10 Simple Habits That Will Keep Your Chicago Home Clean (Without the Stress)

Between work, family, and enjoying everything Chicago has to offer, keeping your space clean can feel like a constant battle. If you’re tired of staring at clutter when you just want to relax, you’re not alone. The secret to a consistently clean home isn’t about marathon cleaning sessions—it’s about building smart, sustainable habits.

1. Always Be Editing (A.B.E.)

Clutter has a way of accumulating when we’re not looking. The “Always Be Editing” habit is all about being proactive with your possessions. As you tidy a space, don’t just move piles around—edit them. That stack of magazines, the clothes you haven’t worn in a year, or the items collecting dust on your console table all need a second look.

Editing means deciding what stays and what goes. Items can be recycled, donated, or simply thrown away. This habit keeps your space feeling open and manageable. If you need deep cleaning help to tackle years of accumulated stuff, a professional team can make the process effortless.

2. Keep Horizontal Surfaces Clear

Here’s a truth I’ve lived by for years: messes are magnetic. A cluttered countertop or table almost invites more clutter. The habit to build here is keeping these surfaces as clear as possible.

I get it—your dining table might double as a home office right now. The goal isn’t perfection, but awareness. When you consciously keep horizontals clear, they become “demagnetized” and stop attracting random items. This simple shift makes any apartment cleaning feel instantly more organized.

3. Establish Your Daily Non-Negotiables

What cleaning tasks make your blood boil if they’re left undone? These are your daily non-negotiables—and they’re different for everyone.

For me, it’s vacuuming the kitchen floor (thanks to our cat and daughter) and running the dishwasher. When these don’t happen, our kitchen backs up “like a busy highway.” Identify your high-traffic zones and what needs to happen daily to keep them functional. Can’t keep up? Fast cleaning services can handle these daily essentials so you can focus on your life.

How to Identify Your Non-Negotiables

• Notice which messy areas cause you the most stress
• Focus on high-traffic spaces like kitchens and entryways
• Choose tasks that take 5 minutes or less to complete
• Schedule them at consistent times each day

4. Create a “Way Station” for Clutter

We all have items we’re not ready to part with but don’t currently need. Instead of letting them clutter your living space, create a “way station”—a designated holding area for these in-between items.

Try this with a junk drawer: empty everything into a box and use that as your drawer for three months. Anything you pull from the box goes back in the actual drawer. After three months, whatever remains in the box can probably go. This system takes the emotion out of decluttering.

5. Practice O.H.I.O. (Only Handle It Once)

This brilliant acronym stands for “Only Handle It Once.” How often do you come home and drop mail, bags, or packages “to deal with later”? OHIO teaches us to deal with items in the moment.

Whether it’s groceries, laundry, or the day’s mail, take the extra minute to put things where they truly belong. This prevents the “I’ll deal with it later” pile-up that makes spaces feel instantly messy. If you’re overwhelmed by catch-up tasks, a cleaning service near me can provide the fresh start you need to maintain this habit.

6. Use Cleaning Tools You Actually Love

If you dread using your cleaning supplies, you’ll dread cleaning. Invest in tools you enjoy using and take time to learn how to use them properly.

I follow the “buy once, buy well” philosophy with cleaning tools. Quality tools that feel good in your hand and work effectively make the process more pleasant. When you have the right equipment and know how to use it, you’re more likely to maintain your space.

7. Develop Your Cleaning System

Having a system turns cleaning from a daunting task into an automatic process. When I started my cleaning business, creating systems was essential for efficiency and quality.

I developed the “Three-Wave System” that cut my cleaning time in half. Whether you use this method or create your own, the key is consistency. A good system lets you go on autopilot and get great results every time. Sometimes the best system is knowing when to call a professional home cleaning team to handle the heavy lifting.

8. Time-Box Your Cleaning Sessions

Cleaning can feel endless if you don’t set boundaries. I use time-boxing by pairing cleaning with entertainment—I’ll clean for the duration of a podcast or album.

Knowing I only have to clean for 30 or 40 minutes makes the task feel manageable. When the podcast ends, I’m done. This approach makes regular maintenance feel less overwhelming and more achievable.

9. Share the Responsibility

If multiple people contribute to the mess, multiple people should help with cleaning. This includes everyone in the household, regardless of age.

Young children can bring dishes to the dishwasher or put clothes in hampers. Teens and adults can handle more significant tasks. Start the conversation gently and build shared habits over time. When everyone contributes, no single person bears the burden alone.

10. Give Yourself Grace

Your home doesn’t need to be perfect. On my best days, my house is a 7 out of 10—and I’m a cleaning expert!

Forgive yourself when things aren’t perfect. Do what you can and release the guilt about the rest. Comparing your home to impossible standards only creates stress. Remember that maintaining a home is an ongoing process, not a destination.

