Loved this advice applied to anything

Brogan Ingram handles extreme messes for free. What she’s learned can benefit anyone.

Start small

Cleaning is not something you can do in one quick session, according to Ingram. “Don’t try to clean the whole house at once,” she says. “Don’t even try to clean a whole room at once.” Instead, she recommends choosing one corner or surface in the room.

“It sounds silly, but I say just pick one, like, two- to three-square-foot space and just clean that,” Ingram adds. Habit formation starts small, and once you can keep a tiny space clean, it will become easier to keep larger areas in the house tidy.

“It’s about not having insurmountable, unrealistic expectations about getting the whole house clean,” she says. “People get stuck because they see a huge task they don’t want to do or don’t feel like they can complete, so they just don’t.”

 

Stick to a schedule

Having a schedule for cleaning can help reduce the overwhelmed feelings. If you’re just starting out, set a timer for just a few minutes a day.

“You do your five minutes, and all of a sudden you have motivation,” Ingram says. “It’s crazy how it happens. You get a little shot of, ‘Okay, I completed something!’ And you feel like, ‘Well, maybe I can do something else.’ It snowballs.”

 

Sticking to your schedule also means only cleaning for a set amount of time each day and trying not to overdo it. “If you’re spending hours or a whole day doing something, chances are you’re just adding to the negative relationship with cleaning and subconsciously making yourself dread doing it again,” Ingram says.

 

Schedules are a very personalized thing. Ingram cleans her home for 30 minutes each day, focusing on a different room. Then, for eight weeks twice a year, she adds a few more intense tasks to her daily schedule for each room — things like scrubbing walls and baseboards or cleaning behind the refrigerator — for a deeper cleaning.

 

“There’s not one schedule that’s going to be for everybody, because our houses are different, and our energy levels are different,” she says. “I always tell people to just think about your life, write down all the rooms in your home, and then just make little bullet points underneath each room of things that you could do in each one daily or weekly, not to deep clean it, but just keep it tidy.”

 

Don’t go it alone

It’s common to think about everyday clutter as a shameful thing, Ingram says. People get stressed about cleaning before company arrives and feel a need to apologize for even the most minor messes. None of that is helpful. Instead, Ingram says, people need to recognize that most everyone has some version of the same struggles, and teamwork can help.

“Body doubling” is another common technique used by people with ADHD. Essentially, it means doing potentially frustrating tasks in the company of another person, whose presence can help reduce distraction and procrastination.

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2024/04/27/cleaning-tiktok-brogan-ingram-advice/