Stop the Cleaning Struggle: Use Your “Path of Flow” for a Tidy Home

Feeling overwhelmed trying to keep your Chicago apartment clean while juggling work, life, and everything in between? You’re not alone. Between the daily grind and the Windy City’s hustle, maintaining a tidy home can feel like a constant battle. But what if the secret to a cleaner space wasn’t about working harder, but working smarter? Let’s explore a game-changing method to organize your home around how you actually live, making cleaning feel effortless.

Do you ever look around your home and wonder why keeping it clean feels so difficult? The problem might not be you—it might be your systems. Instead of trying to change your habits, what if you could change your home to support them? This concept is called your “Path of Flow,” and it’s about designing your space around your natural movements to eliminate clutter and friction.

What is a “Path of Flow”?

Think about how you naturally move through your apartment. Where do you drop your keys, mail, or coat when you walk in? Your Path of Flow isn’t about where you *should* put things, but where you *actually* put them. By identifying these natural routes and patterns, you can adapt your home to work for you, not against you. This is the first step to a home that stays clean with less effort.

Map Your Movement: Start with Groceries

A great place to start is your grocery routine. Grab a pen and paper and roughly sketch your home’s layout. Trace the path you take from your front door to the kitchen. Where do you naturally want to set things down? This map isn’t about fancy design—it’s about revealing your authentic flow. Once you see it, you can solve the clutter problems along the way.

The GPS Method: Goals, Problems, Solutions

To optimize your Path of Flow, use the simple GPS method. This three-step process helps you diagnose and fix the friction points in your home.

• Goal: What do you want to achieve in this area? (e.g., “Put away groceries without creating a mess.”)
• Problem: What currently stops you? (e.g., “I drop my mail and keys on the counter because there’s no spot for them by the door.”)
• Solution: How can you adapt the space? (e.g., “Add a small basket for mail and a hook for keys right inside the entrance.”)

By applying GPS, you stop fighting your nature. You simply create “pit stops” along your path where clutter naturally accumulates. This is how you make apartment cleaning feel automatic.

Real-Life Path of Flow Fixes

Let’s walk through some common trouble zones and how GPS can transform them.

1. The Kitchen Cleaning Path

You finish dinner and see crumbs on the floor. If your vacuum is in a closet downstairs, cleaning becomes a 20-minute chore of zigzagging around. The goal is a quick clean-up. The problem is supplies are far away. The solution? Store a compact vacuum and cleaning supplies in a kitchen pantry or cabinet. Now you don’t have to leave the room to clean it, saving you time and energy every single day.

2. The Morning Rush Path

If you share a bathroom, the morning routine can be a traffic jam. The goal is to get ready efficiently. The problem is fighting over sink space and supplies. The solution? Create a secondary “get-ready zone.” Move your makeup or hair tools to a bedroom dresser with a mirror. This declutters the bathroom and gives everyone their own space, making the whole morning smoother.

3. The Laundry Path

Clean laundry often ends up in piles because there’s no “holding zone” between the dryer and drawers. The goal is to put laundry away without it becoming a floor decoration. The problem is no temporary home for clean clothes. The solution? Use labeled, stackable bins in your laundry area or bedroom. Sort directly into each family member’s bin. They can then grab their basket and put it away on their own time. No more nagging, no more tripping over clothes.

Your Home, Your Rules: Embrace the “Lazy” Solution

The beauty of the Path of Flow is that it honors how you actually live. If you always feed the dog in the kitchen corner, put the food container right there. If you always forget socks by the door, keep a “sock bin” in the entryway. It’s not about becoming a more disciplined person; it’s about designing a home that doesn’t require extra discipline. Sometimes, the smartest home cleaning service strategy is to work with your habits, not against them.

When you stop seeing your home as a collection of problems and start seeing it as a map of your life, everything changes. You begin to identify bottlenecks—like a family bathroom that stores all the medicine and towels—and find creative solutions, like dedicating a hall closet to those supplies. This is how you achieve a home that feels calm and functional.

When Your Path Needs a Professional Reset

Even with the best systems, life gets busy. Sometimes, you need a fresh start—a deep, top-to-bottom reset to get your flow back on track. That’s where a trusted Chicago cleaning company can make all the difference. Professional cleaners don’t just scrub surfaces; they give you a blank slate to maintain with your new, efficient systems.

If mapping your flow feels overwhelming, or if you simply don’t have the hours to implement these solutions, consider getting some support. You can easily schedule a cleaning to tackle the built-up grime first. Once your home is spotless, maintaining it with your Path of Flow strategy becomes infinitely easier.

Looking for reliable cleaning services in Chicago? A professional team can provide that initial deep clean, helping you establish a clean baseline so your new organizational systems can thrive. It’s the perfect partnership for a sustainably tidy home.

