Cleaning for People Who Hate Cleaning: A Chicago-Friendly Guide

Let’s be real: life in Chicago moves fast. Between work, family, and trying to actually enjoy our amazing city, finding the time and motivation for a thorough apartment cleaning can feel like a losing battle. If the very thought of scrubbing fills you with dread, you’re not alone. This guide is for everyone who views cleaning as a necessary chore, not a hobby. We’re sharing smart, psychological tricks and efficient strategies to help you reclaim your time and your space—without the overwhelm.

Confession time: I started a cleaning business, but I don’t always love to clean. If you’re nodding your head, welcome to the club. This isn’t about becoming a cleaning enthusiast overnight. It’s about finding smarter, faster ways to get the job done so you can get back to living your life. Whether you need a quick refresh or some serious deep cleaning help, these strategies are designed for real life in the Windy City.

1. Set a Clear, Time-Bound Goal

The biggest demotivator is feeling like a task is endless. Instead of saying “I need to clean the apartment,” try “I will clean the living room for 45 minutes.” Setting a specific, achievable goal—whether it’s a room, a surface, or a time limit—creates a finish line. Meeting that goal feels empowering and makes the work manageable, turning a vague chore into a concrete win.

2. Identify Your “Most Important Areas” (MIAs)

You don’t have to clean everything with equal fervor. Focus your energy on the spaces that cause you real stress. Walk through your home and notice your physical reaction. Does a messy kitchen spike your anxiety? That’s an MIA. Is a slightly dusty spare room a non-issue? Let it go for now. Prioritizing your MIAs means you’re cleaning what matters most to your peace of mind. For the rest, a reliable cleaning service near me can be a game-changer for those occasional deep cleans.

How to Find Your MIAs:

• Listen to your body: Does a cluttered space make your heart race or your shoulders tense?
• Assess daily impact: Which rooms do you and your family use constantly?
• Let go of guilt: You don’t have to maintain influencer-level perfection in every corner.

3. Simplify Your Cleaning Arsenal

Standing in the cleaning aisle, overwhelmed by options, is a recipe for frustration. You don’t need a cabinet full of specialized products. Go back to basics: soap, water, vinegar, baking soda, and hydrogen peroxide can handle most household tasks. Making your own solutions is cost-effective and eliminates decision fatigue. Save your energy for the cleaning, not the product selection.

4. Do the Dreaded Task First

We all have that one job we avoid (hello, scrubbing the shower!). Do it first. Getting your least favorite task out of the way creates momentum and makes everything else feel easier by comparison. It’s a psychological win that powers you through the rest of your list.

5. Invest in Quality Tools

Flimsy tools make you work harder. If you dislike cleaning, it’s worth investing in a good vacuum, sturdy microfiber cloths, and a reliable mop. Better tools do more of the work for you, leading to better results with less effort. Think of it as hiring a little mechanical help.

6. Eliminate Distractions

Our phones are the ultimate productivity killers. When it’s time to clean, put your phone in another room, turn on a podcast or playlist, and focus. The less you’re distracted, the faster you’ll finish. This turns cleaning into a focused session, not a day-long ordeal of procrastination.

7. “Stack” Your Cleaning Tasks

Multitask your chores to save huge amounts of time. This is the core of efficient cleaning. Spray a cleaner on a dirty stovetop and let it sit (this is called pre-treating). While the product works, you can unload the dishwasher, wipe down counters, or start a load of laundry. By the time you circle back, the dirt wipes away easily. Stacking tasks condenses cleaning into powerful, efficient blocks.

8. Don’t Over-Clean

Not every nook and cranny needs daily attention. Be honest about your own standards. If you’re someone who wants a clean home but doesn’t want to live with a scrub brush in hand, that’s perfectly okay. Focus on maintenance in your MIAs and don’t compare your routine to anyone else’s. Sometimes, the best solution is to schedule a cleaning with a pro for the big jobs.

9. Learn the Right Techniques (The Trifecta)

Frustration often comes from not knowing *how* to clean effectively. Success lies in the trifecta: the right products, the right tools, and the right techniques. A little research can save hours of wasted effort. Learning a systematic approach—like cleaning top-to-bottom, or dry-before-wet—gives you a roadmap so you’re not wasting time or energy.

10. Lower Expectations & Get Help When Needed

This is crucial. Life gets hectic, especially in a busy city like Chicago. After having a baby, during a big work project, or just during a tough week, it’s okay to lower your standards and get help. Hiring a professional home cleaning service isn’t a luxury; it’s an investment in your sanity and time. As a premier Chicago cleaning company, we see it every day: giving yourself permission to get help is a guilt-free way to maintain a clean, peaceful home.

The goal isn’t to fall in love with cleaning. It’s to stop dreading it. By working smarter, focusing on what matters, and giving yourself grace, you can maintain a home that feels good without it consuming your life. And remember, for those times when you just need someone to clean my apartment thoroughly and efficiently, professional cleaning services in Chicago are just a click away.

