Make Cleaning a Habit

Lifestyle & Home, Organization, Self-Care & Improvement

No one likes to clean but we all feel better when our home is clean. By making picking up and cleaning your home a habit, it saves you time and saves you from having to spend your precious time off dusting and scrubbing.

Habits allow us to do things almost without thinking and they can either help us or harm us depending on what the habit is. By turning cleaning and picking up into a daily habit, it saves you time and stress. Your home will always look orderly and clean, letting you relax during your down time. It also makes it easier when you have friends and family come over because you’re not spending the whole day before cleaning up weeks of stuff.

Developing New Habits

While making cleaning a habit (or anything else helpful for that matter) sounds like a good idea, it’s not always easy to ingrain in our heads and routines. Because starting a new habit out of the blue is difficult, I like to use a tactic known as habit stacking. It uses the habits you already have and you use those to build on. For instance, when my son goes to bed at 8pm, as soon as he’s settled and I go downstairs, I pick up the house. His toys, any dishes, books, and the pet toys all get picked up and put away before I do anything else. I used his bedtime routine as the base habit to stack the picking up habit on to. Now, no matter how tired I am, how many things are going on in my head, as soon as he’s in bed and I go back downstairs, I begin the cleanup routine.

Picking Up to Control the Clutter

Clutter does a lot more than just make our homes look messy. Living in a cluttered environment has been shown to negatively affect our mental health. When your environment is cluttered, it raises the levels of cortisol in our bodies, causes us to have trouble focusing, increases procrastination (which can lead to financial trouble when you forget to pay the bills on time!), and lead to impulse control issues and depression. For me, a messy home makes me feel like not doing anything and I hate that feeling. I’d rather be productive and able to relax when I choose to.

To keep clutter under control, make sure everything has a place in your home. Stacking it up in the corner doesn’t count. If you have more stuff than you have space, it’s time to get rid of the excess. To help with cutting down on your excess, take a look at my blog posts about decluttering.

Once everything has a place, picking up becomes so much easier. Some people like to pick up whenever they leave a room while others, like myself, like to do it once a day. I choose the evening because it means my house is clean when my family gets up in the morning. It also lets me enjoy my evening time in a clutter-free home.

Pick a time that fits into your schedule and choose a habit to build your new pickup routine onto. Once you do that, give yourself reminders whether by setting an alarm on your phone or leaving yourself notes in places you know you’ll see during the habit you’re building on to. Before long, you’ll find your home is less cluttered and easier to keep clean.

Cleaning Habits to Develop

Picking up is only part of the equation. Dishes still need to be done, floors swept or vacuumed, and dusting taken care of. Just like with your picking up habit, you can do the same to make a habit of doing the bigger jobs. I do recommend making sure your pickup habit is ingrained before trying to add more habits. It’s harder to get them ingrained if you are trying to add too many new habits at once.

Doing the dishes, just like picking up, can be done once a day or after each meal. For me, I built the habit of doing dishes onto my habit of picking up. Every night, like clockwork, the house gets picked up and the dishes get done and loaded into the dishwasher leaving me with a clean sink in the morning.

By now, I’m sure you see the pattern. After the dishes, I add on wiping down the countertops in the kitchen. Sometimes, I wipe down the fridge and stove as well since I’m already in there.

Vacuuming, mopping, and dusting all take a bit more time (and I don’t want to wake my toddler with a noisy vacuum at night) so these are added to other habits I do once a week. Depending on your household, you may need to do them more often or break them down.

Another way to help with this is to make your life easier. In my case, we have a Shark robotic vacuum that runs once a day, helping keep the pet fur and dirt down. We take off our shoes at the door, only wearing socks or slippers inside so that less dirt gets tracked in and around. Any messes are cleaned up immediately instead of letting them sit. All of this adds up so that things like vacuuming and mopping only take a fraction of the time they would if I had to pick up a week’s worth of clutter and had to deal with extra messes and dirt.

Example Habit Schedule to Keep a Clutter and Mess Free Home

Everyday

Pick up the house.
Put everything in its place.
Do the dishes.

Weekly

Dust the house.
Do laundry and put it away (this is HUGE!).
Vacuum. You can break up downstairs and upstairs if you have multiple levels.
Mop all hard floors.

Tip: Always dust BEFORE vacuuming so that you can suck up the dust as well.

Conclusion:

When you break down your house cleaning and form habits that keep your home clutter and dirt free, you’ll have more time to relax and your environment will support that instead of fighting against you. No one likes cleaning so it’s time to make it as effortless as possible.

Do you have a cleaning routine? Do you break it down or spend all day Saturday getting things back in order? What are your favorite cleaning hacks and tools (I LOVE my Shark!)? Please share your thoughts or suggestions below in the comments.