Cleaning House
I used to believe the backbone of cleaning is coming up with a plan and executing it. Writing out every little step you needed to do and then methodically cleaning my house until it would finally be clean. But you know what, I'm terrible at that. And what's more, it warps my view of how cleaning works. Despite my best efforts to just marathon clean my home into perfection, it always slides back into chaos. And nothing is going to change that. There is no amount of cleaning that I can perform that will outwit entropy.
But I keep coming back to this idea because I want to treat cleaning my house like its a project. At first glance, it does seem like a project. I mean, it isn't just one task - I can't clear off my desk and declare my house clean. There is so much involved in cleaning my house that I have trouble thinking of it as anything but a huge project.
But we all know that our houses eventually are going to need to get cleaned again. We're never going to get over the hill of cleaning into the promised land of a forever clean house. When we treat cleaning like a project, we are creating an impression that if somehow we just clean enough, we are going to be done.
But no matter how many times I've done the dishes, there have always been more dishes. And even if both the sink and dishwasher are empty, I'm going to eventually eat again, and there will be more dishes. No matter how much laundry I've done, there is more laundry to do. And since I have small children it doesn't matter how thoroughly I tidy up, there are always going to be more toys all over the floor.
Despite the evidence, though, I still find myself running down the track that if I just spent a day or two cleaning that I would find myself with a house that could magically maintain that clean state.
The reason this is a problem is that when we create the impression that if we just clean enough, we'll be done is that it makes us lose track of what really leads to having a clean house. And that's the small, consistent actions that need to happen every day.
When we aren't doing the small things, we find ourselves falling into that hole of letting the clutter become part of the background - a term I heard recently on Twitter from Dani Donovan was clutter blindness. I think that's really an excellent way to put it. We just don't see the clutter anymore - it's just become the context of how we understand the space we are looking at. Just like your couch in the living room, it seems right where it is supposed to be. And when we do eventually see it, we often just don't have the energy to deal with it. It is overwhelming to think about how we might be able to get back to a clean state - and so cleaning goes back to being a project.
If we want to get our house into a state of being consistently clean - or at least not a disaster area, then we have to work on building up those small, consistent actions that are going to make it happen. When thinking about having a clean house, we tend to associate it with having to do a deep clean that is going to take all day.
We don't want to start with the deep clean. While it might be satisfying to get your house back in order, it doesn't address the underlying problem of why it has continuously been falling into disarray over and over again.
First up, let me address what I'm sure a lot of people's self-talk has been telling them about why their house is so messy. No, you are not a bad person. It isn't that you are incapable of being an adult. And it's not because we're lazy. It's just because we haven't built up the cleaning routines that many neurotypicals do unconsciously.
We're going to work on starting to create these routines. Building these routines means that these are the baseline things that you are going to be doing every day. Maybe you do some other cleaning as well, but at the minimum, you are doing your routine.
This might be something like unloading the dishwasher in the morning and wiping down the counters before you go to bed. Or it could be clearing off your desk before you leave work.
A significant point in the routine that you create is that you want it to be easy for you to complete. If you set the bar too high, you're not going to be able to follow through with your intentions. Remember, this isn't about cleaning your house all at once. You want to be changing your habits over the long term here, so trying to do too much at once is going to hurt more than it helps.
We want to spread out the work here over time so that we aren't focusing on reaching peak clean and instead are focusing on the process of keeping a clean house.
One key here is that you are going to want to be actually creating a routine here. I might want to have a different day to do each of my big tasks - so like Monday could be changing the sheets, Tuesday could be laundry, Wednesday could be cleaning the bathrooms - however, you want to divvy up your cleaning. But an important step in trying to keep it a routine is trying to do things at roughly the same time every day.
The trick is making that time your cleaning time that way you can actually build cleaning time into your schedule. If you are trying to get in cleaning whenever you have the time, you are going to magically find that you actually never have the time for cleaning.
The other essential thing to remember when changing your habits is that you don't need to do this alone. Now I know we're in a pandemic right now, so it isn't like you are going to be having people over to your house to help clean, but cleaning is a great place to ask for a little help from an accountability partner. Let someone know what your cleaning intentions are and ask them to follow up with you to make sure you got it done.
Another option to look at are apps like, Tody, that help you schedule out how you are going to do your cleaning. We all act like we know what we need to do to get our house clean, but if I asked you for a list of the things you needed to do, I'm sure you'd forget to write down a fair chunk of them. Externalizing what needs to get done can really help you see the forest for the trees.
Along with externalizing things, the app creates visuals to help you see your progress with cleaning. For me, this also helps gamify the idea of tidying up. I want to keep everything in the green and make sure nothing gets red. It's great a reminding me of what still needs to happen before it gets to the point where the actual mess tells me what needs to happen.
Gamifying and making cleaning fun isn't just limited to apps. While my children are great at making messes, they are not so great at helping clean them up - especially if I just tell them I want them to pick up the living room. But I can often motivate my 5-year-old by telling her that, "I bet I can pick up more things than you can" - she loves having races, and so she even has fun if the race is a cleaning race.
