If your home is a mess but you don’t really know where to start, it’s time to set a daily cleaning schedule, but don’t feel the need to do everything all at once. It’s well established that working in short bursts can help keep you motivated when you’re feeling overwhelmed, and cleaning in 15-minute bursts will do the trick. There are a bunch of areas around your home where that’s all you need, so start today and thank yourself in a few weeks.
What to do when you clean
First, commit to spending 15 minutes per day cleaning. It can be in the morning or the evening or whenever you want, really, but ideally, it should always happen at the same time. (More on that here.) Each day, pick a new spot to clean. I’ll share some ideas below, but overall, you’re looking for a small chunk of a larger room to avoid getting overwhelmed. It might make sense to divvy up the rooms in groups—so for a few days, you tackle spots in the bathroom, then move to spots in the kitchen for a few days, etc., but you can also devote your energy to whichever location is needing it most on a given day.
No matter what you pick, it’s important to be decisive and actionable. Select a cleaning or decluttering method that works for your situation and apply it to each of the regions you focus on. Regardless of what method you choose, you’ll essentially be clearing the space out, making choices about what stays and what goes, then reorganizing what you keep.
Use the principles of time boxing and limit yourself to just 15 minutes per day. When you’re using time boxing, you dedicate a predetermined amount of time to a specific task and work on it with no distractions, but you stop when the allotted time is up. If necessary, you pick the task back up during the next time box. Even if you’re really getting into the cleaning groove, try to stay within the 15-minute mark every time to stave off burnout and keep yourself challenged to stay totally on-task the whole time.
Spots you can clean in 15 minutes or less
Depending on what circumstances you work best under, you might want to plan out what you’ll clean a week or even a month or advance. I’m not going to tell you what to do, exactly, but I will say a little pre-planning is helpful when you’re lacking motivation because you go into the time box already aware of what you need to do.
If you’re stuck on what to clean, here are some ideas for areas that take 15 minutes or less (or at least can be mostly finished in that time, with the occasional need for a revisit the next day). Don’t limit yourself to the list, though; go through your home, pick small areas, and take on whatever makes sense in your situation. Here are some starting points to help generate ideas:
A junk drawer
The pantry
Your spice cabinet
Your medicine cabinet
The spots where you keep your accessories, like belts or bags
The spot where you toss your mail, your keys, or whatever is in your hand when you enter the house
Your fridge
A closet, whether it’s the coat closet or the one in your room
Your desk
Your book shelf
The list goes on and on, but would you look at that? It appears I’ve already written handy guides for cleaning and organizing those spots, which means you might as well start with them and follow along. But you’ll also notice all of those are really specific areas. Your goal here isn’t to, say, clean the bathroom in a day. Rather, it’s to break down the task of cleaning the bathroom into a bunch of smaller tasks, from the toilet to the medicine cabinet and everything in between, so you don’t get burned out doing it.
Breaking it down also helps build cleaning into a habit so, gradually, you just do it instinctively. A little bit of work every day adds up and you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of each 15-minute bout, which will propel you into the next day’s effort. By the end of a few weeks, you’ll have a noticeably cleaner space, all without having to strain yourself or dedicate a whole precious weekend day to tidying up.
