How to Clean Your Home in 15-Minute Chunks (and Why You Should)

If your home is a mess but you don’t really know where to start, it’s time to set a daily cleaning schedule—but don’t feel the need to do everything all at once. It’s well established that working in short bursts can help keep you motivated when you’re feeling overwhelmed, and cleaning in 15-minute bursts will do the trick. It can even help you build a cleaning habit over the long run.

For many areas around your home, 15 minutes a day is all you need to keep them neat, so start your new routine today and thank yourself in a few weeks.

Before I give you a checklist of these easily-cleaned spots, let me explain why this approach works, and how to use it effectively.

How and why the 15-minute cleaning method works

First, you’ll need to commit to spending 15 minutes per day cleaning. It can be in the morning or the evening, but ideally, it should always happen at the same time. (More on why that matters here.)

Each day, pick a new spot to clean. I’ll share some ideas below, but overall, you’re looking to tackle a small chunk of a larger room to avoid getting overwhelmed. It might make sense to divvy up the rooms in groups—so for a few days, you’ll tackle spots in the bathroom, then move to the kitchen for a few days. You can also devote your energy to whichever location needs it most on a given day.

No matter what area you pick, it’s important to be decisive and actionable with your 15 minutes. Select a cleaning or decluttering method that works for your situation and apply it to each of the regions you focus on. Regardless of what method you choose, you’ll essentially be clearing the space out, making choices about what stays and what goes, then reorganizing what you keep.

Use the principles of time boxing and limit yourself to just 15 minutes per day. When you’re using time boxing, you dedicate a predetermined amount of time to a specific task and work on it with no distractions, but you stop when the allotted time is up. If necessary, you pick the task back up during the next time box. Even if you’re really getting into the cleaning groove, try to stay within the 15-minute mark every time to stave off burnout and keep yourself on-task the whole time. This will help you build a good habit.

A checklist of 15 areas you can clean in 15 minutes

Depending on how you work best, it can be helpful to plan what you’re going to clean well in advance—a week or even a month of planning can help keep you on track. I will say a little pre-planning is helpful when you’re lacking motivation, because you’ll go into that time box already aware of what you need to do. If you get decision paralysis, planning is the solution. Don’t waste your limited time debating over what to clean.

And if you’re stuck on what to clean, here are some ideas for areas that should take 15 minutes or less to tidy up (or at least, they can be mostly finished in that time, with the occasional need for a revisit the next day). Don’t limit yourself to my list, though; go through your home, pick small areas, and take on whatever makes sense for your situation.

That all said, here is a checklist of 15 areas that can be cleaned in 15 minutes:

I’ve already written handy guides for cleaning and organizing all of these spots, so you might as well start with them and follow along. You’ll also notice these are all really specific areas. Your goal with 15-minute cleaning isn’t to, say, clean the entire bathroom in one go. Rather, it’s to break down the task of cleaning the bathroom into a bunch of smaller tasks, from the toilet to the medicine cabinet and everything between, so you don’t get burned out and end up avoiding cleaning altogether. It might take a few days to see noticeable results, but that’s better than trying to do everything at once, getting overwhelmed, and doing it poorly (or giving up and not finishing at all).

Breaking it down cleaning into smaller tasks also helps build a regular cleaning habit so, gradually, you just do it instinctively. That little bit of work every day adds up, and you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of each 15-minute bout, propelling you into the next day’s effort. After a few weeks, you’ll have a noticeably cleaner space, without having dedicated a whole precious weekend day to tidying up.