Speed Cleaning 101:
As much as we’d like to always have a clean home, we get busy and housework sometimes gets neglected. Your stress level just goes up when you are in the middle of a mess. Sometimes you need to do a speed cleaning and fake a clean house!
Your focus needs to be on the visible areas. Anything behind closed doors can wait for another day.
Before You Start!
Don’t Speed Clean in Silence!
Start with some air pods and crank up some music or a podcast through your speakers while you are working. It’s great motivation!
There are some great videos on the Minimalist Home YouTube channel that you could use for body doubling. Body doubling is a great strategy for productivity where you have someone working next to you to keep you focused and on task.
Here are a few good videos that are great for body doubling from the Minimalist Home YouTube Channel: Let’s Clean Our Kitchens Together, Cleanout Your Closet With Me and The Hack to Get it Done: Declutter and Clean with Me. Some of these are a bit longer than 15 minutes or you can check the channel to find one that is closer to 15 minutes if you prefer.
Gather Your Tools!
Whether you have multiple cleaners or one all-purpose spray you use for everything, having all your cleaning supplies in a caddy or bucket can keep everything with you as you move room to room. This will be cleaners, dusters, microfibre rags, whatever you want to clean with.
If you are fairly minimal about your cleaning supplies, you’ll have less to haul around with you.
A laundry basket or an empty tote can be a simple way to gather those things you find along the way that aren’t in the room where they belong. Keep a garbage bag with you as well so you can immediately throw out any garbage and empty garbage cans in any rooms along the way.
A timer is a really handy tool for this speed clean. Your focus here is going to be cleaning, not organizing and tidying. The timer will keep you on task.
Your 15-Minutes Speed Cleaning Starts Now!
Set your timer for 15 minutes and see what you can accomplish. A 15-minute speed clean is a great way to reset your home at the end of the day and set you up for an easy start tomorrow. Future-you will appreciate it!
It is helpful to do your speed clean in the same order in each room every time. This helps build the habit and reduces the likelihood of missing something. (Think of it like habit stacking. It will soon become automatic to follow that cleaning routine.)
Open Windows if Weather Permits
Obviously, this is only applicable in the warmer months. (Winter can’t last forever, right?!) Opening up windows and getting fresh air into your space will make your home feel cleaner and less stale.
Start in the Living Room
This tends to be one of the less messy rooms in the house. It’s also where dishes collect, especially if you have kids or teens in the house.
Collect anything that doesn’t belong in your living room in your laundry basket so you can get that out of the way. There’s no point in running to the bedroom to put clothes in your hamper or to the office to put books on the shelf. Finish that room before leaving to put the items you collected away. Multiple trips slow you down and hinder progress.
You can empty this basket when you get to the room where these things belong. If you are pressed for time, this basket of miscellaneous items can be stashed behind a closed door until after your guests leave or until the next day when you have more time to deal with it.
Reset the room. Fold the blankets. Put the pillows back. Re-shelf the books. Do what you need to do. We aren’t looking for perfection and we’re not cleaning anything that isn’t dirty.
If you have time and want to dust common surfaces, do the most visible ones and work from top to bottom. What is high and out of reach can wait for your deeper cleaning day (unless it’s something easy like swiping a cobweb in a corner.)
Onto the Entryway
Continue with your basket to collect those things that your family dropped and forgot as they came in the door. Sports equipment, school papers, hats, mittens, junk mail, books…. The list goes on. Most of those things don’t belong there. Hang up anything that has a hook or permanent spot.
When people are in a hurry to leave the house, leaving the house tidy is not a priority. It doesn’t take long for that to create chaos. Even if you were just the family chauffeur taking everyone to their activities, you might not notice it at first. Then Friday night, when you are home, you see what you missed all week.
Into the Main Bathroom
When you are speed cleaning your home, the main bathroom is going to be the target. This is either the one everyone uses most and needs attention and/or it’s just the convenient one for guests.
Drop a toilet cleaning tab or squirt some cleaner into your toilet to give it a minute to work while you do the other things. If you really can’t ignore your grubby shower or tub any longer, then spray it now and give the cleaner time to work.
Toss any clothing, face cloths and towels into your hamper. Put out clean ones.
Give the mirror, countertop and sink a quick wipe. Aren’t you glad you have all those cleaning supplies right there?
Do a basic quick clean of your toilet: give it a wipe around the seat and sides and a bit of a brush before flushing. If you have kids, check to make sure there is more than a square of toilet paper left on the roll. If necessary, give the shower/tub a quick wipe down.
The Heart of Your Home: The Kitchen
In your kitchen, start with garbage and recycling because it doesn’t involve making any decisions.
