We’ve all been there. When your work week becomes so chaotic that Clothes Chair has morphed into Clothes Mountain, and your small to-do list feels so long you can’t breathe.
I am a binge cleaner. A no-good, cleaning for five hours until 3 a.m., procrastinator. There were times when I was so mentally exhausted throughout my work week that I let my dishes and laundry pile up until it was unbearable to look at. The only fix was doing it all at once.
I felt good after those nights. Really good. As if I had climbed Clothes Mountain and placed a flag at the tippy top. I’m never letting it get this bad again, I would think. I’ll stay more on top of it.
My intentions were in the right place (for the most part) and I absolutely would stay on top of it for a few days. Then, after a particularly exhausting week, the cycle would repeat itself again and again. Spoiler alert: saying I’ll do it tomorrow was just one of the many reasons my house had become a disaster.
I’ll let you in on a secret: your problem isn’t that you have too much to do — even though it’s absolutely true — your problem is that you have an unhealthy relationship with cleaning.
Take a deep breath. Think about everything that has piled up in your life and how it weighs down on you. When all of these chores and responsibilities add up, you’ll notice that you want to spend less and less time in places that used to make you feel relaxed. Even while your scrolling through your phone on the couch to unwind, the dishes piling up in the sink are like a dark cloud looming over you. It almost takes more work to avoid them than to face it head on, but you’re stuck in a vicious cycle that is hard to break out of.
How do you fix it? Let’s start simple. No matter how busy your work week is, you have time at the end of the day to tackle one thing. Just one.
Over a year ago, I moved to a new city where I didn’t know anyone. This move had been planned for months and I was excited to get out of my comfort zone, make new friends, and have exciting adventures in a new place. Instead, I was inside (as most of us were) during the peak of the pandemic for a year. And as the months dragged on, the motivation to take care of the things around me slowly dwindled until all of my responsibilities were locked away in a box. Even though I knew things were bad, knew that it had gotten out of hand, I had lost all hope that it could ever get better. I couldn’t see the floor of my room. I had planned to do laundry and threw all the clean clothes on the bed and then never got to them, so my one place of peace and comfort — my own room — became stressful to walk into.
That’s when the thought struck me: five minutes. I will clean for five minutes.
What resulted was something more amazing than I could have possibly imagined. Five minutes of cleaning a day was actually showing results, and that excitement helped me work up to ten minutes, then fifteen. Fifteen minutes of cleaning a day and, within a couple of weeks, my house was spotless.
It wasn’t perfect. On days where I felt emotionally yucky, I set the timer back down to five minutes. Other times, I felt ready for a challenge and bumped it up to thirty or an hour. That’s the thing: regardless of how much was getting done, something was being accomplished each day, and the results did wonders for my mental health.
The Five Minute Method (FMM) will also help you with balance, where you aren’t spending all of your free time over the sink or cleaning out the fridge. If this goes well for you, you can dig a little deeper and make yourself a weekly cleaning schedule, like this:
Believe me, I know this looks intimidating, but the good thing about this list is that you have complete control. If you aren’t feeling great, pick out a couple of important things from each day (or just one if it’s a really rough day) and set your timer. Don’t follow every bullet on my list and don’t feel bad if your list is small — make something that works best for you and your lifestyle. Whatever you don’t tackle, you can get to next week or move it over to an easy day.
I promise, it gets easier. The first step is to forgive yourself, and to create an environment that makes the weight on your shoulders feel a little bit lighter at the end of the day. You deserve it.
Buy me a Ko-Fi.
