5 Reader-Approved Super Smart Cleaning Tips
Last week I asked you how you keep your home livable, not too messy, and you’ve responded with all sorts of great advice, most of which I plan to implement myself.
There were many clever ideas, and the following five stood out as particularly useful:
Present to the whole home that suits your habits
As Fing Fang Flareon points out in his very helpful commentary , it’s much easier to organize work according to your natural impulses, rather than against them:
Create a home for your belongings that suits your habits. Don’t fight where you drop things without thinking, because “there shouldn’t be going there.” Fuck it, make it where it should be. Place a key basin or coat hook on the wall for your coat. If you drop dirty clothes in the same spot in the bedroom, put a basket or basket there. The same goes for storage space in the kitchen and bathroom – put things where you need them.
Cleaning Schedule Around Something Entertaining
If you regularly do heavy cleaning, try to trick StarryNight17: arrange a meeting with a weekly podcast:
My best advice: find a weekly audio podcast you like and listen to while cleaning.
> Ideal for planning. The podcast comes out every week and usually has the same duration every week, so it makes cleaning almost automatic – every Wednesday night when a new episode comes out, I spend 45 minutes cleaning my apartment.
> Hearing environment so less distracting than TV.
> Many podcasts are easy to turn on and off, so if you accidentally miss a few sentences by suddenly focusing on this hard-to-reach place on the counter, it’s easy to return to it.
Clean up in quick jets throughout the week
Rather than trying to do a few hours of chores after a long day of work (or put it off by a week), Melissa Hermes cleans up in one or two 15-minute treatments:
I am still trying to master it but found something. I quickly run 15 minutes as soon as I get home. Any major mess gets caught and I can see what more needs to be done. Energy levels are expected, I spend another 15 minutes doing things like storing laundry. We also have a list of small things to do on the refrigerator, like wiping down the ceiling fans. Finally, our second bedroom is our office. It is forbidden here for children and most other people. Most of the mess is going on in this room. We see no way to keep our sewing table so clean.
Don’t worry about what your mom says
While you may be a product of your upbringing, that doesn’t mean you have to live up to your mom’s cleanliness standards. As Ray points out in his very wise commentary , it’s all about maintaining standards that work for you . You should read all five points of Ray’s comment, but their last point did tell me:
Perhaps most importantly, visiting the homes of a wide variety of people from different walks of life helped me overcome my ridiculous notion that the only cleaning standards that matter are the ones I grew up with, which is unrealistic for one person who works. + hours a day in your business for service. There are many perfectly acceptable intermediate points. For most of my life, I have thought that since I cannot reach my mother’s standards, there is no point in even trying to keep a nice home. I now have a clean, comfortable home that I can easily maintain. I will never become the person who finds it necessary to wake up at 6 am on Saturday to spend the whole day cleaning, but that does not mean that I cannot be the person who has no problems cleaning and resetting the kitchen every evening at 9 pm. because that’s what works with my circadian clock.
There is a place to hide the mess
According to Tako Bebe , it’s very helpful to have a place where you can put the shit you don’t want to deal with right now:
Not sure if this is in the spirit of “neat”, but there is a secluded spot for confusion. In my house, this is our guest bedroom and our office. The guest bedroom is a good place to store things that need to be checked in, but I don’t want to deal with that yet. Our tables are designed for paperwork and personal BS. Clutter in private spaces makes it much easier to maintain order in the rest of the home.
To be honest, I don’t know what I would do without my clutter box. If the concept seems a little lazy to you, think of it not as “procrastinating” but as “prioritizing”.