Making Habits Stick in Your Chicago Home

Start with one or two habits that resonate with you. Maybe it’s implementing OHIO or establishing your non-negotiables. Small, consistent actions create big changes over time.

If you’re struggling to maintain your space amidst a busy Chicago schedule, remember that help is available. As a local Chicago cleaning company, we understand the unique challenges of keeping Chicago homes clean through every season.

Whether you need someone to clean your apartment regularly or want to schedule a cleaning for a fresh start, quality cleaning services in Chicago can complement your habits and ensure your space always feels welcoming.

If you want a clean home all the time, I have found the secret. It’s simple and it works. It’s habits. Now, as someone who struggles with cleaning to this day, I can tell you habits are the only form of permanence that we can create. And if we have good habits at home to keep our spaces clean, we are going to live in a clean space. It’s that simple. So, in this video, I’m going to share with you the 10 habits that I use to keep my house clean. And again, it’s not perfect, but it works well for me. And if you’re new here, welcome to Clean My Space. My name is Melissa Maker. I’m an accidental cleaning expert, which means I help me and you find the most efficient and effective ways to get your cleaning and organizing done right the first time. And give this video a thumbs up for good habits. And just a quick reminder, if you haven’t done so already to subscribe to the Clean MySpace channel. And by the way, this video is brought to you by Makerscle. You can check it out at makerscle.com or makerscle.ca. It’s our sister company where we sell premium microfiber cleaning tools and more. I haven’t figured out cute acronyms for all of these habits, but I have for some. And this one’s acronym is Abe, always be editing. And this speaks to the importance of decluttering or kind of finding things that are just out of place or don’t belong in your home anymore. Few great examples. If you’re tidying a space, rather than just glossing over a pile of something, edit that pile. For example, we get magazine subscriptions and we have to constantly edit that so that it’s not a big increasingly large pile of magazines. The same thing can go for clothing or things that you have on your counter or that you stick on the little console table that you have at home when you’re coming in. Editing is key. It helps to keep a space tidy and it helps to keep the things out of your home that you no longer need. It might mean that something gets recycled, put in the garbage, donated, or sent off somewhere else where it can meet its highest and best use that’s probably no longer in your home. For a long time, I’ve had this saying which goes, “Messes are magnetic or mess attracts mess.” And when a horizontal surface like a counter or a table has clutter built up on it, it is very easy to just take one more item and put it there. You’ll deal with it later. And that is precisely how we get cluttered surfaces. So the habit to get into is to keep your horizontal surfaces clean or as clean as possible. Now I understand you might be working from home. Your dining room table might now be your desk. But the idea is to keep these horizontals at horizontal surfaces as free from mess as possible. That way they become demagnetized and they won’t attract more crap. The habit I want you to think about for this is to come up with your daily non-negotiable tasks. What are these? They’re what make your blood boil on a daily basis. And this is going to be different for you than it is for me than it is for your nextdoor neighbor because we all live different lives and different things piss different people off. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. If you work from home and your kitchen table is your workspace, maybe your non-negotiable is that your kitchen table has to be cleaned at the end of each day. Couple of my non-negotiables, the kitchen floor. It gets a mess every single day. We’ve got a cat, we’ve got a daughter, it just gets messy. So, we vacuum this floor every single day. It takes a couple of minutes. Makes a difference. The same thing with unloading the dishwasher. It has to be done in the morning. It has to be run through at night. When it is not done, this area backs up like a busy highway and it becomes ridiculous. The kitchen instantly looks messy. So, figure out what those areas or zones are in your home. They’re generally hightraic spaces. Figure out what your non-negotiables are for you. Carve out a little bit of time. You will feel like you’re in so much more control of your space and your home will feel just that much better. Most people I speak to admit that they have too much clutter in their home, but it’s hard to get rid of. And I get it. And that’s why a long time ago, we created what’s called a way station in our home, which is like a safe holding zone for the items that we think we’re ready to get rid of, but we’re not quite sure if we want to part with just yet. So, a way station is a space where you can put those items, park them. If you need them, you can go get them. but every 3 months or 6 months, whatever interval you determine, you can then take those items that you’re no longer using and send them off to their next highest and best use. And if you want a challenge, if you want to try this and see how it works, start with something small like a junk drawer. Dump everything that you have in that junk drawer into a box. Have that box replace your junk drawer for three months, let’s say. Now, anytime you need something from your junk drawer, you can pull it out of that box and place it back in the actual drawer. But at the end of say that 3 months, anything that hasn’t been used, you probably don’t need it. So, that can then go. And this teaches you the concept of a way station and how it works. So, I’d love to know in the comments down below, do you have a junk drawer? And does it need a little bit of a junk drawer overhaul? Now, I can’t take credit for this acronym because I heard it many years ago and I can’t remember the exact source, but Ohio stands for only handle it once. And what this basically means is when you enter a space and you’ve got stuff in