I don’t enjoy doing household chores. More than that, I don’t enjoy completing menial tasks in general, or doing one thing for more than 30 minutes, or pushing myself past the point of minor inconvenience. That said, like most people, I do enjoy a clean and comfortable home — or at least the type of home I can invite friends over without wincing as they step over clutter and shoe mud in the hallway. When you live in a small London apartment, as I do, one forgotten plate or hastily flung coat can make the whole place feel chaotic.
These facts might appear irreconcilable. You can’t sink into a bubble bath without running the water first. But when it comes to household chores specifically, there may be one solution that combines productivity with an anti-productivity spirit. Some describe it breaking a task into manageable chunks. I like to call it slow cleaning — the act of cleaning a little bit, every day, or even just sometimes, whenever you feel able.
Slow cleaning can best be defined as an anti-spring clean. Instead of doing an intense and time-consuming seasonal clean, which you might avoid until the mess feels unmanageable, you divide the labor into miniature, almost unnoticeable tasks that can be done often. For example, you might vacuum the stairs before meeting friends, fold the laundry before watching a movie, or clean the bathroom floor while dinner’s in the oven.
As time passes, the tasks add up, until you have a clean house without feeling as though you’ve done, well, anything at all. (And yes, even the knottier, deep clean tasks can be tackled with this approach. Need to do a full degrease of the oven? Try it one morning while listening to a podcast — just that, absolutely nothing else. Don’t even load the dishwasher.)
I am by no means the first to float this particular concept. Housework and productivity experts alike have long endorsed the idea that, in order to get anything done, it needs to feel both manageable and actionable.
But most productivity techniques (the Pomodoro technique, the 52/17 rule, the two-minute rule) tend to focus on exactly how prolific of a taskmaster you can be, with the energy and time that you have. I like to think of slow cleaning as more of an anti-productivity, pro-pleasure practice. Instead of stressing over what needs to be done, it’s more about focusing on what you can or want to do — within reason. The world isn’t going to implode if you don’t disinfect every single surface in your home, or if you’d rather read a good book than organize your drawers today. You can vacuum later, if there’s time.
This more casual approach to cleaning is becoming increasingly popular, particularly online. Maxwell Ryan, founder of Apartment Therapy, a home and lifestyle platform that regularly advocates for breaking chores into bite-size chunks, believes we’ve seen a mass attitude shift when it comes to housework. Where older generations might have prided themselves on keeping fancy homes, with strict cleaning calendars à la Martha Stewart, it’s now more about doing what you can, with what you’ve got. When people are renting cramped apartments, working from home and often living paycheck to paycheck, something as simple as tidying a bedroom floor can feel like enough.
“If you go on TikTok, there are a whole bunch of hashtags for #sundaycore, #cleanwithme, that sort of stuff,” said Ryan. “You’re seeing people who are making their bed or cleaning a window, and their homes are modest. There’s a message there, too, which is: it doesn’t have to be fancy. In fact, that would stress me out. It’s about accessible homes and people sharing clean, well-lit spaces that are not fancy.”
Indeed, at a time in which phrases like “quiet-quitting,” “burnout” and “anti-ambition” have entered our everyday lexicon in reaction to the hustle culture of previous decades, it makes sense that we’re taking less of a perfectionist approach to our homes. Scroll through TikTok and you’ll be met with endless clips of people briefly tidying their “depressed rooms” or spending their Sunday cleaning what they can, despite having busy schedules. The onus isn’t on productivity or precision, per se, but on looking after your home to the best of your ability, at any given time.
This is something that Kenika Williams, a professional organizer and founder of Tidied by K, has also noticed, particularly during the pandemic, as her customers began working from home. “I think the power of having a functional home is something that’s being more understood now,” she said. “The focus is now shifting to ‘I just want our home to work for us. It doesn’t have to feel luxurious for anyone else.’ It omits this feeling of ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ Everyone is just trying to manage day-to-day and be at peace. I think that’s super powerful.”
Dr. Tim Pychyl, retired psychologist and author of “Solving the Procrastination Puzzle,” said as soon as we’re too abstract (“spring cleaning”), we risk making a task feel “aversive,” which can trigger our amygdala’s procrastination response.
“Studies have shown that when we speak about things concretely, they belong to today, they have a sense of urgency to them,” said Dr. Pychyl. “When we think about things abstractly — like ‘Oh, I have to clean’— they belong to tomorrow. The concreteness is partly what’s nudging you in the right direction. ‘It’s only going to take a minute for me to wipe this floor’ becomes no big deal.”
Doing less often means more, too. Chris Bailey, a productivity consultant and author of “The Productivity Project,” found that when he decided on three important things to do that day, instead of an endless list, he was better able to make traction. “I call it the ‘rule of three’,” he said. “You ask yourself, ‘What are the three main things I want to have accomplished by the time the day is done?’ The idea is because you only get to pick three, you have to really choose what is essential on a given day. You choose way more things that you don’t dedicate your time, attention and energy to.”
So next time you feel the pressure to do a huge spring clean, why not just tidy the kitchen cupboards and save the rest for another day? The number of goals you can tick off a to-do list bears no relation to the moral fabric of your character. And remember: There’s always tomorrow.
