If you have ADHD, you know how it can be difficult to clean your home. It’s not that you don’t care, it’s that all the advice out there seems to have been written so that they don’t work for you. I have ADHD, and ironically, it has hit me hard, and I have struggled to write this blog post about cleaning and ADHD. I had to call a friend for body doubling and use brain.fm to try to focus. And slice this blog post into micro-tasks. Anyway. Back to cleaning. Like anybody, we want a clean home and fear judgment when we struggle to clean. But that doesn’t mean we’ll never have our home clean. We only need ADHD cleaning hacks so we stop hating our brains.
Why you need ADHD cleaning hacks
For most people, cleaning is a boring and never-ending chore that keeps repeating itself. And it’s even more true when you have ADHD. But as we still want a neat home, we still have to clean, even if it feels like our brains are throwing a tantrum and stomping their feet to avoid it.
Odds are you know it, most of usual cleaning tips tend to fall flat with us. That’s not laziness or stubbornness, it’s just that they’re for people whose brains work differently from ours.
So don’t throw the towel yet. With solutions that keep the way your brain works front and center, you can manage to clean your home!
Create an ADHD cleaning checklist
Usual checklists seem helpful at first, but they might make you freeze before starting because each task seems enormous.
On the contrary, I find that a detailed one helps me begin. And by detailed, I mean “getting into the nitty-gritty” detailed. For example, instead of “Clean the bathroom”, you’ll write:
- Tidy the counters
- Wipe the counters
- Scrub the sink
- Rinse the sink
- Scrub the bathtub
- Rinse the bathtub
- Sweep the floor
Each task is smaller and looks more doable. Plus, you’ll avoid forgetting steps and know what you still need to clean when you return from a side quest.
This checklist is long, but you can write it once and put it in a plastic sheet protector. If you use an erasable felt-tip pen, you’ll be able to use it again and again.
And maybe, after using it for some time, you’ll note that you don’t need to look at it so much, each step leading to the next more easily. That has happened to me, and now, I’m good with the “Clean the bathroom” item on my to-do list.
Master your flexible ADHD cleaning calendar
Rigid schedules usually don’t work for ADHD people. Everybody needs room for when life sends curveballs, but it’s even more true when you add ADHD.
Create a list with yearly, bi-yearly, quarterly, and monthly tasks. To decide each task frequency, my principle is to clean often enough so that if I miss a time, it won’t be too bad.
Then, distribute these tasks evenly, not by number, but by the time and energy needed.
You can’t expect to be able to clean for hours. Either you’ll get too bored or exhausted before that. So, long days to deep clean are out. Instead of Spring cleaning, I prefer to do a few deep cleaning tasks more often.
As an example, every 3 months I clean the washer, the dishwasher, the windows, sanitize the remotes, and de-ice the freezer. For me, cleaning the washer and the dishwasher are fairly easy tasks, as is sanitizing the remotes. But the windows and the freezer are more complicated. So, I’ll group the washer, dishwasher, and remotes cleaning one month and do each of the other tasks during the other 2 months.
Then, I try to stick to that. The 3 tasks? I aim to do one per week. They are written in my bullet journal so I don’t forget. And if I end the month and one isn’t done, I add it to the following month. If the 3rd month starts and I still haven’t completed it, I will drop it. It will come around soon after.
Use the junebugging cleaning method
The junebugging cleaning is perfect when you know you won’t be able to focus on one task. It was first described on Tumblr in 2018.
First, choose a small task. If we follow the example of the bathroom above, it can be the counters. It’s your goal. So, you start cleaning the counters.
Then, when you note you got distracted, and are doing something else, you return to cleaning these counters without any judgment. And you keep going like that, either until the counters are clean, or a set time, or you’re too bored or tired to keep going.
Even if your counters are not perfectly clean, chances are you’d have cleaned or organized something else. Maybe you saw a pile of dirty clothes and put a load of laundry on, maybe you walked on too much hair, and swept the floor. Whatever the case, you made progress, and that’s something to celebrate!
My other ADHD cleaning hacks
Don’t stop
Once you’ve started cleaning, it’s easier to keep going than to start again. So don’t make your life harder than it needs to be, and keep moving. If something needs to sit, like the toilet cleaner, clean something else meanwhile. It will avoid having to battle with the initiation part once again. Trust me, it changed how I clean.
Put a timer
A timer will help you if you tend to hyperfocus on one task. The goal here is to time yourself while you do a defined task. Then, when you plan to do this task again, put a timer for the measured duration and clean. If you end up cleaning something else, the timer will remind you what you were supposed to clean, and you won’t spend too much time focused on something that may be less urgent.
My last tip about the timer is to plan some time at the end of your cleaning session as a catch-up for the tasks you didn’t finish in time. That time helps me feel less overwhelmed because of the timer.
Use these ADHD cleaning hacks to make progress toward a neat home
Keeping your home clean when you have ADHD isn’t about following strict rules or impossible routines. It’s about finding what works for you. These ADHD cleaning hacks aren’t here to create pressure. They’re here to offer little sparks of progress that fit your life and your energy levels.
Pick one small step today, try it out, and see how it feels. You’re not failing if it takes time. You’re building a way of living that respects who you are. You’ve got this!
Which ADHD cleaning hack will you try first? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear!
Be the first to leave a comment