You won't meet many people who don't want or like a clean home. Though not a necessity, clean homes are conducive to more pleasure in your life: you're more likely to have friends over, more apt to enjoy time with your children, and you'll be more into climbing your partner if you're not so concerned about climbing a laundry mountain in the basement.
But we are busy. You are busy, I am busy, our partners are busy, and our children are busy. Some of us even have busy pets. The days of tying up your hair and deep cleaning your home for 8+ hours once a week are long gone (thank God) but it's okay - most cleaning can be managed well enough by making sure you stay on top of things on a daily and weekly maintenance schedule. Doing a few things everyday can help you avoid catastrophe cleaning (which is what happens when you get a 15 min heads-up "we're on our way over" call from your in-laws), and most of your cleaning chaos can be handled in sprints.
When it comes to bigger tasks, you can still break them up into 10 minutes chores. Print the list below out if you'd like. Start at the top and work your way down through the week. By the time you get to the bottom, you'll likely need to start over again, but rather than think of cleaning as a once and done proposition, re-frame your thinking to consider house cleaning and self care a cyclical loop. Sure; it's not as fun as performing a task that you only need to do once, but accepting that you will be trying to keep your shit together for the rest of your life is actually freeing — and with acceptance comes freedom. It's like me just accepting that my student loan debt is still 50 years away from being paid off. Instead of crying under a pile of takeout fried chicken buckets, I turned that depressing thought into a great idea for my eventual demise: I'll have combo funeral/student loan burning party. I'm a barrel of fun, folks.
Set a timer, because here's a list of what you can do in 10-12 minutes:
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