8 Ways How to Keep Your House Clean When You're Busy

These genius tips will teach you how to keep your house clean even when you’re extremely busy (and, quite frankly, don’t want to clean).

I’ve never been someone who LOVES to clean. I don’t hate cleaning, usually, but I wouldn’t say it’s my true love, either.

But, I AM someone who loves to have a clean house. And, to have a clean house, cleaning needs to get done.

I struggle a LOT to get things done when my house is a mess. I find myself getting distracted and having a hard time focusing on certain tasks, and I just always feel stressed. A messy home = stress for me.

Don’t get me wrong, our house certainly isn’t always spick and span. In fact, most times it’s not. But then when it’s not – I need to do something about it, or else I just know I’m going to have an extremely unproductive day (or week, or month, or however long I choose to put cleaning off for).

If you can’t stand having a messy house, or you simply just want to learn how to keep your house clean, but you’re too busy to dedicate much time at all to cleaning, what is there to do?

Through a lot of trial and error, I have learned a couple cleaning tips that help me keep our house (mostly) clean – even when I’m busy wifing, momming, and working from home.

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How to keep your house clean when you’re busy and don’t have time

1. Clean the shower when you’re in it

This is one of my favorite cleaning hacks, and it’s one that not many people are utilizing – but they should be.

Cleaning the shower while you’re in the shower is a smart way to cut down on having to set time apart in your day to go and clean your shower.

If you want to get the whole bathroom cleaned quickly, and in an effective way, right before you hop in the shower, quickly remove everything from the shelves and spray it with cleaner, then spray your counter, sink, mirror, and toilet with cleaner too. (You will also want to put toilet bowl cleaner in at this time – use this to get all the icky, stuck on stuff out of your toilet without scrubbing.)

Grab your cleaning rags (these are the ones I use – they work incredibly well) and wipe down the mirror, countertop, sink, and outside of the toilet.

Take your toilet brush and give the toilet bowl a quick wipe (see? No scrubbing thanks to this).

Then, hop into the shower, and, with a clean cleaning rag turn on the shower and – you can do this at the beginning or after you’ve put conditioner in your hair while you’re letting it soak – wipe the shelves, walls, spout, and tub.

Use the water from the shower to give everything a quick rinse (this is SUPER easy to do if you have a shower head like this one).

And, just like that, you’ve cleaned your entire bathroom AND showered in less than 10 minutes. Now if that’s not being efficient, I don’t know what is.

2. Use timers

If you get even just five minutes in your day where you have time to clean, UTILIZE THAT FIVE MINUTES.

I’m not saying you should never have downtime, but I am saying that if you’re too busy to clean, your house is going to become a mess. So, use any spare time you have to clean what you can. (This way you don’t need to stay up into the wee hours of the morning cleaning your house.)

When you have a couple spare minutes (and would rather use those minutes to read a book or just sit on the couch) grab your moo timer, set it, and start speed cleaning.

This doesn’t have to be anything long to drawn out, you could clean for as little as 5 minutes, or up to 20 minutes.

The whole point of this speed clean is to just get the big stuff dealt with. Maybe your kitchen floor is a disaster, grab your broom and spend 2 minutes giving it a quick sweep. Then, with the extra 3 minutes you have, do another cleaning task or two that will really help your home look less messy.

The goal here isn’t perfection – it’s simply doing a couple tasks with the time you have.

Are you ready? Grab yourself a moo timer and get cleaning.

3. Always work from top to bottom

When you’re trying to speed clean your house – or just trying to keep your house clean when you’re busy and don’t have time to, the most important thing to remember is to be effective.

You don’t want to waste any time you DO get to clean, backtracking and finding things you missed.

Being effective should be a part of anybody’s cleaning routine whether they have hours to spend cleaning every day or no time at all.

Something you can do to be effective while cleaning your house is to ALWAYS clean your house from top to bottom.

Not the other way around.

Never the other way around.

If you were to clean your house from the BOTTOM up, you would be creating a whole lot of unnecessary work for yourself.

