By Anita Edwards, Blog Editor at Spekless in Washington, D.C.

If you are like most adults, your daily life is chock full of activities. Between work, school, regular exercise, or performing volunteer work, it’s easy to be gone all day. When you do get home, the last thing you want to do is clean, right? But have no fear. We’re sharing all the tricks and secrets to how to keep your apartment clean with 15 minutes per week cleaning time.

Clean Up Everything’s As You Go

There are a few things you must do to keep your apartment clean with 15 minutes per week. First, you must pick up after yourself as you go each day this allows you to declutter your home easily. This means dishes to the sink, laundry to the hamper, toys in the bin at night, etc. You can’t possibly pick up everything’s after every 15 minutes, so everyone should help. Of course, you have the choice of hiring a professional apartment cleaning Arlington company. But, if you are unwilling to spend these extra bucks, you should maintain the habit of cleaning everythings.

Give Everyone Daily Chores

Implement a daily chore schedule so that everyone in the house has at least one regular maintenance chore to do. Maintenance chores are things that must be done regularly such as feeding pets, cleaning the litter box, getting the mail, putting away clean clothes, or setting the table.

Save Yourself a Trip

Organize your cleaning supplies in your home so that the products you need to clean each area are in that room. By having your supplies in the room where you need them, you’ll reduce the need to go fetch supplies elsewhere in the house. If you don’t want to have multiple bottles of mirror cleaner, split it up into smaller spray bottles.

Clean in Zones

The next thing to do is to divide your home into cleaning zones. Don’t worry, this should take you less than 15 minutes and can be your “cleaning” for the first week. It doesn’t matter how you divide your home, just make sure you write down which rooms belong to which zone. Your focus each day will be in a different zone. Create a weekly schedule to suit your home (Zone 1-Monday, 2-Tuesday, Zone 3 is Wednesday,).

Declutter to Make Regular Cleaning Faster

You may need 2 focus days for your kitchen but schedule them several days apart, for example Tuesday and Friday or Monday and Thursday. Your main goal the first few weeks is to get rid of the clutter and organize your spaces.

Once you have decluttered, you’ll find it much quicker and easier to do things like dust, sweep, and vacuum because you aren’t having to pick up and move clutter as you go. Below are some examples of things you can do to declutter, reorganize, and keep your home clean, each of which will take about 5 minutes.

• Grab a trash bag pick up any old newspapers, outdated magazines, miscellaneous paper, cardboard, or other trash and get it out of the house.
• Pick a closet and set a timer for 5 minutes. With a garbage bag or laundry basket in hand, go through all the clothes hanging up, pull out as many things as possible to give away that doesn’t fit, you don’t wear, or you don’t just absolutely love. When the timer goes off, you can choose to stop and do more another day or you can choose to finish it up.
• Pick just one drawer from your kitchen or elsewhere and set a timer for 5 minutes. Take everything out of the drawer that doesn’t belong there, throw away any trash or outdated coupons, etc. and then use small baskets or flatware trays to organize the rest.

Once you have decluttered, you’ll find it much quicker and easier to do things like dust, sweep, and vacuum because you aren’t having to pick up and move clutter as you go.

Do Cleaning in 5-15 Minute Intervals

• Grab a laundry basket and pick up any dirty laundry on the floor daily. Start a load of laundry and put it away when it’s done.
• Pick up any other items, toys, shoes, extra blankets, that belong in a different room daily. You can use a timer if you like and then put it all away if time. If you’re truly short on time, use your next 5 minutes cleaning time to put it all away.
• Clean the bathroom. If you keep lysol or clorox wipes and other cleaning supplies in the bathroom, you can do a different chore whenever you use the bathroom to keep it sparkling all week.
• Empty all of the trash bins, gather any old pizza boxes or take out containers, and take them to the dumpster. This should be done on the day before garbage pickup.

Today’s post was from Anita Edwards – professional writer and editor. She works as blog editor at Spekless, where she shares her own and her colleagues’ tips for cleaning. In her free time, she enjoys cooking and going on day trips with her children.