We've also had fun in the backyard where instead of just picking up all the toys, we're pirates and collecting as much treasure as we can.
While it can feel a little silly, adding fun to tasks is a great way to add some motivation in. I know I had a CrossFit friend who liked to do dishes "for time" - I mean sure he broke a couple that way, but he did enjoy himself a lot more.
Everyone is going to have there own areas that they struggle with the most, but there are a couple places I imagine most people struggle, and dishes are a great example.
Dishes can be incredibly frustrating because no matter how many dishes you clean, it feels like there are always more. I've felt this more than ever during the pandemic because with the kids home and not ever going out to eat, we're just creating so many dirty dishes. Even with a dishwasher, it is easy to fall behind.
So what you need to do is work on being proactive about getting the dishes done. It means creating a routine for getting the dishes done - and I know dishes are tricky because time blindness makes it seem like they are going to take forever, and if you have a giant pile of dishes they might take a bit to do, but as you build up your routine of doing dishes, you'll have less to do at one time.
Because of the number of dishes, my family has to use, that means running the dishwasher at least every night and sometimes more often if we've also been cooking or baking something that creates a lot of additional dishes.
Now here's the thing - this sometimes means that you might want to run the dishwasher when it isn't absolutely crammed full of dishes. I know, it was a hard idea for me to accept, and it seems like such a wasteful idea. But unfortunately, ADHD management doesn't always play well with being the best environmentalist. And let's be honest, there are a lot worse things we could be doing than running the dishwasher when it isn't optimally loaded.
And I'm not talking about running the dishwasher when it only has a couple of knives in it, but if you are more than 3/4 full, than by all means, go ahead and run it before you go to bed. We don't have to do this all the time, but it is an excellent way to start getting ahead of your dishes. So yeah, try and fill it up as much as you can before running it, but don't let yourself fall into the trap of believing you can't run your dishwasher cause you could probably fit a couple more spoons in and don't have any dirty ones handy.
So part of your routine that you are developing should involve making sure that your dishwasher is loaded and running every night. Or as often as your family needs it to be, if you're living alone, maybe you need to run it every other day. The point here is to make it a routine where you are filling it up. If you don't have a dishwasher, then making sure you aren't letting your dishes build up in the sink. You can still use the same idea of scrubbing the dishes before bed and putting them on the drying rack overnight.
Now another note here is that the one that makes loading a dishwasher harder than anything else is having it full of dishes already. This means we've also got to make it a habit to also be unloading the dishwasher. I know that nothing unmotivates my ADHD more than having one task turn into more tasks, so again, we've got to be proactive here. We want to have unloading the dishwasher be a regular small task that you are already doing so that you aren't finding yourself needing to unload right before you fill up again.
Time blindness used to hit me pretty hard in regards to unloading the dishwasher, but after timing it a few times, I was shocked by how quickly it went. Now I like unloading the dishwasher in the morning while I'm getting my kids to eat their breakfast. It gives me something to do, and something about sorting silverware hits all the right OCD buttons in my brain.
Another place I imagine many people struggle with is laundry.
Laundry is just not ADHD friendly. For one, it is not only one task. You've got to wash, dry, and then if you're really bold, you'll put it away too. It isn't like you can just toss in a load of laundry, and it'll just take of itself either, you've also got to move things around. I mean, how many times have you forgotten to move your washed laundry over to the dryer? Always fun when you find something that's sat in the washer a couple of days, and you give it another quick run to freshen it up, and you know... forget about it again.
So first off - laundry is much much easier if you are using timers and reminders. I also try and make sure that I'm not setting myself up for laundry mishaps by creating more natural transition points. If I have a load that is going to take an hour, but I need to leave in 30 minutes, then I might save that laundry for when I get home - or better yet use the delayed start on my washer so that it will finish the load right before I get home (and then, you know, also set a reminder for myself to move the laundry when I get home too).
But far and away, putting laundry away is just the worst. Whether you hand up your laundry or fold it, it just feels like it takes forever. It doesn't (yes, I've also timed myself folding laundry), but knowing that doesn't help me activate on the task.
What I've found really helps here is temptation bundling. Temptation bundling is the idea of combining two activities, one you want to be doing, but procrastinate on; and one you enjoy doing, but maybe isn't the most productive use of your time. When I first started using this method, I was really into watching the show Breaking Bad, so every Monday I'd set aside time to watch someone make meth while I folded all my laundry. It was incredibly effective for getting me to get my laundry folded, and since the show took longer to watch than to fold my laundry, I tended to also fold all the towels and my wife's laundry.
I think temptation bundling is an excellent way for you to get a lot of your cleaning done. I like bundling with podcasts now because they can travel with me around the house, and I don't get stuck in front of the TV. It was one thing when I was watching Breaking Bad because I was watching the show as it came out and couldn't binge a bunch of episodes at once. No self-control needed when I can't watch a new episode until the next week anyway.
