ADHD-Friendly Cleaning Tips for Spring Cleaning and Home Organizing
Spring is officially springing and I would bet your to-do list is growing faster than the dandelions in your front yard.
And as good as us ADHDers can be at times coming up with a vision and a plan for how we’re going to get our homes in shape during the spring, we can be equally good if not better at spending all our time and energy making the list and not taking any action.
Which is why I wanted to spend some time today discussing ADHD friendly strategies for starting, following through and maintaining your spaces.
Where to Start Spring Cleaning with ADHD
Let’s start our spring cleaning and organizing tips with where to start.
It can be really easy for us to talk ourselves out of starting our ambitious spring clean up plans if the task or project feels big or overwhelming.
And I totally get it. If it feels like too much, we often don’t start at all.
Which is why I want to talk about elephants…eating elephants to be precise.
And no, they aren’t some mystical power source that will suddenly give you’re the motivation to follow through or the energy to work on your task project.
It’s actually the saying…
““What’s the best way to eat an elephant? One bite at a time!””
Part of the reason us ADHDers struggle with starting is that we are thinking of devouring the whole elephant instead of all the little bites we need to take in order to make progress.
We think clean out the garage or go through our kids’ clothes instead of organize this tool shelf or go through the kids’ sock drawer.
So to bring it back to original questions “where do I start spring cleaning?” my answer would be to start by breaking down any area you are wanting to clean or organize into small, easily digestible tasks.
Tiny tasks typically have a lower barrier to entry so they may be easier to motivate yourself to do.
Because you may not have the time or energy to wipe down and declutter every drawer and cabinet in your kitchen in one fell swoop BUT you might be able to knock out the cupboard with all those take out food containers you’ve been meaning to go through.
And an added bonus…as you start to knock out these tiny tasks, you’ll get a little dopamine hit off the reward of crossing the task of your list, which may just give you the boost you need to do another tiny task.
How to Make Cleaning and Organizing Easier with ADHD
I know there are some people out there that actually enjoy the act of cleaning and organizing.
I mean, I clearly enjoy organizing seeing as I made it my full time job for over 10 years. But cleaning, well, that’s another story.
So if cleaning and organizing aren’t your jam or preferred activity on the weekends, you may need some tactics to help you get in the groove.
ADHD-Friendly Organizing & Cleaning Tips: Set Timers
Try setting a timer for 5 minutes to see how much you can get done in that time.
Or try setting it for 30 minutes and see if you can finish cleaning or organizing the area you’re working on in that time.
Timers work for our ADHD brains because they act as a sort of due date to help us to overcome an ADHD time blindness hurdles we may have
And really quick, if you’re not familiar with ADHD time blindness, it’s the concept that our ADHD brains see the progression of time with only two stops.
Either something is happening NOW.
Or it is happening NOT NOW…which could be tomorrow, next week, or 10 days from now but to our brains it doesn’t matter how far away because it isn’t happening NOW.
Back to timers and spring cleaning…Setting a timer is like giving your task or project a due date, prompting you to shift something that was previously seen as “NOT NOW” into a priority that needs to be completed “NOW”.
And if the clock winding down isn’t your jam, try creating a cleaning playlist the length of the time you’d like to spend cleaning or organizing. It has the same effect of playing “beat the clock” to get a task or project done, with the added bonus of the energy you get from your favorite music.
ADHD Friendly Organizing & Cleaning Tips: Try Body Doubling
You could also try creating or joining a cleaning and organizing body doubling session.
Body doubling is a productivity hack where you work simultaneously with other people. You don’t have to be working on the same thing, you all just have to set a time limit and state what you’ll be working on.
There are online body doubling memberships you can join, TikTok and YouTube body doubling sessions, or you could call up a friend and FaceTime a cleaning session between the two of you.
Body doubling can be a super helpful productivity tool for us ADHDers in many areas of our lives and if you’d like to learn more about the benefits, you can click here to check out my episode “What is ADHD Body Doubling?”
ADHD Friendly Organizing & Cleaning Tips: Create a Checklist
Another helpful cleaning and organizing tactic…create a checklist.
Now if you’ve been hanging around with me for awhile, you know I love a checklist. It is probably my favorite ADHD productivity tool.
It helps me know what I need to do.
It helps me remember all the steps.
It helps me pick up where I left off if I have to take a break.
It helps me get others on board because I can share what needs done.
So if you’re an checklist aficionado like me, I highly recommend creating a checklist for the task or projects you’ll be tackling this spring.
Not only will it help you this season BUT if you save a copy of the checklist you created, you can use it in subsequent years to help you remember everything you did to finish in the past.
Because as we discussed a few minutes back, not knowing where to start can be a real hinderance to our task initiation. But we’ll have no excuses about not knowing where to start if we’ve got our checklist to guide us.
ADHD Home Organization and Cleaning Maintenance
I want to wrap up with what I think is one of the most important and often overlooked steps in the cleaning and organizing, process…maintenance.
I probably don’t have to tell you that it is much easier to maintain a space than it is to constantly start over. Even if we have a checklist to tell us where to start.
And if you’re going to put your precious and limited time, energy, and effort into cleaning our your kitchen drawers or organizing your craft area, you don’t want to have to recreate the wheel again next year.
There are 2 keys that I found both in my work as a professional organizer and as an ADHD coach that help with your home maintenance….make regular time for resets and make your systems work for you.
First, let’s talk reset…
This can be as easy as doing a 5 minute family pick up every evening. Or spending an hour putting everything that’s not in its correct place on Saturday morning.
You can even incorporate some of the tips I mentioned earlier for your maintenance sessions…make a playlist, try to beat the clock, create a checklist to make sure you don’t miss steps, involve family members as a form of body doubling.
It may take a little time to figure out what maintenance style works best for you and your family. If finding an hour on the weekends doesn’t work for you, try the shorter sessions during the week. Or vice versa.
It’s less about doing a specific routine that you found from me or someone else on the internet, and more about coming up with a regular system that works for you and your family.
And speaking of systems that work for you and your family, let’s chat a bit about creating routines and systems.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that every ADHD brain is different. The systems and strategies that work for me and my family may not work for yours in the form that I use.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t mold it to fit your needs.
I’ve had several clients who see something on YouTube or read about something in a book that they’re excited to try. But invariably, the routine wanes because either it was too complicated, too time-consuming, or they weren’t seeing results they wanted so they stopped using it.
So as you think about some routines you’d like to put in place to help you maintain the hard work you put into your spring cleaning and organizing, remember that it is ok to adapt or change your initial plan to make it work better for you.
If you find it is easier to put a basket on the stairs to collect all the bits and bobs you find throughout the week for the kids to put away during a weekend reset works better than getting them to put their bits and bobs away every night before bed, do it.
And remember, ADHD brains need low barrier to entry…meaning if there are 19 steps to do in order to get in the door and keep your landing zone organized, it may be a struggle to maintain that systems and space because it has a pretty high barrier to entry.
Try to keep systems simple. Set reminders if you need them. And remember you can always tweak they system if it stops working.
And if you’re still struggling with where to start, following through, or maintaining your home or business, I’m here to help! As an ADHD accountability coach, I meet with you each week to discuss what you’d like to accomplish and schedule when you’re going to accomplish it.
To schedule a free, no-obligation call with me to discuss my programs and how I could support you, click the button below.
