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the-practical_cat t1_ja7r3o7 wrote

Cleaning and tidying are habits, just like most daily activities. You can teach yourself to do it if you really care to.

Set an alarm two or three times a day with a fifteen minute timer. When the alarm goes off, spend that fifteen minutes cleaning something. It will be annoying as hell at first-and that's kinda the point, lol. Hopefully it'll annoy you enough that you'll start doing all those little cleaning tasks as you see them throughout the day instead of waiting for the alarm to do them.

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teamboomerang t1_ja8zlga wrote

I did something like this with my son when he was younger. I got fed up with the arguments about cleaning his room so I told him I was setting the timer for 15 minutes, and he had to clean the whole 15 minutes, but then he was done FOR THE DAY. We were going to do it every day, though.

My son LOVED it. He made it a game trying to get more done than me (so of course I let him "win.") but really, it was a game changer for both of us. We both realized that MANY things didn't take as long to do as we thought they did, and after about two weeks, the house was really clean and stayed that way. And then every time we had 10 minutes before we had to leave or something, instead of scrolling on our phones, we'd find something to clean.

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