One of the most difficult realizations that adults must face once they branch out to their own apartment or home is this: cleaning can be overwhelming, frustrating and just plain difficult. Many people find themselves unable to maintain a clean home , especially if they have children or they find themselves buried in clutter and dirty dishes.

Thankfully, you don’t have to put up with a dirty home. The following guide will help you learn a smarter way to clean your home, along with some insights on why cleaning a home can get so frustrating.

Why Cleaning a Home Gets Frustrating

Why is it so easy to become overwhelmed when cleaning your home? Let’s take a closer look at the mindsets that occur which make cleaning so frustrating.

It’s hard to prioritize what to clean and when to clean it

It’s easy to lose focus when you try to decide what you should prioritize. For example, should you wash the sink full of dirty dishes or wipe off the counter? Should you vacuum the bedrooms or put in a load of laundry? It’s easy to become overwhelmed when trying to juggle the many priorities of cleaning a home.

Trash, mess and clutter accumulates

It is surprisingly easy for trash, mess and other clutter to accumulate in a home. If you don’t put clutter away everyday, you will soon find entire tables or counters taken over. Likewise, if you don’t regularly do the dishes, dishes will start to pile up on the sink and even extend to the kitchen counter. Once this mess collectively accumulates, it becomes more overwhelming to try to manage it.

The Smarter Way to Clean Your Home

Now that you understand the mindset of what makes it overwhelming to clean a home, it’s time to learn the smarter way to clean your home. In short, the smarter way to clean your home is to streamline the cleaning process in order to make it easier, more simplified--and less frustrating overall.

Curate a list of essential cleaning products

Instead of having entire shelves or caddies filled with cleaning products that you don’t know how to use, curate a list of only the essentials. An all-purpose cleaning spray; toilet cleaner; shower cleaner; window/glass cleaner; broom and dustpan; mop; duster; and cleaning rags will do for most homes. Keeping a curated collection of products will make cleaning far more streamlined and efficient.

Tackle mess when it happens

Think of cleaning as an ongoing series of small tasks rather than something you put off until you’re spending 24 straight hours trying to clean your home. The best way to do this is to tackle mess as it happens.

For example, if you eat lunch, do the lunch dishes as soon as you’re done eating. When you’re taking a shower, use a shower cleaning spray to spritz the inside of the shower and scrub before you step out. If you spell chip crumbs on the floor, go get the vacuum and clean it up quickly. When you’re finished with a book, put it back on the bookshelf. And so on throughout the day.

This will help prevent the accumulation of messes and help you tackle those everyday cleaning tasks instead of putting them off. The more you put them off, the more difficult they become; and the more difficult they become, the more likely it is that you’ll continue to procrastinate.

Reduce clutter

If you wanna clean your home the smart way, you need to be smart about clutter. Go room by room and reduce as much clutter as you can. You can create “donate” and “toss” piles for items that you want to remove entirely from your home.

If you can’t get rid of an object entirely, make sure that it has a place in the home. You can purchase bins, boxes or use storage drawers to create a unique place for every item in your home. The less clutter, the less mess.

And in line with a previous time, remember: clutter is only clutter when it’s in a place it shouldn’t be. If you put items away instead of putting them on counters, tables or chairs, then they won’t be clutter anymore.

Combine tasks to make cleaning more efficient

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when cleaning is trying to clean room by room period for example, they will clean their bedroom and then move on to the living room and then move on to the kitchen. What does me seem like a sensible way to do things, it’s actually incredibly inefficient and makes the cleaning process take longer period the longer cleaning takes, the more likely it is that you will get burnt out and stop cleaning for awhile. In turn, this can result in your home staying messy and you getting once again overwhelmed with cleaning.

To counteract this, you should combine tasks to make cleaning more efficient overall. What this means is that you should complete the same cleaning task throughout the house rather than limiting yourself to one room.

For example, if you have the vacuum, vacuum the entire house at once--don’t vacuum the bedroom, then move on to making your bed, and so on. Don’t put the vacuum away until you have completed all of the vacuuming. Likewise, if you are decluttering, declutter the entire house at once rather than going room by room. This will keep your mind focused on the task at hand, which improves your productivity.

Create a list (if you need one)

This one is a bit controversial. Some people think that creating a cleaning list is the surest way to become overwhelmed and that people often simply give up if they can’t complete a checklist. However, some people benefit from using cleaning lists because it reminds them of exactly what needs to be done. Whether or not you create a list will depend on your preferences. If you’re the type of person to need a reminder of what exactly you need to do, then go for it--but if you’d rather stick to memory, then that is perfectly fine.

It’s easy to become overwhelmed by cleaning, but if you practice the smarter way to clean your home, you will be on your way to a cleaner house in no time.