: the washing machine maintenance cycle, the deep fridge clean, the air conditioning checked and reported on, worn cloths replaced.
Start the laundry first thing so it has the whole day to dry, work top to bottom and dry before wet, and finish each room before starting the next. Half-finished rooms feel to everyone in the house like no work happened.
How to check the plan is possible
Total the blocks. Add the four numbers. Add the weekly task for that day. That is the working day the plan actually describes.
Subtract the care hours first, not last. If childcare or care for an elderly family member takes four hours, the cleaning plan has to fit what is left. Care is not something that happens in the gaps between cleaning.
Compare it with the hours you pay for. Include the time between tasks. A home with stairs and four bedrooms costs more minutes than the same task list in a two-bedroom flat.
Watch for the migrating task. The tell of a plan that does not fit is a task that moves to the end of the day, then to tomorrow, then out of the week, and nobody mentions it. That task is the plan telling you the arithmetic is wrong.
Ask her to time three tasks in the first week. Not as a test, and say so. Your estimate for mopping is probably from the last time you did it, in a hurry, badly.
When the day does not go to plan
Guests arrive, a child is ill, a delivery comes, the machine breaks. Consistency matters more than completeness, so agree in advance what gets protected and what gets moved.
Protect the daily block: meals, dishes, wet areas dried, bins, anything to do with a child. Move the weekly task to another day and say which day. The rule worth writing down is that a plan which was communicated is never a failure, and a plan which was silently abandoned is the only real problem here.
Two minutes at the start of the week, asking what is coming, prevents most of it. Guests on Thursday, a school holiday on Friday, you travelling from Tuesday.
The schedule is agreed, then adjusted
Write it, hand it over, and then sit with it once at the end of the first fortnight. Ask which block runs over, which task takes longer than the number on the page, and what she would move. Adjust the paper rather than the person.
A schedule she helped correct is one she will tell you about when it stops working. A schedule issued and never revisited is one she will fail quietly, and you will find out in month three from a floor that has not been done properly since week five. If that is where you already are, the four checks on this page are the faster route, and the first of them is this arithmetic.
The hours themselves, when the day starts and ends and what happens in the evening, belong in your house rules rather than in the task plan.
The handbook
The Domestic Helper Training Handbook. Professional cleaning, laundry and home health standards for humid and air-conditioned homes, with daily, weekly and monthly schedules laid out to be filled in with this household's real times.
The Shared Standard, Book 3. Written for her, bought and printed by you.
Figures on this page were checked on 10 September 2026 against the sources named. Requirements and fees change. Check the source before you rely on a number.