Have you ever heard the “Power of 15”? It’s a common phrase and one I never took to heart until I became a wife and mother with a million things going on. Organization and cleaning kept moving further down my priority list in lieu of just keeping everyone fed and alive.
But truly, I despise cleaning. Was it ever actually on my priority list? Hmmm. Probably not. I Loathe it. Hate it. Dread it. And keep putting it off until I can’t take it anymore.
BUUUT…I’ve learned that I also enjoy a clean house…ESPECIALLY now that I “for real” know what it feels like.
In the past, my motto was if it’s picked up, it LOOKS clean, and that’s enough for me. And if I’m being honest, I don’t fuction well when it starts getting cluttered, so keeping my home uncluttered is relatively easy for me. It’s easy to do the things that are, well, easy. It’s the things that are hard (like cleaning) that I’d rather just push off to a later date (as in never).
But the dust bunnies under the beds and night stands, and the ones on top of the fridge (you know the ones I’m talking about), also on the ceiling fans and on those pesky stair spindles…Oh! and don’t forget the crumbs in the microwave and the grease splatters behind the stove…every last one of those rascals keeps rearing their ugly heads at me letting me know that they are {still} there and secretly driving me crazy although I don’t really want to admit it.
Uggh! I wish I could just hire someone already to get all this cleaning done that I can’t ever seem to get to.
But that’s not happening so…
I tried everything. I tried the Clean Mama method where you do one house task each day of the week. But, let’s be real. When she says dust on Tuesdays, you better believe I’m dusting flat surfaces only and will not be getting to ceiling fans, washer and dryer, back splash, baseboards, under beds, under nights stands, in closets…well you get the picture. Bare minimum.
I’ve also tried the clean the whole house one day a week method. But I’m always in such a hurry that basically only the floors and bathrooms get done. Maybe a little dusting if I’m lucky. I mean, who really wants to spend 8 hours on their only day off cleaning every single thing in their home. Uh, no thanks! WE HAVE A LIFE TO LIVE PEOPLE!
And don’t even get me started on Spring Cleaning. ARE YOU EVEN KIDDING ME? Just the thought of spending a week cleaning all of the things that typically get passed over and are extremely nasty because they’ve been sitting there for a year (or five!) since the last time they were cleaned. GROSS!
I digress.
I want a clean home, but I don’t want to clean it. Ha!
Let’s be real though. I DO need to clean it, but I don’t want to spend every spare moment cleaning, nor do I want to pay someone else to do it for me. So I came up with a system…
What Clean 15 is and how we do it
I was listening to a mother/daughter duo talking about SCAMP. (Which means Speedy Cleanup After Meal Party.) This was when she (the mother) would assign a specific task or room to each child for a season and they’d get the kitchen clean and the house tidied up after every single meal. They’d set a timer, play some music and work hard and fast for 15 minutes only.
Enter LIGHTBULB MOMENT!
What if I take this same idea and use it for doing all the little unwanted tasks that I never get around to or put off because I either don’t see them or they’re just plain yuck?
15 MINUTES IS NOTHING! I can clean for 15 minutes. I can do this!
And get this…15 minutes a meal is actually 45 minutes a day. And 45 minutes a day, minus Sundays, is actually 4.5 hours a week! Take that 4.5 a week and multiply that times 2 people (because this is family effort between me and E) and we got 9 hours a week baby!!!!!
Wait what?!?!
We are currently cleaning our home around 9 hours a week, give or take. Haha! I’m literally cracking up because this is the first time I’ve done that math. Wuuuuuut?!
The greatest thing about it is that it really feels like NOOOOOTHING. 15 minutes…THAT’S IT!!!!
This is a prime example of taking a pain point and “making it easy” like James Clear talks about in his book Atomic Habits. If it’s easy, it won’t be so overwhelming and off-putting.
And to be fair, there ARE hard days—low energy days, tired days, etc., and 15 minutes even sounds like too much! So on those days, just do 5 or 10 minutes. Because 5 or 10 minutes is SOMETHING! And something is better than nothing!
Make your cleaning list
The next task was to make a list of everything I could think of to clean…EVERYTHING.
Things like cleaning our Dyson vacuum cleaner. It’s relatively easy, but that’s one I put off constantly…because it’s gross. And I have to pull up a YouTube video to make sure I do it right.
We broke down every chore we could think of into about 2-5 minute tasks so we can knock out several in one fifteen minute time chunk. It’s awesome this way! Trust me. Instead of, “clean the bathrooms,” we have it split up into several different chores. Clean toilets. Clean bathroom mirrors. Clean bathroom vents. Dust bathroom baseboards. Clean bathroom light switches and handles. Clean tub. Clean bathroom floor. Clean sink. Dust TP and towel holder. See that? Clean the bathroom is so overwhelming. Clean bathroom vents? That’s nothing!
