At our house it takes about as much time as a snap of a finger to go from clean to messy. I know that life is being lived at our house and life isn’t a perfect picture of cleanliness, blah, blah, blah. But I don’t think that means we just accept that it’s always messy. I swear my house is a reflection of my mind. If it’s crazy bananas in my mind, my house is likely a disaster (and vice versa). I believe there is a balance between cleaning all of the time and letting things happen, but I do like to go to bed with a clean house and a clean mind.
And research shows that we are less productive and lack concentration when the space around us is messy.
10 minute power clean
Sometimes, I look around and I get a little sassy thinking about spending the next 30 minutes cleaning up a messy house that I only partially created, so Jeff and I started to do something together and it’s making all of the difference. I call it the “10 minute power clean”.
I’m fairly certain I adopted this idea from my mom because we did this when I was little. It’s a miraculous little mental game. Here’s how it works.
When you are about to leave for a few hours, you just woke up and the place is crazy, or your about to go to bed and it’s overwhelming to scan your house, it’s time for a family 10 minute power clean. Ask Alexa to turn on some high energy jam, set a timer for 10 minutes, and everyone clean anything they can find up.
Why does a power clean work?
When you have a competitive family, this kind of turns into ‘who can clean up the most in 10 minutes’ and most of the time when the 10 minute timer rings, you do 5-10 minutes more because it feels damn good. It’s also a great way to build cleaning into your daily life, to model it for your kids and ask them to participate, and a great way to avoid the seemingly nagging ask — “honey, can you take a second to clean up X?”
You will be SHOCKED with how much you can accomplish in a 10ish minute power clean, how good you’ll feel when it’s done, and how connected you’ll be with your family after accomplishing that household task together.
Try it, and let me know if you truly do take a happy deep breath afterwards on my Instagram! Can’t wait to hear from you.