Load the dishwasher; this is why you do the other rooms first. By now, you’ll have all the dishes returned to the kitchen. The dishwasher makes life so much easier; once it’s full, start it. Hopefully, you don’t have much to hand wash now that the dishwasher is going.
Wipe all your countertops and the front of the fridge and other appliances. In a speed clean, don’t worry about moving every single thing out of the way. (On a day when you are doing a deeper clean, you can move the bread box and wipe under it. Today is not that day!)
If there are any piles of paper on your countertop, tuck those away elsewhere. (You may find speed cleaning exposes weaknesses in your daily routine, like a lack of a paper strategy.)
If You Have Time Left in Your 15-Minute Speed Clean!
If you still have time, then you can sweep the floor or use your cordless vacuum to do a quick job of your floors. This is a great last task as so many of us have flooring that continues through multiple rooms.
For those with pets, this might be an essential task you can not skip. If you have a robot vacuum, take advantage of the scheduling feature to have it do regular maintenance of your floors.
But I’m Not Sure I Can Speed Clean in 15 Minutes: Alternatives!
Another alternative to the 15-minute speed clean is to commit to only 5 minutes in each room.
In a speed cleaning session, you are probably most concerned about your kitchen, your living room and your bathroom. These are the highest traffic zones in your home.
But your home may have different needs. Maybe today you want to do three bedrooms in 15 minutes. Pulling up your blankets to make the bed and getting all loose clothing off the floor is quick. Then you can tackle the flat surfaces, put things away and dust if needed.
Speed cleaning isn’t overwhelming. It’s doing what you can in that window of time and accepting that it is enough. If you want to keep going, great, but if you don’t have the time or energy to continue, that’s okay.
Consider a Time Audit
Something that can make your speed cleaning (and regular cleaning) easier in the future is to do a time audit where you track all your time for 1-3 days. This will help you take control of your time.
Track everything – sleep, work hours, your commute, scrolling your phone, cooking, whatever you do. Be honest. No one has to see this list but you. You can use an app, like Toggl, on your phone or just keep a manual list.
This will help you see how long it really takes for you to do some tasks. Time blindness is real! Folding laundry or dishes might actually be a faster task than you think. When it comes to a speed clean, it’s good to have an idea how long things take.
This time audit can also help you prioritize what’s important, reduce wasted time and put your focus on the things that pick you up and give you energy.
If a low energy day happens, you also have a good idea what you can do to keep the momentum going in your home. A 5-minute speed clean is still progress. You do what you can!
Adapt Your Speed Cleaning Using Triage
The 15-minute speed clean is very adaptable: triage first! This will help you identify what areas of your home you need to tackle in that short window. This is also very helpful with your deep clean but you can use it in a short form as well.
You don’t have to spend a lot of time on this. This will help ensure you use your energy to target the right space.
How to Triage
1. Assess the current state of your home.
Take an honest look and become aware of where your hot spots are. What’s going to be the best place to tackle with your limited time?
You may also consider why you want to speed clean. Do you need the guest room to be clean for a guest coming to stay? Are you hosting a big supper and cooking left you with less time to clean the rest of the house?
Your hot spots might be different than mine. This will give you the best starting point for you at this time.
2. Identify the causes.
You don’t have to go into deep detail here. Is it stuff that simply needs to be put away in its proper home? Is it new stuff that needs to stay but your teens didn’t know where to put it? Is it just garbage or recycling?
Do your kids need to pick up that space? Maybe your time is better spent in a different room in your home. (When my kids were small, the best strategy was to have them do two 5-minute tidies every day. It was manageable for them and kept things from getting too chaotic.)
3. Understand the impact.
How does this make you feel? A room that makes you feel stressed or overwhelmed will benefit from your attention more than the relaxing one. You can make it a lot better in a short time!
4. Visualize your ideal outcome.
If you are honest, you know how you’d like it to look. In a speed clean, you know it won’t be perfect so you adjust your expectations accordingly. You are still getting closer to your ideal outcome which is totally worth it!
What About Decluttering?
Yes, it’s inevitable that you are going to come across items you’d like to declutter. Try not to let this sidetrack you from getting your house cleaner.
Cheers for recognizing that item no longer belongs in your home. Take that win! You are becoming more aware of the clutter than inevitably accumulates in your home! It’s no longer invisible to you.
Put the items you’d like to declutter into your laundry basket since these items don’t belong in the room you are working in. When you finish your cleaning, you can move those to your donation box or your vehicle for hauling away.
As you continue to declutter your home, you’ll find cleaning gets easier and takes less time overall. Your possessions have homes. You will discover that flat surfaces are easier to clean when you don’t have as many things on (and around) them.
The more often you speed clean your home, the less there will be to do when you want to do a deeper clean. And when you finish that 15-minute speed clean, feel free to give yourself a small reward. A nice cup of tea is perfect!