your hands, it’s so easy and so tempting to put it down and deal with it later. But Ohio tells us that while we’re dealing with something, we don’t get the luxury of putting it down because, as we know, things tend to not happen later. They always get pushed off to another time and then they sit and pile up and collect dust and make a mess and so on. So what Ohio teaches us to do is to deal with that item in the moment. Whether it’s a pile of laundry, groceries when we come in, or you know, for me, Ohio is so big for when I come into the house, I often have a whole bunch of things. So rather than just dropping it down and going on and dealing with other things, I put everything away. The habit I want you to get into when it comes to selecting your cleaning tools is to get stuff that you love. Because stuff that you love is stuff that you’re going to use. And on top of that, when you get the stuff that you love, learn how to use it proficiently. That way, you’re going to be efficient. You’ll actually want to use it because you know how to do the task at hand, and you’re going to absolutely nail it. The stuff I have been talking about for years is more often than not the stuff that I still talk about to this day. And you know, I am the first person to tell you when you should not be spending your money on a new thing. And that’s because there are so many great cleaning tools that are out there that do the job right. And I always talk about buy once, buy well. That really applies to cleaning tools. Get stuff that you love. Learn how to use it. You will be more inclined to clean and you will do a better job. I can tell you that as someone who started a professional cleaning business and had no previous cleaning experience, creating a system was imperative for me to become successful. Meaning, for me to be great at the job and to do it in the least amount of time possible where I could both satisfy the client and also be efficient with my time so that my business could make money. And then what I did with that system was I translated it into what we now call the three-wave system, which I’ve talked about for years. And the three-wave system had cut my cleaning time in half. Now, what we did, because we’ve been talking about this for years, is we decided to go deep on the three-wave system. We’ve gotten so many questions about it. How do you do this exact thing or what should I do in this particular scenario? So, we put a very comprehensive ebook together about the three-wave system. And anyone who I’ve shared this with in depth has it’s changed them. It’s changed the way that they clean. So, if you’re interested in learning about the three-wave system in depth, you can check out this ebook and we’ll also put some other videos down below that talk about the three-wave system so you can learn more. But the habit you need to get into when it comes to cleaning is to create a system, whatever that is, so that you can go on autopilot and get the job done well repeatedly. Because I find cleaning to be dreadful, the only way that I can make it somewhat manageable for myself is to give myself a set amount of time. That way, it doesn’t feel like it’s this nebulous task that I’m going to have to do for however long it takes me to get done. Instead, I pair my cleaning with some sort of entertaining listen so that I know I have x amount of time to do the cleaning that I have allocated based on what I’ve chosen to listen to. So, for example, I will pick a podcast. Say it’s 20, 30, 40 minutes. I know I have that much time to do my laundry, clean the kitchen, whatever the case may be. When that podcast is over, I am no longer going to be cleaning. And at least at least my brain has been entertained while I am engaging in the thing I truly like doing the least. I truly believe that cleaning shouldn’t fall on one person’s shoulders if everyone’s contributing to the mess. Everyone should help clean up the mess. And that goes for everyone right up the chain, no matter how old you are. Even young kids, if they can figure out how to use cell phones or tablets, they can figure out how to bring their dishes over to the dishwasher or to take their stuff and put it away in their drawer or to take their clothes and put them in a laundry hamper. Now, I know this can be harder to do with adults or teenagers, but it’s just starting the conversation. Start it gently. Start where you are, but get into the habit of talking about cleaning habits because eventually they’ll stick. Give yourself space. Forgive yourself. If your house isn’t perfect, it’s okay. Even my house, I think it’s hilarious when people say, “Oh, Melissa, your house must be perfect because this is what you do.” I always say, like, “My house, if you were to step in on an average to really good day, would be like a seven out of 10. I don’t want to spend all my time cleaning.” So, I do as much as I can and then I forgive myself for the rest. And it took me a while to get to that place, but I can tell you it’s so much easier being here than it is trying to compare myself to some perfect standard that I’m never going to meet. So, there you go. 10 different habits that you can try, whether it’s one or whether it’s all 10 of them. That will make a really big difference in terms of how easy and simple it is for you to keep your home clean, tidy, and organized. And that brings me to this week’s comment question, which is, what is the one habit that you are going to start doing today? Let me know what that is in the comments down below. Not only is it going to help you feel more committed, but it’s going to help other people, too. So, fill up those comments. If you like all things cleaning and organizing, or you’re trying to get in on that, uh you can subscribe to my email newsletter. It’s called The Dirty Dish, and it is all things cleaning and organizing related, product reviews, recommendations, tips, tricks, and more. I’ve got a link for you to subscribe down below. You can also become a member here at the Clean MySpace YouTube channel if you want to support the work that we do. And if you’re feeling inspired to create your own cleaning routine, you can check out this video right here, which teaches you exactly how to do that. Thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you next