It is known that it’s not so much where they clean it, but where it is not rubbish. Maintaining order will require much less effort and time than emergency general clean-ups, only it is worth making some useful habits.
Liquidate immediately
Life will become much simpler, and a house cleaner if you accustom yourself and household members immediately put things in their intended places. So, it will not be difficult and it will not take much time to put the read book on the shelf, and send the removed clothes to a cupboard or basket for dirty linen, wash the boots immediately after returning from a walk, and dishes immediately after the meal or cooking. It will take much longer to eliminate the large-scale consequences of laziness in a week, than to maintain order day after day.
Make a schedule
If there is a big and complicated business ahead, psychologists advise to divide it into smaller and easily feasible parts ("cut the elephant and eat it in parts"). With an experienced master's eye, look around your home and think about what corners of it require your intervention. Make a list of “mess-up activities”. Highlight the most important and urgent points - for their implementation should be taken first. Try to formulate tasks as specifically as possible. So, for example, the wording “To clean up the kitchen” will not work - it’s too general. It is much more correct to break this big task into parts:
- "Wash the stove";
- "Wipe the shelves";
- "Wash the refrigerator", etc.
Make such a plan, for example, for a week. Include in it the things you do daily, weekly, several times a week (wet cleaning, washing, etc.).
Do not get carried away!
Devote at least 15 minutes a day to accomplishing each of the planned tasks, or a little more if you can afford it. Set an alarm or timer that will notify you of the end time. The secret is that having persuaded yourself to devote only 15 minutes to what you have planned, you will most likely still bring what you have started to the end - you will be sorry to leave the case interrupted in the middle of the process.
But you shouldn’t get carried away either. If you plan to devote 15 to 20 minutes to cleaning, you should not spend a couple of hours on it: most likely, you will get tired, and the next day your enthusiasm will evaporate, which means that the mess will begin to “creep” into your comfortable apartment again.