If you’d like an exhaustive list (free printable) of all our 2 mintue house chores see this blog post.
implementing clean 15 (it will change your life)
I originally wrote all of our chores down on a piece of printer paper and cut them up. Later I typed them out and printed them off. This worked ok for us, but I found that doing it this way caused a lot of running back and forth and upstairs and downstairs and wasted precious time in our short 15 minutes. And sometimes I’d want to work on a certain area or room and have to fish around for the specific chores so I could make sure we pulled them out when we were finished. This became another “pain point” for me, so we actually just redid our whole list and wrote them on COLORED POSICLE STICKS so that each room would have it’s own color. This makes it easy for me so that if I want to specifically work on the guest bedroom because we are having overnight guests coming the next day, we can pull out the yellow posicle sticks. LIFE SAVER!!!!
After our chores were all written onto our papers (or posicle sticks) we put them in a jar and just got started.
I explained to E what we were going to do so she would know what to expect. (She was actually pretty excited about it because she got to help write the chores on the popsicle sticks and pick out the specific colors for specific rooms.) I also told my husband about it, but he’s not usually home for Clean 15. He will sometimes help us in the evening if he’s home.
I told E the rule was that if you have an attitude about cleaning, I’m adding five minutes. Also, if you don’t do a good job on your chore, you have to redo it. (Note, I did not tell my husband that. Lol.)
And that’s that. After most meals, we set the timer for 15 minutes, turn on some ridiculous music that makes us laugh (Here is our Clean 15 Playlist on Spotify), then pick a chore out of the jar and bust it out. Once we finish one chore, we pick another, and another until the timer goes off. We can usually get through about 3 or 4 chores each during the 15 minutes.
We put our “done” chores in a different jar until the chore jar is completely empty. When that happens, we add them all back in the origianl jar and start the process over.
Our goal: WORK HARD, WORK FAST, WORK HAPPY! We even have a little cheer we’ll do to get us pepped up! Lol.
Sometimes I absolutely do not feel like doing it. But I know it’s only 15 minutes, and it will be over with before we know it.
When I first wrote out our list, I missed some things. As the weeks went on, I would just add a new chore as I thought of it. In fact, I’m sitting here now thinking how it would really benefit us to even add in some outside chores that get overlooked. Hmmm. I’m going to have to think on that!
It takes us about a month to get through all of the chores.
This means three things. First, our home is pretty much always clean…ceiling fans aren’t dusty, cobwebs aren’t hanging down from the corners, the top of the fridge is always clean, no food splashes are above the stove, the microwave isn’t nasty. You get it. Second, since we are doing all the cleaning so often, it’s not super gross or overwhelming to clean. And third, our home is always company ready! It’s not overwhelming to prepare for guests because our home is already clean. All I have to worry about is food!
It’s just been amazing. And take that from someone who despises cleaning!
A couple of notes before you get started
I try to clean anything that gets gross very often—at least once a week or day or as I notice it. For example…the toilets. I try to do them every Monday during our Clean 15 after breakfast. They aren’t even in our jar. I just know that during Monday morning Clean 15, we’re doing the toilets. Vacuuming high traffic areas (Kitchen and entryway) happens as needed which turns out to be daily, if not twice a day. Putting dishes in the dishwasher and quickly wiping down kitchen counters and table happens when we clean up from whatever meal we just ate. That is not part of our Clean 15 routine (although there is a more thorough deep clean of the kitchen counters that IS included in our list of things).
E will often make daddy’s lunch as part of our evening Clean 15 Routine so that we don’t make a mess in the kitchen AGAIN after cleaning up. (Go in the right order! A lazy-genius principle.)
Anything on E’s morning chore list are not added to the SCAMP list. This would include emptying bathroom trash.
Clean 15 works with larger families too! I have many friends with several young children who do this with their kids, but instead of mom cleaning themselves, they oversee the cleaning of their children as well as use this time as a special training time. What a perfect opportunity! If you have older and younger children, it also works to pair older children with younger to get tasks accomplished as well.
I did a podcast interview with my friend, Brettnay from No Higher Calling, about Clean 15, so if you’d like to listen to us chat about it, you can find the episode here.
Quick Links for Easy Finding
Our Clean 15 Playlist on Spotify
An Exhaustive List of our Two-Minute Chores (free printable)
Podcast Episode about Clean 15
Hopefully I’ve answered all of your questions, but if not, feel free to leave more below.