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What is ADHD?

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is marked by an ongoing pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development. [1]

If you are over 18 and you have at least three symptoms shown in the picture above, check with your doctor as you might have ADHD.

Chores and ADHD.

If you have ADHD, you must know that doing chores is the worst of all, because your brain finds it boring and hard to focus on one task at the time. Not to talk about procrastination, which damages you even more. Here are a few tricks on making chores more fun and stimulate your brain to do so.

Competition

This one is good, as I tried a few times before. Set the timer on your phone for 15 minutes on each task. Your brain will be tricked into thinking that this is a competition and focus easier on every task you have to do. If you are living with someone, make a race with them, get rewards for your competition. Example: The first one to finish cleaning the bedroom gets a cookie. Your brain wants rewards for its actions.

Novelty, Humor, and Play

Put together a selection of the songs that get you motivated. If you are getting organized with another person, make sure that the music takes both people’s taste into consideration. Playing music while you clean, get organized, and make plans gives your brain that jolt of dopamine it needs to stay engaged. And you can always take a moment to dance!

To help you with your decluttering efforts and with ADHD and house cleaning, you should also consider using bins for organization. Clutter happens because we don’t put things where they really belong. Over time then, we just collect piles of stuff without a place for it to go.

To fight clutter before it begins, get some clear plastic bins and put them in a closet or storage area in your house. Label the bins with general categories. Categories could include “mail” or “things from work” or “books.” If you can’t think of general categories, look through your own clutter and make a list of what things collect around your home. Those things that end up in piles everywhere should be the categories for your bins.

After you have the bins and categories, start putting your current cluttered items in the correct bins. Once you fill up a particular bin, you then need to empty it. Clean a full bin out by going through it and throwing out what you don’t need and finding a permanent storage spot for what you want to keep. You can continue with this process over and over as you go through your clutter and as you bring more things home.

Whenever you bring something else home that you don’t already have a spot for, make sure it goes in a bin. The bins then can act as a holding spot until you can find something to do with the extra stuff. This way you don’t create more clutter and you don’t stress yourself out always having to clean and find spots for everything. The whole idea should be to make the organization simple enough that you can do it without thinking about it.

Another great thing to remember when it comes to ADHD and house cleaning is that if you don’t plan to clean, you won’t ever do it. We all lead busy lives, and we all have tons of excuses for why we can’t get something done. When it comes to house cleaning, for most all of us, we always have something else we’d rather do. If we don’t schedule time for house cleaning then, we will almost always do something else instead.

In order to create a cleaning schedule, you should think along the lines of what you need to clean daily, weekly, and monthly. You don’t need to clean everything in your house everyday or every week even. For some things, like a hall closet you rarely use, you don’t even need to clean it once a month.

For your cleaning schedule then, you should sit down and list out the cleaning tasks that you normally need to complete into whether they are daily, weekly, or monthly tasks. After you have your categories and your tasks assigned, then put them on an actual calendar that you can see every day.

With your calendar, you can then refer to it every day or once a week to see what needs to happen. You then can make sure you tackle the appropriate cleaning task by setting aside time during the week to get it done. If you have kids or a spouse, you can assign each person a task each day to complete.

By breaking up tasks and assigning them set aside space in your regular schedule, you can learn to make a priority of house cleaning. Over time, ADHD and house cleaning won’t be so much of a problem because you are used to doing a little bit each day.

Another reason we run into issues with ADHD and house cleaning is because we lose track of what we have done and what we have yet to do. The ADHD brain quickly moves from one thing to the next with little time to focus or reflect. This quick processing means we can lose track of where we are with our tasks.

To keep yourself from losing track, you should have a cleaning chart. This chart should work alongside your cleaning schedule that you already have developed. With the schedule, your goal was to list out all the cleaning tasks that you need to get done. With the chart, you can take those same tasks and mark off whether or not they were completed as scheduled.

You can design a weekly breakdown for your chart. You can create a chart with a dry erase board. This way you can clean and update the board each week without having to throw it away and start all over.

With the chart, at the beginning of the week, you can write in the tasks that you plan to get done. As you complete the tasks, you can mark them off one by one. Each person helping with the tasks then can see what has been completed and what is still left to go.

This way, you won’t have to guess whether or not someone vacuumed the living room. You can always just refer back to the chart. The cleaning chart should help to take away some of the headache of tracking your house cleaning progress. In the end, with the chart in place you should have one less thing to worry about at home.