by Aileen Journey

I used to hate cleaning with all my heart. Basically, it was a whole lot of work with little reward because once you were done, you had to do it all over again and that went quadruple once I had kids.

When I was a kid my room seemed like a mountain of junk that I could never tackle. I was just yelled at to get it cleaned and I had little idea of how to do it.

When I grew up I hated living in messy places. Just looking around and seeing clutter made me anxious and cleaning made me anxious so I was pretty stuck.

At some point in my adulthood I realized that starting by picking up one thing and then another often got an area cleaner. As I continued trying to figure out how to keep my environment cleaner, I started categorizing things. I would either focus on just one small area and get that clean then move to another or I would focus on one category of clutter, like clothes strewn about or garbage and pick all of that up first.

Another tactic I like is cleaning up a bit between other responsibilities. If I had work to do at home I would break up the chunks of work with bits of cleaning. I would make the cleaning feel like a break from work since there was little thinking involved.

It seemed also that practice helped. Recently, I’ve found that cleaning doesn’t bother me much at all. I know that if I pick up one thing at a time it’ll get cleaned soon. This has helped me clean more often which, in turn, makes it easier to clean each time since it’s not that messy.

Staying ahead of tasks seems to be what helps make things so much easier.