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A little time goes a long way.
Key Takeaways
- A quick 15-minute daily cleaning burst transforms chaos into calm.
- Customize your routine: focus on rooms, activities, or urgent messes.
- Enlist your household for maximum efficiency in minimal time.
True confession: Despite the fact that I regularly write about organizing and cleaning topics—and interview cleaning experts galore—my house tends toward the messy. With two dogs, two cats, and two kids, keeping everything clean has generally felt like mission impossible.
But this year, my goal has been to finally get things under control, with massive decluttering projects and tons of deep cleaning. And I've been experimenting with a lot of the strategies that we recommend to see what works for me. One of the more surprising successes: a simple, daily commitment to 15 minutes of cleaning. Here's the skinny on it, if you want to give it a try.
Related: Our 15 Best Cleaning Tips of 2024 Will Make Your Life So Much Easier
How the 15-Minute Cleaning Routine Works
The idea is pretty self-explanatory. Set a timer for 15 minutes, and get cleaning. When the 15 minutes are up, your work is (in theory at least!) done.
There are several different versions of the 15-minute cleaning routine out on the internet—including some that don't specify setting a clock, but break up the typical weekly cleaning tasks into short increments that should, ideally, be able to be accomplished in a 15-minute time frame.
Tips
Most of these 15-minute routines have another set of everyday tasks that is separate from the list, including dishes, bed making, and counter clearing. However, I found that I could accomplish many of them during my 15-minute routine!
Divided by room
One common 15-minute cleaning strategy? Assign each room a day of the week, and get all your to-dos accomplished in there. For instance, Allison at Designed Simple prescribes a different room for each day, with a set of activities to do in each room (so you don't forget to clean the microwave when you're tidying the kitchen).
Her schedule:
- Bedrooms on Monday
- Bathrooms on Tuesday
- Kitchen on Wednesday
- Living Room on Thursday
- Monthly Clean Items (like baseboards, appliances, or cabinets) on Friday
- Outdoors on Saturday
Divided by activity
Some cleaning experts prefer to separate their 15-minute daily to-dos by activity type. Becky Rapinchuk at Clean Mama focuses on one type of cleaning each day.
Her schedule:
- Bathrooms on Monday
- Dust on Tuesday
- Vacuum on Wednesday
- Wash Floors on Thursday
- Catch Up on Friday (Monthly tasks or anything you missed)
- Sheets and Towels Saturday
Related: How a 15-Minute Cleaning Routine Can Transform Your Home
Priority approach
If you don't want to follow a set schedule, you can opt to prioritize what looks worst on any given day—so floors if you're seeing dust bunnies in the corners, or toilets if your bathrooms are looking a little worse for wear.
Tips
This might be a good approach if there are areas of your home that get heavier traffic and mess than others. For instance, our first floor, where our dogs spend their days, tends to get a lot messier than my second-floor office.
How Devoting 15 Minutes Daily Made My Home Better
To be totally honest, I was a little bit skeptical that so little time per day would make a big difference in my home—especially with the amount of pet hair and paper clutter that tends to accumulate in my home.
But I dutifully began setting the timer each day, and setting to work. I tried for a bit to follow the room or the activity schedules, but I found that just committing to the time—with the vacuum and an all-purpose cleaner at the ready—was enough to make some real changes to my house, really quickly. I'm a naturally competitive person, so having a deadline and a need to succeed combined to have me hustling to accomplish as much as possible in as little time as possible. And it worked!
My 15-minute cleaning routine earlier in the day even made it easier for my husband (who does the post-dinner cleanup) to have the kitchen spotless every night before we go to bed.
When Saturday came, rather than committing hours to get our whole house deep cleaned, we just had to do a quick vacuum and a floor wash, spray down the kitchen appliances, and we had the rest of the day to ourselves. (Though, admittedly, I did spend a bit of time working on my big office declutter project.)
Tips for Putting This Cleaning Routine Into Practice
Want to try this 15-minute cleaning routine for yourself? Here are some strategies I used to set myself up for success.
Create a set routine for when you clean
The best way to get a habit going is to set a specific time when you get it done, so that it starts getting baked into your day. My pick was to do it right after my work day is done, so I clear away any mess, cross it off my to-do list, and have the rest of the night to myself. (It also makes a nice transition from work to home!)
But you may find that getting it done in the a.m. works best for you to help you start your day off fresh, or you might want to do it at the end of the night or right after dinner, so everything's clean when you wake up in the morning.
Related: 8 Tricks to Help You Accomplish Any Goal, According to Psychologists
Let your cleaning products do the work
This is a tip we recommend over and over, but it can be hard to break the spray-and-wipe habit. When you have just 15 minutes to work, go around and spray the surfaces you're cleaning, let it sit for a few minutes while you take on other tasks (like cleaning up dog toys from the floor), then go back and wipe. You'll find that the stuck-on messes on countertops or grime in the shower simply wipe away without a lot of scrubbing, saving you time.
Try to get your household involved
Obviously, you can multiply the cleaning effect if you have your whole household get in on the cleanup—and with only a 15-minute commitment, it can be hard for even the busiest family members or roommates to say no.
If you do have other people work with you, you might want to prescribe certain activities to each person (i.e. cleaning up their own clutter, taking out the trash, vacuuming the living room, etc.), so the sinks don't get scrubbed twice, yet the floors are ignored.
Did my family completely come on board for the 15-minute cleaning routine? Not exactly. But they did help out enough to ensure that when life got messier, we were still able to keep things in shape. And as anyone who's seen my house before we started this routine can attest—that's a very big deal.
Read the original article on Real Simple
