What chores can I get done in 5 minutes?
What is the 5-minute clean routine?
You’re waiting for the kids to get home from school and feeling completely overwhelmed by your house. The thought of everything that needs to get done the rest of the night makes you break out in a cold sweat. Overwhelm kicks in, and you just want to scroll for those five minutes because surely you deserve a little bit of downtown, right? And you certainly aren’t going to get it once the crew comes in the door.
Stop! What you really want is a little bit more peace in your day. I’m going to argue with you right now that you will find greater peace from an ordered environment than you will from a mindless scroll. The five minutes you put in now to create a little more physical calm in your house will reap rewards for the rest of the day. You will forget (or want to forget!) that Tiktok reel as soon as you see it.
So what can you actually get done in 5 minutes? Today, I vacuumed my whole living room in 5 minutes. And I had 32 seconds to spare! That included vacuuming the couch cushions and moving the ottomans to get all the dust bunnies. It also included finding the slightly off odor behind the sofa and a random marker. [And that’s why being a professional organizer is a no-judgment zone. My kids are all young adults. I actively miss the days of coloring books. Our ottoman is only a year old. I don’t know how to explain the marker except that there must be weird fairies hiding things under furniture just for their own amusement. But that also means no judgement about clutter that builds up because it happens to me, too.]
Why does it take me so long to get things done?
Many times we think that tasks are going to take much larger than they really do. Next time you start a task you hate, time yourself. Those daily chores usually take less time than we anticipate. Scientists call this subjective time dilation. Stress, emotional distress, boredom – all lead to this perception of tasks taking longer, subjectively, than they actually do, objectively. So if you really dread doing the piles laundry, or you are bored out of your mind vacuuming, the chores can seem to take forever. Setting timers can help break down that barrier to completion. A timer both gives us a more realistic idea of what we can accomplish in a given time frame and provides a concrete boundary for the task being done. Knowing that a task will only take 5 minutes, for example, can increase the motivation to begin.
How do I do everything?
And that’s the other secret to getting lots done. Break bigger tasks down into 5 minute components. Hate doing laundry? Do a quick sort into shirts, pants, socks, undies, or any other category you want. Each smaller pile will only take you a few minutes to complete. Do one small pile every time you walk by, in snippets of time between other tasks. Before you know it, the laundry will be done. Don’t have time to vacuum the whole main floor? Just do the living room. Do the other rooms another time. Few of us feel like we have long stretches of time all at once these days, especially to clean! But most of us have 5 minutes multiple times a day. Getting something done, today, is better than getting everything done, never. Eventually you will build 5 minute habits little by little and everything will start getting done.
But that’s the final hack. In order to be able to vacuum the living room in five minutes, you can’t have 20 minutes worth of picking up to do first. If you need some help decluttering and organizing so that you really can do a 5-minute reset, reach out today!
