During this time of year, it’s cold and dark, and nothing’s worse than leaving your warm room to do laundry in the drafty basement or having to grab the bulky communal vacuum from across the dorm. However, it’s more important now than ever to keep your living space clean; having a tidy room can improve your mental well-being while making everything much easier to find and manage. Your mornings will be so much better when, upon opening your eyes, you see everything is supposed to be where it is, as opposed to it being strewn all over the floor.
I, for one, definitely need to clean my room; as a way to motivate myself, here are some ways I start picking away at the mess to prevent the vicious cycle of avoiding cleaning from taking hold:
- After you’re done wearing something for the day, put it away. Do not–I repeat, do not–leave it on a chair, for example, thinking that it’s not clean enough to hang up but also not dirty enough to wash; if you can wear it again, it can be put away nicely. Else, to the hamper it goes. Putting away huge amounts of clothing can seem daunting; three items or so at the end of the day, not so much.
- Have a vacuuming schedule. I find that vacuuming once a week seems to do the trick; dorms are quite small, and it takes a maximum of ten minutes to cover all 100 square feet. Your room will look so much nicer without random bits of lint and hair in corners–it makes all the difference.
- On a similar note, be smart about laundry. It seems as though whenever I do my laundry, ten other people have the same idea. It’s even worse when people take your clothes out of the machines and dump it on a ledge during busy hours. To avoid this, try to notice when the machines aren’t busy. Nights and weekends are a common time to do laundry; do you have a free afternoon one day or a late morning on another? If so, those are great times to take advantage of the empty machines.
Also, it helps a lot to put away clothing as soon as you bring it upstairs from the dryer; if I don’t do so, for example, it could take me days to put everything in the right drawers.
- Make your bed, or at least straighten out your covers. It relaxes me so much to jump into a made bed at the end of the day, as opposed to a knotted mess of sheet, top sheet, and duvet.
- Make sure you do your dishes often. Nothing is more disgusting than a pile of dirty dishes sitting on top of your microwave, contaminating the air with the smell of rotten food. It might be annoying to walk all the way over to the kitchen sink after your midnight snack, but it’s worth it.
Everyone has different methods for keeping their living spaces clean, but above all, consistency is key. You’ll be much happier cleaning for five minutes a day than for an hour every week after letting the mess accumulate.