You would get the floors cleaned just in time to knock more dust onto them while you’re dusting. You would get all your surfaces dusted just in time to clean that ceiling fan and knock even more dust onto your coffee table and floor.

Then you would have to go back and grab your dusting rag and vacuum and clean the bottom half of your house again. Now THAT is a big waste of time.

Instead of wasting precious time, make a habit out of working from the top down in your house.

4. Use a robot vacuum

A robot vacuum picks up crumbs, dirt, hair, and virtually anything that a regular old vacuum will pick up – without you having to do any of the work.

If you really can’t find time in your schedule to set aside for cleaning, your house is going to become a disaster – and often the first part of the house that gets messy (and becomes the messiest), are the floors.

Using an automatic vacuum to keep your floors clean might be a really good idea – and it checks one big task off of your to-do list.

When I would think of robot vacuums, I always pictured these extremely expensive and over-priced objects, but it turns out you can get some at a very affordable price. Click here to see some affordable robot vacuums.

(Even if you thought you would never be that person who has a robot vacuum, it’s better to be that person than the person who always has a dirty floor…)

See my top pick for the most affordable and best-reviewed robot vacuum here.

5. Clean as you go

This one might sound obvious, but when you think of your day to day life, are you actually cleaning as you go?

How often do you walk from one room to another empty-handed? How often do you leave your dishes on the kitchen sink without a second thought? How often do you walk by something that needs to be done without doing anything about it?

The idea of cleaning as you go is to help keep your house clean WITHOUT setting time apart in your day to clean it.

If there is something in the living room that belongs in the bedroom, next time you walk from the living room to the bedroom (or pass by the bedroom), grab that object and put it in its place.

When you’re done lunch, put the lunch dishes in the dishwasher RIGHT away.

Next time you walk past a dirty surface, if you have a cloth nearby (these are handy to keep in various places throughout your house), give it a quick wipe.

If there are dishes in the room you are in, don’t leave the room empty-handed. Grab the dishes and bring them straight to the dishwasher.

6. Get rid of junk as soon as it enters your house

Or, better yet, don’t let junk enter your house. But, sometimes that’s hard to do.

Junk, or stuff that you don’t need, doesn’t belong in your house and will just make you do more work than necessary when you’re cleaning your house.

Junk can come in all kinds of different forms, and it doesn’t always look like junk. But, if it’s not something you need and it doesn’t have a place in your home – it needs to go.

7. Use baskets

Using baskets as a part of my cleaning routine has been a game-changer.

I love using these baskets in our rooms to collect miscellaneous items. Because, if we’re being completely honest, we don’t always have time to put stuff where it belongs during the day – and at the end of the day there are going to be a few things out of place.

Using a miscellaneous basket to collect all these out-of-place items throughout the day makes it a million times easier to tidy up the house in the evening.

Simply grab your basket and place everything in the basket back where it belongs at the end of every day. (The key here is making sure you don’t let the basket add up for too many days without being emptied – or else it WILL become an overwhelming task, and the whole point of these baskets is to keep.things.simple.)

Even if you don’t have a basket in every room, it’ll save you loads of times to keep a basket in the most common areas of your house. My two favorite places are the living room and the entryway.

In short, grab yourself one of these to keep miscellaneous items together and to make putting them away at the end of the day a quick, easy task.

8. Clean regularly

This cleaning tip is another one that sounds like a no-brainer, but in reality, there are a lot of people NOT doing it.

Cleaning regularly, even if it’s just doing a couple quick cleaning tasks each day, will help keep your house looking presentable, even when you don’t have an hour each week to dedicate to cleaning your house.

The easiest way to ensure you’re doing a few small things each and every day to keep your house clean is to use a cleaning schedule.

Cleaning schedules can be printed off and hung up in a common place in your house, this way you can check tasks off as you complete them and see what still needs to be done for the day.

Do you struggle to keep your house clean with your busy schedule? Or, maybe you’re someone who has got this whole how to keep your house clean when you’re busy thing down pat. I’d love to hear where you’re at – and your tricks on how to keep your house clean.