Let's also talk about clutter. It's amazing how quickly clutter can build up - it's probably one of the hardest things for me to deal with when cleaning. Too often, I find that clearing clutter is my biggest challenge to getting a clean house. I can't wipe down the counters when they are covered in all the junk that has built up on them over the day.
So the first thing we should think about it setting things down with purpose. It is incredible how often I've lost something because I just let it get put down where it doesn't belong. And it isn't like I'm consciously putting them down just willy-nilly, it's more that I never put any thought into where it should go in the first place.
This happens to me all the time with tools. I'll have a wrench in my hand, and I'll need to grab something else, and then when I need to wrench again, I realize I don't even know when I set the wrench down, let alone where I put it.
The key here is to just work on being a little more conscious about how we're letting things escape our hands. It doesn't always work, but spending time on being mindful of how and where I put things has really helped me lose fewer things. Keys are a great example - my keys don't go anywhere except my pocket and my keys basket by the door. By creating that space that they always have to go, I haven't had to use the Tile I've got on them in years... I probably should check that battery.
And that brings us to the idea, "a place for everything and everything in its place." I've got to say hearing that just gives me the chills. It conjures up images of my boarding school days and stern authority figures, looking at my room with displeasure. It makes me think of how I'm never going to be neurotypical, and I'm never going to live up to those standards.
I think my biggest hang-up from the phrase comes from my own poor interpretations of it. When I hear that, and I look at my desk, I think - man, where does all this stuff need to go. Do I have to draw a little outline of where my fidgets are going to live on my desk? No, I don't need pinpoint locations. I can just say that those fidgets live on my desk - or if I wanted to be more exact, maybe I could get a little bin for them.
Something being in its place doesn't mean that it has to have an exact location - think more like, coats go in the coat closet. And these delineations can really help with how clutter creeps. For a long time, at my house, we had issues of my kid's shoes slowly creeping out of the shoe closet and into the hallway. The shoe closet wasn't a precise enough boundary for shoes, so got a bin, and now the kids know exactly where they are supposed to put their shoes.
Of course, the most significant source of clutter is simply having too much stuff. This might be just too much stuff for the space you're trying to keep it in or just too much stuff in general.
With ADHD, we tend to gravitate towards keeping things because we might need them - we solve a lot of problems in creative ways, so we see a lot of junk as a potential solution for future issues. We also end up getting too much stuff as we lose things, get a replacement, and then finally find the thing we lost - and then deciding to keep both so that we have a backup.
And when we have too much stuff, we inevitably end up having more things than we have spaces for.
But decluttering isn't easy. Often we'll start working on getting rid of stuff but find that we actually want to keep it all, and we think hey maybe if I just got organized, I could get it all to fit. Maybe, but probably not. We all have stuff we don't need that we hang onto for the wrong reasons.
One of the most natural traps to fall into while trying to declutter is asking the wrong questions. We ask ourselves, "do I want to get rid of this?" And that's just the wrong question. Of course, we don't want to get rid of most of our stuff, our real question should be, "do we want to keep it?" But even that question doesn't go far enough.
So we need to start off by asking ourselves better questions, like,
Would I buy this item again?
Do I have any plans to use this item again?
How hard would it be for me to replace this?
How does this item make me feel?
Does this item represent who I am now?
When we ask ourselves better questions, it makes it easier to determine if that shirt we got for free in college is actually something we want to keep.
Another good question is asking where something should live in your house. If you can't think of where something should go, it might be a sign that it actually doesn't have a place in your home.
It's also important to not let the decluttering process overwhelm you - you don't have to do it all at once. While methods like Marie Kondo's suggest getting all your decluttering done in one fell swoop, I honestly don't think that is the best way for the ADHD brain to manage. While I love the idea of getting all of my stuff out into one space and then organizing it, I usually don't manage to have the motivation for the second part. Yes, I can pull everything out, but after that, I kind of want to move onto something else.
And declutter should be it's own project - while cleaning and decluttering do overlap, if you group them together, it is going to lead back to thinking of cleaning as a project. Decluttering my closet can be a project, at some point I'm going to run out of things to get rid of - don't just make decluttering your house the project.
Just like cleaning, take small steps, and do a little bit at a time.
This Episode’s Top Tips
Stop thinking of cleaning your house as a project - we've got to understand that cleaning is about the small tasks that we do consistently that is going to keep our house clean.
Work on creating that routine of small tasks that you can do every day to improve the base level clean of your house - focus on starting small at first. Think about what you can do in the morning and what you can do right before you go to bed.
Time your cleaning tasks so that you know how long they actually take to do - a lot of the tasks that we put off doing actually take way less time than we think they do.
Use temptation bundling and listen to a podcast while cleaning so that you can stay motivated while tidying up.
Make sure everything in your house has a place to live - it doesn't have to be an exact spot, but if you know where to put something then you won't waste mental energy figuring out where stuff needs to go when picking up.
Spend sometime decluttering your house by asking better questions about the objects you are thinking of getting rid of - if we can identify if we really have a reason to keep something it makes it easier to pare down what we have.
Mentioned in this Episode
Check out Dani Donovan for great ADHD comics and insights