Start Your Journey to an Easier Home Today

Grab that piece of paper and map one path in your home tonight. Identify one goal, one problem, and one simple solution. You’ll be amazed at how a small change—like a hook for your keys or a basket for mail—can reduce daily stress. And remember, for the bigger resets, there’s no shame in calling in the pros to clean your apartment from top to bottom. The goal is a home that serves you, not one you have to constantly serve.

Do you ever feel like why is life so hard? Why is it hard to maintain my house and the bills and just everything? What if we stop trying to do everything the hard way and instead we find our flow? What if we turn off hard mode, turn on easy mode, and start living the life we actually deserve? And it’s easier than you think. It’s about looking at your space and your life a little bit differently. Your home isn’t broken. Your systems are just fighting your flow. The very best way to describe path of flow is to use your house as a metaphor. Think about how you naturally move through your home, where you naturally drop stuff. Not where you think you’re supposed to, but how you actually live in the space and your path that you take. This is not about you changing yourself. This isn’t about you trying to adapt to your home. It’s about adapting your home to work for you. You don’t need to change, my friend. You just need to adapt your home so that it works. The first thing I want you to think about with your own path of flow is how you enter your house when you’re coming home with groceries. Think about all the things in your hands. Think about the path you travel when you’re going to go put your groceries away. And take a piece of paper and a pen and just literally rough draw your house. It doesn’t have to be fancy, you guys. Draw where you naturally flow and how you naturally move to get to the end goal, which is where the groceries go. Let’s rewind for a second and go back to how I enter my home. I used to have issues with the mail. Now it’s got a clutter catcher, a spot for my keys to go. I’ve adjusted the path, so putting away my shoes is really easy. the gloves, my purse, my coat, everything could be done in a second instead of having piles of clutter everywhere. I don’t want you to try to adapt yourself. We’re going to adapt your home to make this work. And we’re going to do this using the GPS method. GPS stands for goals, problems, and solutions. And we already know the goal is to get from your door to where you put away groceries without making a mess and without wasting time or energy, right? So, what’s the problem? When we first moved into this house, I could never find my keys. I would set them on the kitchen counter or just wherever. I would drop my coat because I didn’t want to put it in the closet. I would never put my shoes on the shoe rack. So, I was always tripping over them. Nothing had a place to go or at least a place to go that was along my path. So, I just kind of dropped it as clutter all over the place and then would have to go back and clean it up later. These are all the problems. So, let’s talk about solutions. That’s the S part. And use your map as a guideline. So along your flow in your room, where can you have a little basket or hook for your P’s? How can you easily kick off your shoes without moving from your path without changing the way you’re moving through your home? Make new homes that are along the way, little pit stops as you would. So you’re still as efficient. You’re not changing anything about yourself or how you live in your home. Your home is changing to meet your needs. So, come with me and we travel some of my paths of flow. We’re going to have the path of flow to putting away groceries, which used to be a little bit more complicated because I would be decanting things and doing all the unnecessary stuff. Now, I can literally just come in and chuck things in the baskets or throw it on the shelf. It’s labeled. It’s easy. And I’m moving on. Another path of flow here in my kitchen is cooking. So this everybody’s got a favorite burner and a favorite side that they stand on. And this is mine. I used to have pots and pans all the way over there. So I was kind of walking back and forth. Now I’ve just moved them here so I don’t have to move my feet. Spices don’t have to move my feet and put things like my cooking utensils. Again, I used to have to walk back and forth. That’s bonkers. The path of flow is where you are naturally standing when you’re doing things. How you’re naturally moving and then move around your house to kind of catch you there. The farthest I have to go now is like the pantry and the fridge. It’s all about laziness. That’s the path. But what about cleaning? Okay, so picture this. It’s late at night. I’m doing the dishes. I’m cleaning the kitchen. I notice crumbs on the ground. I would have to go all the way downstairs to get the vacuum. come back up if I needed to mop again. Downstairs, the cleaning supplies were in the laundry room. I was zigzagging up, down, and all over the place to do something that should have been 5 minutes. So, how did I solve that problem? I created a spot in my kitchen, which I know some of you are like, “Cass, calm down.” No. But I moved the vacuum in the pantry. Listen, I have to adapt to my natural flow. I created this like back of the door for all the rags and the cleaning supplies and all the things that I would normally have to run upstairs, downstairs, and everywhere to get. It’s now along my natural path of flow. So, I don’t have to leave the kitchen to clean the kitchen. This saves me hours, probably years of my life, just making this simple adjustment to my path of flow. The whole concept of path of flow, I actually did in a podcast episode. It was so good. if I say so myself. I’m going to put a link to that down below. And it got me thinking