Cleaning House

Hacking Your ADHD

I'd say I have a love-hate relationship with cleaning, but that implies that there is a part of me that loves cleaning. There isn't. I like having cleaned and having a clean home, but I seldom enjoy the actual cleaning part. ADHD tends to not make cleaning any easier. Time blindness makes me think most of the cleaning tasks I need to do are going to take forever. I have a natural propensity for clutter, and that clutter often fades into the background of what I notice - so I just stop seeing that stack of mail on my counter. Today we're going to be looking at why we should stop treating cleaning our house like a project. Ways that we can make consistent cleaning easier and also how we can get rid of some of the junk that has accumulated in our homes. Find the show note at HackingYourADHD.com/cleaninghouse This Episode's Top Tips

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Use temptation bundling and listen to a podcast while cleaning so that you can stay motivated while tidying up.
5. 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.
6. Spend some time decluttering your house by asking better questions about the objects you are thinking of getting rid of - if we can identify the reason we want to keep something it makes it easier to pare down what we have.