Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

We had friends over Sunday evening. Once upon a time that would've been barely worthy of note. Back in The Long-Long Ago (i.e., before the pandemic) we had friends over at our house a few times a month. But that was... *checks watch*... 16 months ago. Sunday was only the second time in 16 months we've had friends over.... and the other time was over 2 months ago! Since then our house once again got cluttered.



Unlike in XKCD we didn't use cleaning as a reason not to have guests. We simply cleaned. Fortunately, 1) our house is by no means a disaster zone; mostly, it's just cluttered. 2) We cleaned two months ago before having friends over that one other time, so some things we cleaned then didn't need cleaning again this weekend. Or they only needed a touch-up. And 3) the friends were only coming in through our foyer, up through our living room, to our dining room and kitchen. We don't have to clean the upstairs.

The 20 Minute Rule & the 80% Rule

In the past I've talked about The 20 Minute Rule for cleaning. Well, I've talked about that in person; I'm not sure I've posted it here. The idea is to break down big, imposing cleaning tasks— the sorts of things it's tempting to procrastinate— by tackling them in 20 minute increments. Staring down at, "Ugh, I have to clean all the bathrooms, vacuum the carpets, and scrub the whole kitchen!" is hard. But saying, "I'll commit to 20 minutes and knock out one or a few pieces of the whole," is easier to manage.

The necessary cleaning today took more than 20 minutes, even with both of us working on it. But that's okay; 20 minutes is a minimum, not a maximum. We gave it 20, liked the progress we'd made, and in that found motivation to do another 20 minutes, then another to polish things up.

Yeah, it took us 3 x 20 minutes x 2 people today. That's what happens when we let things slide. The 20 minute rule is best applied as an everyday thing. Just do 20 minutes a day and there will rarely be a need for a major clean. That idea's also reflected in something I read recently I call the 80% rule: 80% of cleaning is simply putting things away.

That may not describe your house but it definitely describes ours. A lot of our messiness is clutter, things we didn't put away at the time because we expected to use them again or were plain lazy. After a while those bits of clutter stack up. Some of our cleaning today was actual cleaning— vacuuming floors, wiping tables and railings— but much of it was putting things away, especially sorting out things in the various "landing zones" we have on and near our dining room table.