I Tried the 20/10 Rule, and It Changed the Way I Clean Forever
Cleaning and maintaining your home efficiently is crucial to ensuring that the means doesn’t overshadow the ends. You don’t want to spend so much time and energy making sure your home is a peaceful space that you never get to sit down and enjoy simply living there. You want to get the most impact for the least amount of time spent (even if you’re someone who enjoys cleaning and organizing like I do).
That’s why I love homekeeping productivity tips, and I’m always willing to test them out. For instance, I enjoyed experimenting with the 6/10 method for daily and weekly cleaning, and I’m constantly on the lookout for laundry strategies. So when I recently read about the 20/10 rule, I was intrigued.
What is the 20/10 rule?
Rachel Hoffman writes about the concept in her book Unf*ck Your Habitat. The 20/10 rule involves breaking up your task into a work time of 20 minutes followed by a nonnegotiable 10-minute break. The main idea is to train your brain to associate cleaning with reward.
How I Tried the 20/10 Rule
For me, a clean space is the reward, and I actually enjoy cleaning and organizing most of the time. Transforming a mess into an orderly environment truly calms me, maybe almost as much as the result. However, breaking up my task, which was cleaning out my disaster of a primary closet, into 20-minute chunks of work followed by 10 minutes of rest definitely had other benefits.
First off, it got me out of the inertia that kept me procrastinating the task for many weeks. Rather than cleaning up the closet when it got messy, I kept tossing laundry baskets of clean and dirty clothes (yes, they got mixed up) and other things I didn’t want in the bedroom on top of what was already there. The mess became overwhelming to address. But knowing that I only had to commit to 20 minutes of working on the closet as opposed to cleaning the whole closet out made facing the task manageable. I started, and momentum began to build.
Secondly, approaching the project knowing that I was going to do it in 20-minute chunks broken up by intermittent 10-minute breaks meant that I didn’t just completely give up when the inevitable interruptions came. In fact, I couldn’t finish the clean-out in one day because there was dinner to make and the kids who needed me. But I didn’t feel discouraged; instead, the next time I had a 20-minute window of time available, I picked up where I left off. Instead of giving up, I made steady progress.
Although for me the power of the 20/10 rule was less about associating cleaning with reward and more about maintaining a positive attitude throughout my project, the effect was still psychological and impactful. The perspective shift enabled by enforcing breaks meant that I could roll with the inevitable interruptions without feeling frustrated. I could chip away at the project consistently, even as daily life happened, and eventually finish it without feeling like the continual interruptions were thwarting me.
The Final Results
The result was that I approached with a mindset that meshed with how larger household projects naturally unfold — and I actually got this project finished. Of course I am so happy with my cleaned-out closet, but I’m also thankful for this new strategy that allows me to take on larger tasks while regular daily life unfolds. Ultimately, this means I can maintain and even improve our home space steadily, with realistic expectations.
Further Reading
I Just Discovered the Smartest Way to Store Paper Towels in Your Kitchen (It’s a Game-Changer!)
See How a Stager Used Paint to Transform a 1950s Living Room
