9 Tips to Make Cleaning Less Exhausting

Do What You Can

You don’t have to get your home entirely cleaned in a single day. “Stop cleaning with an all-or-nothing mentality,” Rapinchuk says. “Concentrate on what you can do, not what you can’t do. Set a timer and do as much as you can in 10 or 15 minutes.”

Prioritize Your To-Do List

Make a list of all the chores you have to do, and then move the things you really can’t avoid (i.e. that sink full of dishes), and/or the tasks that you can cross off your list with minimal energy use, like wiping down the bathroom sink, to the top of your list, Ballentine says.

That way, you ensure the most pressing (or the easiest) jobs get done first, and you can save the less essential tasks for another day.

Start Early in the Day—or When You Have the Most Energy

Let’s face it: After a full day of work, you aren’t going to be able to tackle a full deep clean of your kitchen. If you make cleaning a to-do for when you’re most energized—like a Saturday morning after a good night’s sleep—you may be able to tackle more than you can on Friday night after a long work week.

Take Advantage of Tech

There’s a lot of cleaning tech products that enable you to either multitask your cleaning or avoid it altogether. A robo vac or mop can keep floors clean at the touch of a button and cut down on floating dust and pet hair, and air purifiers can minimize the amount of dust that settles on your furniture. Combo vacuum-mops can get your floors clean in a single pass.

Use Tote Bags or Laundry Baskets to Minimize Movement

“When you’re going through a lot of different stuff that has accumulated somewhere it’s not supposed to be, set up bins or tote bags of stuff to go to other places in the home,” Ballentine says. “That way, you can continue cleaning that single space without walking back and forth every time you find a thing that needs to go somewhere else, which interrupts the process over and over and over.” When you’re done, you just bring each bin to the appropriate room, and empty it out there.

P.S. This is a great job for your reusable grocery totes.

Change Up the Position

You don’t need to be standing (or on your knees scrubbing) to get a lot of work done. Ballentine recommends getting a saddle stool on wheels for the kitchen. “You can be sitting down while doing the dishes, stirring a pot on the stove, etc. You can’t do everything in the kitchen seated, but it can be a really good investment.” You can roll your way to emptying and loading the dishwasher, or even baking.  

If you’re sorting through a lot of clutter in a room, gather it all into a bin or basket, and you can sit and sort through it. And Ballentine has even seen some clients do well with sitting or lying down in the bathtub and scrubbing it, rather than trying to stand and do it.

Stick With a Single Task

There are energy savings to be made by doing the same task repetitively, over and over. If you bring out the vacuum, vacuum everything that needs to be vacuumed in your house, from the floors and rugs to the baseboards and couch.

Ballentine even recommends sorting your dishes or laundry by type, so you’re washing all the plates together or folding all the T-shirts together. “The repeated action gets easier as you do the same motions over and over,” Ballentine says.

Use Cleaning Tools With Long Handles

“Cleaning tools with longer handles will help, so you aren’t bending down or straining,” Rapinchuk says. Consider tools with long, adjustable poles like scrub brushes, vacuums, and mops that will make it simpler to clean without a lot of up and down on a step stool.

Spread It Out Over Time

There’s a lot of satisfaction in a mission accomplished. But if your energy is flagging, there’s no shame in taking a break. You can break your tasks up by time—like spending 20 minutes decluttering—or into smaller to-dos—like just washing the counters.

Rapinchuk has a cleaning schedule that includes small tasks for every day of the week, rather than trying to power through a longer session on the weekends. (For instance, she suggests dusting on Tuesdays, vacuuming on Wednesdays, and washing floors on Thursday.)

Short bursts of working with plenty of breaks may make a larger project more manageable and give you the clean home you want.