Cleaning the house is not a fun task. But it can be made even harder when one suffers from depression.
The kitchen seems to be the one room in the house where things can get unruly fast if you don’t keep up with it.
“Keeping things orderly is not my strong suit, especially when I’m dealing with depression. While all areas of my home suffer, no area suffers more than my kitchen,” Heidi Fischer wrote in a piece for The Mighty.
“Dishes pile up, clutter is not organized and surfaces are not wiped down. Of course over time it only becomes worse, making it all the harder to find the motivation to get into cleaning it.”
One day while avoiding the mess in her kitchen, she came up with the perfect way to motivate herself to clean.
“One day while staring at the microwave, counting down the seconds, I looked around and thought about how messy things were,” Heidi writes. “Instead of continuing to stare at the numbers, I wondered how much I could get clean in the time I had left on the clock. I quickly filled up the dishwasher in those remaining seconds, and was amazed by how much I got done in the short window of time.”
She decided to make a fun little game out of cleaning… she calls it the two-minute rule.
She found that even when she was depressed she could manage to get things done two minutes at a time.
Plus, she’s already in the kitchen so she doesn’t have to find the motivation go into the kitchen to clean. She’s already there!
“If I spend 10 minutes in the kitchen over the day, that’s 10 minutes I can also clean. More often than not, I will go over my time limit, as once something is started it makes sense to complete it,” Heidi says. “This system isn’t perfect, and I never quite get to the very clean state I would like, but I am able to keep things at a somewhat manageable level.”
She even listed things that can be done within a few minutes while you wait for the coffee maker, water to boil, or eggs to fry:
- Go through your pantry and toss out expired items or things you don’t need
- Load or unload the dishwasher
- Write up your grocery list
- Sweep the floor
- Clean out your junk drawer
- Wipe down your counters
- Put dirty dishcloths and towels in the hamper and replace with clean ones
- Soak your dishes and wash what you can
- Put garbage or recycling in its place
- Organize bills and other papers
For some of us who find it hard to keep up in the kitchen, the two-minute rule can be a total game-changer when it comes to getting the cleaning done.
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