about my own home and my own paths. Some are working ones I’ve shown you. Some are not. So, it’s time to use GPS. Come with me while we solve some problems. You maybe can relate to this. My three kids share a bathroom and it’s a lot of hurry up, I need something. Not fighting over the bathroom, but fighting over the stuff that we store in the bathroom. If someone needs an aspirin or a band-aid or a towel or extra toilet paper, it’s a bottleneck on the path of flow. This is where we go to get those things. And yet, we have a roadblock if any of the three kids are using the washroom, which is crazy. It’s like a traffic jam right here. So, using GPS, the goal is to be able to access the family’s products really easily and efficiently. The problem is they’re in the bathroom that people use to go to the bathroom. So, the solution, move that stuff out. Except where? This is where things get you’re going to roll your eyes. Okay, I have an entire closet dedicated to cat litter. I never would have thought of this because I didn’t look at my house with a path of flow. I wasn’t thinking about GPS. I was just like, well, we fight over the bathroom. But relocating this, like making this a spot that is along our path of flow to get all the supplies we need, that solves so many problems. So, poor Joe, I’m going to make him install some just simple shelving. I’m going to relocate the cat litter and I’m going to give our path actual function with a closet. You might not have a closet that you can dedicate for this, but you probably have things you can declutter. You probably can rearrange. Where is one of those bottlenecks along your path of flow in your home? I am so excited. Like, I don’t know why I didn’t do this so freaking long ago. The toilet paper is the thing I’m most excited about because we go up and down and like all over the place to get toilet paper. Now it’s right here. Towels for the hot tub. If the kids are in, we have to wait before we can get a towel. The pain reliever. The girls fight over their nail polish constantly when one is in the bathroom and one wants to paint their nails. One closet solving so many problems in the house. Like, why didn’t I think of this? Think of your own home. And is there a place you can declutter, rearrange, and just make your life easier? Another path of flow that I’m kind of struggling with is my laundry path. I have this natural flow where dirty clothes go down the laundry shoot and then I take them from the laundry shootute to the washer, transfer to the dryer. When they’re clean, I bring them upstairs here into my master closet. And now comes some of the issue. I don’t have a laundry room. In my old home, I would sort all the clean clothes and I built this like little thing for clean clothes to go and a place to fold. Well, now I don’t fold. and I don’t have a place for clean clothes to go. So, I spread it all over my floor and I sort for family members. So, Abby and Milo and Joe and me and it just becomes a crazy nightmare. And then I have to take the clothes to their room so that I’m not tripping over them here in the master bedroom. And I’m going back and forth, back and forth a million times zigzagging through the house. And now I’ve just given them clutter. Listen, we are not a family to put our laundry away straight out of the dryer. And the whole point is I don’t have to change that. I don’t have to try to become a better person that does that. And if you do, awesome. But I know there’s a lot of families that don’t. We don’t have the time or the motivation or the energy. And so the clean clothes sit and wait. But if you don’t have a place for it to sit and wait, now it’s friction. Now it’s a bump along your path. So here’s what I’m going to do. It’s a simple solution. Get stackable laundry bins right here. So instead of sorting on the floor, I can sort right into the baskets. And instead of moving the clean clothes to the kids’ bedroom and nagging them to put it away, when they’re ready, they can come here and get their basket and easily put it away. I haven’t changed the path of flow, but I’ve eliminated all of the detours. Think about your own laundry system. Are you piling the clean clothes somewhere to put it away later? Is it on top of your dresser or the bed or just in your laundry room? How can you actually give a home? Like create a place for that to go. Use the GPS. The goal is to put away the laundry efficiently. The problem is I don’t put it away right away. The solution creating a simple little landing zone, like a holding spot for clean clothes so it’s not all over the house. I’m so glad I thought of my laundry path a little bit differently and used the GPS method because now I’ve solved a huge issue. Are you ready to rapidfire some examples of path of flow and solving problems using the GPS method? I’m here in my pet zone. I’ve made another video about zoning and neighborhoods and the path of flow really goes with that. Path of flow is just an example of don’t change how you naturally move through your home. If this is where you always feed your dog, don’t change that. That’s your flow. But you can adjust the path just by using GPS. So the goal was to feed the dog here. The problem was I used to have to walk to the pantry or to the garage to get the dog food. The solution actually just adding this little dog food can right here. So I don’t have to move. I can just scoop the food, pour it in, we’re good to go. And that created a whole pet zone. It solves problems without me having to change how I’m naturally doing things in my house. I still have the path of flow. This is where we naturally feed her. I’ve just made it easier and I can be lazier. That’s the whole point. Let’s rapid fire some more. Sock bin. A sock bin in the entrance way. I know I’ve talked about this before, but seriously, our family, we don’t wear shoes in the house, and