How to Keep Your Apartment Clean with 15-Minutes Per Week

Cleaning sucks, we get it. Nobody wants to have to get their hands dirty and spend hours each week getting rid of the dirt that seems to magically appear. But it doesn’t have to take hours, especially if you’re only trying to get a superficial level of cleaning in-between visits from our professional cleaners.

Efficiency is the key. The truth is that homeowners are terrible cleaners, they don’t have anywhere near the numbers of hours of experience that a professional house cleaner or an apartment cleaning in NYC that does and as a result, they’ve never had to learn the tricks of the trade.

The 3 Rules of Cleaning Efficiently

There are three key rules when it comes to keeping your apartment clean with only 15-minutes each week and to work this efficiently, you have to follow each religiously. Not only do they prevent you from wasting time, but they ensure that you can get better results in only 15-minutes per week.

Clean from Top to Bottom

The first rule is the most important because it’s the biggest mistake that amateurs make. Dust and dirt obey the rules of gravity, so, cleaning your TV stand and then the TV is going to mean that dust from the top of the screen will fall down and make the previously clean stand dirty again.

Instead, you MUST clean from top to bottom. Simply swapping to a top to bottom approach can half the amount of time that it currently takes you to clean your apartment, particularly if you have a lot of shelving and appliances.

Never Repeat Your Steps

If you’re having to constantly go from room to room to grab cleaning products or are tidying up clutter in each room first, you’re wasting a huge amount of time. Your goal should be to never step on the same piece of flooring more than once or twice, to ensure that you’re working as efficiently as possible.

When combined with the rule above, the result is that you should work from top left to bottom right in a room. Working around the room in this way prevents you from repeating work or steps, which add up quickly when you’re trying to work as fast as possible.

The only exception to this rule is when it comes to vacuuming, which we would recommend doing last and all at once. Again, this is far more efficient because you don’t have to keep unplugging the cord and starting over.

Only Clean What is Dirty

The final rule is to only clean what is dirty. That might sound obvious, but the vast majority of people will clean an entire bookshelf, even if only one shelf has dust on it. Why waste your time? When you’re trying to clean your apartment in 15-minutes each week, you need to prioritize your time.

If the TV isn’t dirty, move on. You can always clean it in the 15-minutes that you have next week or the week after, when it’s actually dirty, and isn’t a waste of valuable minutes.

Following this rule is particularly important in the bathroom and kitchen, two areas where people tend to scrub things out of principle. The same rules apply here, unless you’re talking about disinfecting a surface that could contain bacteria, and perhaps more so.

Tiling can take a long time to scrub and if it’s not dirty or only very slightly, you’re probably best to move on and leave it for when it’s actually dirty so that you’re not wasting time. Of course, if you were doing a deep clean or professional clean, like our cleaners do, you would scrub every inch until it sparkled, but for superficial upkeep you must be selective.