How to Keep Your House Clean in Less Than 20 Minutes a Day

Does your housework get pushed off until you have an entire day available to spend cleaning? Here’s how to keep your house clean in less than 20 minutes a day!

Author: Amy of DeliberatelyHere.com 

Keeping a clean house doesn’t need to mean sitting on the bathroom floor scrubbing the back of the toilet in your “free time” because you’ve been putting it off for months and the smell is now nauseating. You don’t need to spend half your life hunched over the bathtub scrubbing at soap scum rings. There is an easier way to keep the house clean, even when it feels like it will take weeks It’s time to stop letting the mess in your house rule over you; take charge of your home with this simple list of 5 things you can do everyday to keep your house clean even when it’s mess-prone.

What To Do When You Can’t Keep Up With Housework

Whether it’s the absence of structure hindering your ability to keep up with housework or simply the fact that you can’t get motivated to start, no one should feel overwhelmed by their messy house. Your house should be a place that you’re excited to come home to. Somewhere that you enjoy being, not somewhere that stresses you out when you look at the dirt and crumbs getting tracked across the floor.

How to Get Started Cleaning

If looking at your messy house zaps your motivation and makes you want to hide under the covers with a bowl full of rocky road ice cream (been there, done that) here are 3 things you can do to turn that idleness into action.

Organize First

Before you set out to start cleaning your home, you need to spend a bit of time organizing it. Keeping clutter out and placing items in their proper spot will significantly cut down on the amount of time you spend cleaning.

Turn on Some Tunes

Music increases stimulation and motivates us to get moving. Music just might be the fuel your body is missing for productivity and motivation.

Make Your Bed

Though a small accomplishment, making your bed will help you start the day off feeling motivated. Making your bed every morning not only makes your bedroom look much tidier, but it also motivates you to keep the rest of your home up to that standard of tidy. Now that you’re motivated and ready to start cleaning, here are 5 things you can do every day to keep your home clean when you have minimal time.

How to Keep Your House Clean in Less Than 20 Minutes a Day

Use the Same System

First, you need to find a cleaning system, routine, or schedule that works well in your day to day life. Once you’ve found (or created) the system that works for you, use it repeatedly and don’t stray away from it. Consistent repetition will help you get quicker at what you do. In other words, when you use the same cleaning system day in and day out, it will become second nature and you’ll be able to incorporate your cleaning tasks into your day in ways that allow you to get them done in less time. 

In the morning while waiting for your coffee to brew and getting the kid’s cereal ready, empty out the dishwasher. Playing on the floor with your toddler? Grab that load of laundry that has been sitting in the dryer for the past 5 days and start folding. Brushing your teeth? Give the washroom countertops a quick wipe down before bed. Using the same daily cleaning system day after day will help you significantly cut down on the amount of time that it takes to keep your house clean.

Define Clean

One big mistake many people make when stressing over the state of their home is trying to live up to someone else’s standards of clean. Your life, your to-do list, and your situation are all completely different from the next person’s, which means if you have no more than 10 minutes a day to clean, you can’t expect to keep your house as pristine as your neighbor’s who has over an hour every day to dedicate to cleaning. It just doesn’t work. If you only have 10 minutes a day to clean, you need to hone in on your cleaning tasks and really prioritize them. Ask yourself which tasks absolutely need to get done daily, and which ones can be done once or twice a week. Define what clean is to you, then work on keeping your house up to that standard of clean.

Maintain

More than anything else, work on maintaining a clean house. When you let it start to slip by pushing your housework off for one, two, ten days, cleaning your house goes from being a 5 minute tidy-up to requiring a dust mask, 50 hours, and hiring a professional cleaning service. Try to maintain a clean house by doing small cleaning tasks daily, rather than letting it all build up and having your house require a very thorough deep cleaning.

Automate and Delegate

If you have family members that can help out around the house, don’t be afraid to delegate some tasks on to them. Many hands make light work. If you’re really low on time, when possible, automate any cleaning tasks possible. Automating your cleaning tasks could look something like purchasing a robot vacuum to cut down on the amount of time you spend vacuuming or using a scrub-free toilet cleaning system that does the dirty work of cleaning toilets for you. Automating and delegating your cleaning tasks will free up some extra time to spend doing other things.

Task Clean

Task cleaning, unlike zone cleaning (which is cleaning one room at a time), can significantly cut down on the amount of time it takes to clean the house. Task cleaning is when you focus on one particular task at a time. For example, you could focus on dusting every surface in the house, then moving on to vacuuming all the floors, and so on. Unlike zone cleaning, where you could get the whole kitchen cleaned in 2 hours, when you focus on task cleaning, you can get the house in its entirety thoroughly cleaned in the same amount of time it takes to clean just the kitchen.

Author bio: Amy is the founder of DeliberatelyHere.com. She is a passionate homemaker who is always looking for a better, more efficient way of doing things. She loves helping other women find joy and purpose in their daily lives by sharing her best cleaning tips, organizing secrets, and offering decluttering help over at Deliberately Here.