A common reason why people procrastinate cleaning is how much time they think the cleaning will take to complete. They know what needs to be cleaned but are busy in their other daily activities, like spending time with their family, that they let their cleaning duties weigh heavy on their shoulders until it is too much to carry.
In this article, we will let you in on some tips and tricks to make your cleaning more efficient so you can have the best of both worlds, get your daily cleaning done, and still have plenty of time to spend with your loved ones.
Set a 15-minute timer for cleaning sprints so there’s no time for procrastination
Setting a 15-minute “clean-time” timer each day will feel like an achievable goal for completion and will not infringe on your time for other more enjoyable activities in your day. Simply use the timer on your phone or a stop watch to keep track of time.
The timer plays an important role in the psychology of your brain, as the timer makes you feel like you can no longer procrastinate. Once you hear the timer start, you know it is GO time. You know that whatever you clean in that 15 minutes will be more than you had planned to accomplish in your cleaning without the timer. You can consider it a job well done!
If you didn’t have time to clean something, you’ll get to it during tomorrow’s 15-minute sprint. You’ll be surprised how much cleaning may be accomplished after a solid week of daily 15-minute clean sessions and how much time this gives you to relax with your family.
Clean throughout the day to make long tasks shorter and save yourself time
Another reason a cleaning task may seem overwhelming is because you may be allowing the task to build up all day. Instead, follow one of the golden rules for cleaning, leave a place cleaner than you found it.
If you clean up after yourself and tackle small quick cleans throughout your day, you’ll be surprised at how much less time you will spend cleaning and how much fewer cleaning tasks there will be at the end of your day.
Instead of leaving all three meal dishes collecting in the sink, along with crumbs collecting on every surface of your kitchen throughout the day, clean the dishes and surfaces after each meal. The job will be much quicker at the end of each meal than the time it will take to clean an entire day’s worth of dishes and crumbs at the end of the day.
Let things soak and clean themselves so you don’t have to
This trick may be applied to a few areas of your house. All it takes is some pre-planning and time management on your part and your cleanser will do most of the cleaning for you.
Kitchen
Instead of using a sponge, cleanser, and good old elbow grease for an excessive amount of time to scrub away dirt and food residue, apply your cleanser and allow to sit/soak overnight. In the morning, you should be able to easily wipe away any remaining dirt or food residue without any scrubbing necessary. For dishes, pots, and pans, you will want to soak in hot water along with a cleanser to allow the cleanser to remove the residue. For residue on your oven or cooktop, apply the cleanser as directed and magically wipe it away in the morning.
Bathroom
Give your bathroom cleaner some time to work its magic by letting it sit for 30 minutes before cleaning the bathroom. This will loosen up the debris and make your cleaning easier and therefore less time-consuming. See our bathtub cleaning article for more tips.
Keep everything dry so they stay clean
A common mistake is leaving items wet. When things stay wet they can grow bacteria, making them harder to clean and therefore taking more time to clean.
Hanging up or opening up items to dry like your bathmat, shower curtain, and hand towel so bacteria won’t grow will allow them to stay cleaner. It’s also important to not let your laundry sit in the washer for too long. The quicker your laundry dries the quicker it is clean and also doesn’t grow any bacteria or start to stink. If you wipe down your sink and shower before you leave the bathroom in the morning, you will keep your bathroom cleaner and reduce the time it will take to clean it each week.
Don’t break your back and waste time making everything spotless
Lower your standards. This might sound surprising but not everything has to pass the white glove test or look professionally cleaned. You may be wasting time by wiping surfaces a third or fourth time just to ensure you have not missed a spot… Yes, you may miss a spot or two but it’ll still be clean, and the next time you clean the area you’ll most likely get that spot without realizing it. If you are consistent with your cleaning, eventually all spots will be wiped away.
Not everything has to be picture-perfect. If you tend to be a perfectionist, try to cut down on your cleaning by half and focus on quantity over quality. You’ll be surprised at how much family time you gain.
Conclusion
If your cleaning time feels insurmountable and so you are procrastinating, rethink your cleaning methods so that you can accomplish your cleaning and have quality time to spend with your family.
Tackle bits and pieces of your cleaning as you go throughout your day, soak items overnight to reduce your cleaning time the following day, set daily 15-minute cleaning sprints, and don’t waste your time over-cleaning.
At the end of the day, spending quality time with your family is more important than cleaning but it doesn’t have to be one over the other. With these helpful tips, you can accomplish both.
If you need extra help with staying on top of your cleaning check out our app Dirtfree. Dirtfree is a cleaning app that stays on top of your cleaning and reminds you what items need cleaning so you don’t have to.
