Working from home cleaning struggles

It is a challenge to find a balance when working from home and managing the household. I am a home body, but that doesn’t mean that I enjoy cleaning and all of the maintenance that is needed. In the pandemic, my job went remote, so you would think that more time at home means more opportunity to take care of the house, but it seems that the opposite is true. When working at home, obviously most of your day is taken up doing work, and in my job that meant being on the computer and zooming. Being home working all day, when the work day is done, I feel like I am just done, so I unwind with a book, and then I just don’t feel like cleaning or de-cluttering.

That being said, I need to figure out how to make myself do some sort of scheduled household tasks each day after work (or before as I am a morning person). I really want to de-clutter because there is a lot of built up stuff and I tend to shift things from one room to another, which is not wholly helpful. I did get a bit done this summer, and then a little more over spring break. I need to make progress every day or week though and not save up for when I have time off of work. I do not have a solution because I kind of suck at it, and all of these cleaning blogs can tell me what to do until they are blue, but that doesn’t mean that I will do it. I have to figure out something that will work with my schedule and my personality and do it on my own.

So here is my starting point. 5 minutes a day. Pick an area and put things away for 5 minutes. If I do that right after work, I won’t have slipped into a book with no escape yet. I feel like this could work and I will give it a try. The picture is of one of my starting places in my office. The office tends to become a catch all, and I just dump things in there to get them out of the way, so I am going to work on putting those things away first.