usually we’re barefoot. Except when we’re on our way to go out the door, we’re like, we need socks with our shoes and we would make a detour all the way back upstairs. Just having family socks right here in case we forgot to put them on. Lifechanging. We don’t have to change ourselves in our forgetfulness. We just have to solve a problem. Here’s the thing. my path of flow, like after I’m done cleaning the kitchen and the kids are going to bed. I flow right here to my bed, not to go to sleep, but to bed rot. I’m not a sit in the living room person, I lay in my bed. And I’m not going to change that about myself. So, the problem was every time I needed something like a book or I was bored and I wanted to solve a Rubik’s cube or pick locks, I would run around the house to get my hobbies. I just made a little hobby catcher right here under the bed. It’s creating like a solution where the problem was my path of flow had a bunch of detours to really enjoy the space. I just adjusted that and now I could bedrot without having to move at all. Life changing. When I first moved in, this felt like the perfect spot for the coffee maker, except the coffee mugs were in with the glasses all the way across the kitchen and the coffee and tea was in the pantry. So, I was zigzagging every time I wanted to make a coffee. Just moving the mugs above the coffee maker. And moving the tea and coffee right here underneath it solves problems. It doesn’t change where and how I make coffee. It just eliminates all those little detours. And that is what this is all about. Our get ready in the morning path of flow means Joe and I get ready at the same time and we were both sharing the bathroom. The problem was we’re both sharing the bathroom, so we were fighting over who could use it. The solution is moving out my makeup and moving out my hair supplies here. I decluttered a dresser. I got this little desk and a makeup light. Man, this is like the ultimate solution. No more fighting over the bathroom. And just zoning this is like I feel special every day while I’m getting ready. You got to try this. So right now I hope you are tracking the paths of flow through your home. Think about those hightraic areas like what’s your path look like when you’re making dinner, putting away laundry, coming in the house. What about when you’re getting ready in the morning? Are you zigzagging through your house? Are you dropping things where you shouldn’t and creating these clutter hotspots? This is what the path of flow is all about. It’s about mapping out your space, identifying those little frictions or problems, and then coming up with a solution. Use your GPS. What’s the goal? What’s the problem? And what is the solution or system that you need? I think so many times we look at our house and we just see problems. We just see it’s too small. I don’t have enough storage. Everything’s everywhere. It’s cluttered. But what if instead we first look at the goal? What is the goal of each path? What is the goal of each room? What is the goal of each zone? And then we can look at the problems a little differently and it opens up our solutions and systems too. So track your path, follow your GPS and I promise your home will be easier. And this entire concept, this path of flow and this using your GPS for goals, problem, solutions, you can apply this to every area of your life, not just your physical home. What’s your path of flow to saving money look like? What is your relationship path of flow? How do you create new habits and goals? You can use this same sort of like technique, not just with the physical. Make sure you subscribe and follow because I’m going to have videos and little shorts coming up that are going to demonstrate how you can do this in other areas of your life, too. You don’t want to miss this. It’s pretty life-changing. So, grab a piece of paper, start mapping your home right now. I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope it gets you to think a little bit differently about your home and your life. And I’ll see you next time. Thank you guys so much. For those of you who have stayed to the end, I thought I’d share like an old story with you. Maybe it’s TMI, but here we go. Disclaimer, if there’s small children in the room, I will be talking about butts and boobs. Butts. Butts and butts and boobs. Okay. So, uh, a couple years ago after I lost weight, my family was making fun of my butt being just just straight from my back to my upper thighs. And I was feeling a little insecure. And I was going to a Christmas party and I bought a gorgeous dress. It was a family Christmas party. But I thought, you know what? I need a Kardashian rear. I need to look popping. And sometimes I’ll wear like a padded bra. So, I thought they got to make padded butts, right? And they do on Amazon. It’s underwear that have butt cheeks inside. And I thought this is going to be amazing. And I wore this to this family Christmas party. Did anyone notice? This is what I get asked. No, my uncle did not point out my popping butt, but I’m sure I still looked fab. Except the next day, I couldn’t really walk or move. And the day after that, it was pure agony. Like the worst pain I’d ever felt, shooting down my leg and up my back. I thought I was going to die. I went to the chiropractor. I had inflamed my sciatica by sitting on a fake butt and wearing this fake butt. The pressure from the fake butt broke my real butt. So, this is my PSA to you. Fake boobs. Okay. Fake butt. Not. Well, I wonder if like a Brazilian gives you the like a is that a Brazilian is a waxing? I need to be I wonder if a buttlft also breaks your butt. I The point of this story is no matter how much you want to wear a fake butt, don’t do it. I need to leave an Amazon review to warn other people. But this is my PSA to you. I probably looked great, though. I’m just going to walk out of frame.