I can therefore sympathise with all those clients who are also busy working mums. Not only do they have two full-time jobs (I’m counting looking after the kids as 1 FTE here) which take up most of their time, but the children also tend to add significantly to the household chores: there’s more washing, cooking, and rooms to clean!

As a mother of two, I also know that for all of us, the real priority is our children. It’s a cliched phrase, but we all want to have quality time with our family, nurture our kids, an enjoy them at every age as they change and grow up at an alarming rate.

For most mums, work falls somewhere in between – hopefully we enjoy our work and get satisfaction from it, but we’d love to have more time with our children, especially when they are young. I know I’m lucky to have my own business when I see how hard juggling all these priorities can be for mums who go out to work every day.

Cleaning is often the one area where working mums can eke out a bit more time in their week. As a professional cleaner, I know just how much a scheduled, concerted approach can achieve in relatively little time.

Therefore, my first piece of advice is to make a cleaning schedule.

Making a plan will involve setting out all the different cleaning chores that need doing every week to ensure a clean home. You will probably keep going back to it during the first week and adding things that you had been doing automatically, but hadn’t thought of when writing the schedule. In the end, it’s usually quite a long list.

Having this schedule can in itself save you time. But even better, you can use it to determine the jobs you don’t like, are time-consuming, or you rarely get round to doing. These are the jobs you could consider delegating to a professional cleaner.

At that point, many of us would happily bring in a full-time butler, but realistically all you need is someone to come in and do the tougher cleaning jobs for you once or twice a week.

My not-so-surprising admission is that I myself now use one of my team of skilled cleaners in my own home. Even a relatively small amount of help on a weekly basis can make a huge difference: it gives me more time to spend with the children, but also ensures a nice tidy work environment and frees me from any niggling worries about chores I’ve fallen behind on.

My second piece of advice is therefore to get a cleaner, if you can afford it.

A skilled professional can do a lot of the hard work in your home in just a couple of hours and you’ll never look back. At Domestic Matters, around two thirds of our clients across Fife and Kinross are working mums like myself, and I know they all appreciate the extra time with their families, instead of doing their most onerous pieces of housework. That’s one of the most satisfying things about running this business.