5 Time Saving Habits to Keep Your Home Clutter Free

If you’re a busy working mom, keeping your home tidy can feel impossible.

But keeping your home clutter free doesn’t have to be overwhelming once you learn how to keep the clutter at bay.

With these 5 simple keystone habits, you’ll be able to keep your whole house clean simply and easily no matter how busy life gets!

5 Time Saving Habits That Will Keep Your House Clean (And You Sane)

Habit #1: Make Your Bed

Although leaving your bed un-made seems like a time-saver, not doing so will drain your energy and therefore make you less productive throughout the day.

An unmade bed will make you feel like you have something unfinished hanging around in your mind all day, messing up your focus on more important things.

Psychologists call this the Ziegarnick effect–or that unsettled feeling that you get when you didn’t get done what you planned to get done.

Making your bed every morning is an easy win you can give yourself first thing in the morning, so that you can focus all your mental energy on getting the rest of the other chores done throughout the day.

So spend the 3 minutes to make your bed every morning. Doing so will help you make the best use of whatever time you have throughout the day.

Habit #2: Empty the Dishwasher 

Emptying the dishwasher, like making your bed, is another time saving strategy that will help you get more done by doing less.

For instance, once you empty out the dishwasher, you’ll have all the clean dishes you need right there when you need it.

Clearing out the dishwasher will also allow you to stack whatever dishes you use directly into dishwasher, as you’re cooking, or in between meals throughout the day, so that you can batch all the cleaning into one cycle at night.

Why spend more time washing multiple piles of dishes, when you can keep them out of sight inside your dishwasher to get them done all at once later?

Also, running your appliances at night, like your dishwasher will also lessen the total home energy consumption–not to mention your energy, as well.

Habit #3: Employ the 15 Minute Cleaning Strategy

If you find that you’re still NOT making your bed or emptying out your dishwasher, try using a timer to get these tasks done in 15 minutes or less.

My husband does this all the time, so he can get whatever he needs done without having to worry about it later.

Honestly, I think this is why he can work full time as a surgeon, run a successful blog, do podcasts and be there for me and my kids without missing a beat!

So the next time you see your unmade bed, ask yourself, “Can I get this done in 15 minutes or less?”. If your answer is “yes”, then resolve to get it done right away instead of putting it off until later.

Don’t let your mind get caught up in that long drawn out self reflection loop of “Should I?”, “Can I?” or “Will I?”.

Choose Action Over Feelings

The truth is, none of us, including me, will ever “feel” like cleaning if we don’t have to.

This is why when you give yourself a deadline, you’ll most likely choose action over your feelings.

By forcing yourself to act now and think later, you’ll be amazed at how productive you can become in all areas of life–including the cleaning.

Habit #4: Time Yourself 

Another simple way to save time on house cleaning, is to time yourself whenever you do a task.

Basically, there’s a famous adage from a British scholar, C. Northcote Parkinson who said that:

Work expands to the time allotted for its completion

Timing Makes You Faster

What this means is that if you give yourself 15 minutes to make your bed, you’ll take 15 minutes (or longer) to get it done. But, if you force yourself to get the same job done in 10 minutes, you’ll more than likely get it done in 10 minutes.

In fact, by timing myself to clean faster, I figured out that I can save more time if I clean with a microfiber cloth.

I also found that Branch Basics, a toxic free cleaner, can cut my cleaning supply to almost nothing, not to mention save me time and hassle.

There’s nothing like a deadline to force your brain into coming up with simpler, less time consuming strategies!

Habit #5: Put Everything Back In Its Place

Another type of time saving strategy I rely on to keep my home clean and tidy every day is to put everything back in its place at the end of every day—no matter how late or how tired I may be.

Two Reasons For Putting Everything back

There are two reasons to put things back after every use.  

The first reason is that what you don’t clean now, you’ll have to clean later, when it’s much bigger than you can handle.

The second reason is that visual clutter drains mental energy.

Clutter Begets Clutter

Think of what happens when you keep all your apps on your phone open. This will not only make your phone slow down, it will put a major drain on the batteries; I can’t tell you how often my phone has died when I needed it because I forgot to close all those apps after use.

So, take care of the clutter now, while it’s still manageable, before it gets unmanageable later on.  

Simple Strategies For A Cleaner Home

Implementing these 5 time saving cleaning strategies keeps me sane and my home clutter free, not matter how busy I get.

So, if you’re struggling to find time to clean your house, pick just one of these habits and get to work.

Soon, you’ll find that household chores become so easy and routine you’ll be able to fit them into your daily schedule without even thinking about it.