Did you know that 15 minutes every day can change your life? It’s true, and in this article I’m going to tell you how! OK, enough of the clickbait introductions, I always hated those and I feel like the article is always a letdown. So let’s just cut to the chase and let’s talk about the Daily 15 Minute Clean.
What Is the 15 Minute Clean Method?
The 15 Minute Clean Method essentially breaks down your daily cleaning into 15 minute chunks of time. I use it in two different ways.
First: I use it to break down chores I don’t like into 15 minute chunks. Vacuuming is a prime example of that. I’ll get more into that later. This is very similar to the Pomodoro Method I use at work to keep me focused on tasks.
Second: I set aside 15 minutes to just focus on an area. When the 15 minutes is up, I’m done. It doesn’t matter if I completed the task or if it barely looks like I made a dent in it. After 15 minutes I’m done. This makes the task seem less overwhelming to tackle on any given day. Over time, you’ll see results and it will start getting cleaner and more organized. This is the most common use of the 15 minute clean method.
How Long Do Tasks Really Take?
How long do you think your household chores take? 5 minutes? 4 hours? Somewhere in between. I can tell you from experience, it’s easy to build up the amount of time in your head for how long something takes. Especially if it’s a chore you hate doing.
For example, vacuuming is an extremely tiresome chore for me to do. I hate it mostly because I live in a house with toddlers and trying to move things around to get everything vacuumed is a colossal task. So I’ve got it built up in my head that vacuuming our floors is a 2 hour task.
So I decided to time it and as it turns out, I was very wrong. I can get the entire downstairs done in 15 minutes. Score one for the 15 minute clean! The upstairs I can get all but one room done in 15 minutes as well. The 15 Minute Clean Method strikes again!
I mentioned all but one room. That last room is the kids playroom. It’s a big room and when I first started using the 15 minute clean method, it would take 15 minutes just to clean up all of the stuff in that room to get it ready to vacuum. Then another 30 to vacuum it. That was before I implemented nightly reset routines.
I decided to massively declutter that room and get rid of a ton of toys that the twins no longer played with or that I just greatly disliked. It’s still a bit like playing Tetris to move furniture and large toys around in that room to get the entire floor cleaned. But, the end result was that this room itself was able to be completed with the 15 minute clean method.
I learned that my 2 hour task was massively overblown in my head and it took less than half the time that I thought it would to get the task done.
Applying the 15 Minute Clean Method
With the realization that I had overblown the time I takes to do the vacuuming, I decided to start applying the 15 Minute Clean Method to other things. I started looking at other common tasks around the house that I don’t like doing and I started timing them as well.
As it turns out, dishes don’t take hours. It just seems like it. In fact including wiping down the counters, loading the dishwasher, and sweeping the kitchen floors on a typical night it takes about 15 minutes.
I realized there was something magical about that 15 minute time because it was typically something I could find every day even when I was super busy. So I started keeping an eye out for those times and rather than mindlessly browsing my phone for 15 minutes I started to make use of them.
It’s amazing what just one 15 minute period of time can do for your day. We have a window in our laundry room that chronically collects stuff. Just stuff. I have no idea why because it’s not a particularly convenient place to put things and it’s kind of out of the way to put things there. But the window and the area around it collects stuff and it got to the point where it was overwhelming to look at.
As you might have guessed, I built it up in my head just how long it was going to take to clean out that window area. So I kept putting it off and putting it off. It’s been a mess since before my kids were born and my kids are going on 2.5 years old, so that should give you an idea of how much I really didn’t want to deal with it.
Finally the other day I just said “I have 15 minutes, what can I get done on this?” As it turns out…a lot. Almost everything on there was stuff that just hadn’t been put in its proper home and it was just a case of putting it away. The rest was just random junk that I threw away. Maybe it was useful at one point but if I couldn’t figure out what those screws were for just by looking at them I sure wasn’t going to be able to figure it out when I actually needed them.
After 15 minutes the entire area was clear! Something I’d been putting off for almost 2 years was resolved in just 15 minutes, it was magical and made me feel so much better.
Any Progress is Good Progress!
Here is the magic of the 15 minute clean method. If you don’t get the entire thing done in 15 minutes, don’t worry about it. Take 15 minutes tomorrow and work on it again and again until you get it done. Maybe it takes you a few weeks to tackle an area, but that’s fine. You’re making progress.
There was a section of the kids playroom that became the ‘Let’s toss everything that we want to keep out of the hands of the kids’ area. This section was gated off and contained everything from old baby stuff to cardboard boxes to toys. It took me 6 weeks of attacking that spot almost daily for 15 minutes at a time, but it slowly started to become a useable space again.
Turn The 15 Minute Clean into Routine!
Since I’ve largely decluttered my house already, I’ve taken to assigning out chores for myself in those 15 minutes. For example, I have 2 days a week where I have vacuuming planned out. Once for the downstairs once for the upstairs. This ensures that at least most of the areas get vacuumed at least once a week. But I’ve only got 3 of my 7 days planned out for ‘set chores’ the rest of the week is very fluid so that I can tackle anything in the house I want in those 15 minutes.
The result is that even with my twin tornadoes running through the house, I’m still able to maintain the house in a manner where it actually looks pretty clean.