Some people who watch these videos, they love to clean and I love that for them. But I fall into the other category where I hate to clean. I struggle with it. Even though I started a cleaning business in 2006, and I’ve been making cleaning YouTube videos since 2012. To this day, I still find it hard sometimes to feel motivated, inspired, or excited to clean. So, if you fall into that bucket, which I’m willing to bet is a larger bucket than the bucket of people who love to clean. I mean, if you love to clean, you’re going to love this video, too. But if you’re in the big bucket of people who don’t love to clean, this video is for you. I’m going to show you tips and tricks and ways to trick your brain and get the cleaning done anyway, even if you find it a struggle. And if you’re new here, welcome to Clean My Space. My name is Melissa Maker. I’m an accidental cleaning expert, and now you know why. And my whole job here on YouTube is to help you find the most efficient and effective ways to get your cleaning done right the first time. So if you are not already, make sure that you subscribe to the Clean MySpace channel. Part of the reason I hate cleaning is because sometimes it just feels like the neverending story. That’s why if you want to get something done, set a goal. Whether it’s a surface, a room, or an amount of time that you’re going to spend dedicating to cleaning, just set yourself a goal. Meet that goal and it actually helps you feel better and more empowered about the work that you’re doing. I know for me, if I just said, I have to clean my room, that means it could be for a day. I could be so frustrated. I’ll get distracted. I’ll waste my time. I won’t know how to get the job done. Whereas, if I set a goal, I’m going to clean my room and I’m giving myself one hour to do it. Well, now we are talking business and that makes the job much easier for me to get done. The best way to maximize the time you spend cleaning is to spend time cleaning the things that are most important to you. I don’t think there’s value in cleaning something that doesn’t necessarily bother you, but just something that you kind of think you’re supposed to clean cuz your mother-in-law cleans it or someone you watched on TikTok cleans it. No, no. You need to think about your MIAs or your most important areas. And the best way I can describe this is feel your body’s physical reaction when you’re present in that space. So if I’m in this kitchen and I see it and it is a messy disaster, my heart rate increases. I start to get anxious like I feel it. So I know if my kitchen is messy, it’s an MIA. It’s one of my most important areas. But my dining room, I mean the room we use the least on this floor of the house, I couldn’t give two hoots about that. And if it is not clean on a random Tuesday, it is not going to affect my day or my heart rate. So when I get to it, I get to it, but I’m not going to focus on it on a daily basis. And that’s what I want you to do. Really think about those areas that are important, and that’s where you’re going to focus your efforts. You can I’m not saying you never have to clean those other areas, but you can let go of the feeling that you need to clean those areas all the time. Something that leads to the disdain of cleaning is the overwhelm of deciding the cleaning products to choose. And that’s why I recommend just slimming it down and going back to basics. You can do so much cleaning with just soap and water. And if you add a few pantry staples in like vinegar, baking soda, and hydrogen peroxide, well, that’s a first aid kit staple, but you get what I’m saying. You can even accomplish more cleaning. In fact, we have a DIY recipe book that you can click on. It’s down below. It’s DIY cleaning recipes that we’ve created and we’ve tweaked over the years. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on these. You can make them for pennies and they get the job done. I know so many folks stand in that cleaning aisle kind of bewildered trying to decide what to get and that just makes the cleaning process frustrating. So take it back to basics. Make your own cleaning products. Only buy what you absolutely need and that will help to reduce your frustration. If there’s a cleaning task you’re dreading the most, do that one first because once it’s out of the way, everything else will feel so much easier. What I’m talking about here are the tools, your sponges, your brushes, your vacuums, your mops, your brooms, etc. Those are the things that will enable you to clean more efficiently and effectively. Now, if you’re picking up inexpensive kind of flimsy cleaning tools, you have to work harder to compensate for the crappy quality of your tools. And as someone that hates cleaning, that frustrates me. I actually find it worth my money to buy the better quality stuff that’s going to work a little bit harder so I don’t have to. We exist in a very distracting world and for someone who has to do something that they don’t love doing, it’s very easy to choose the distraction and procrastinate on the work we have set out to do. Which is why when I clean, I have a pretty steadfast rule. I put in my AirPods, I turn on a podcast, and I put my phone where I can’t see it because that way I just focus on the task and I’m not distracted by my phone or my watch. And sometimes what I’ll do is actually turn my phone or watch on do not disturb so that I’m not distracted by texts or calls or anything of that nature because that will then take me away from the work I’m doing and the work I want to spend the least amount of time doing. The more I’m distracted, the more I have to prolong the pain of cleaning. If you don’t like cleaning, figure out ways to stack your cleaning tasks on top of one another so you don’t have to spend a whole bunch of time doing things that could have been condensed into one cleaning session. For example, I often talk about the importance of pre-treating a surface. That means finding a dirty surface, spraying it with a product, whether it’s a cleaner or a disinfectant, and letting that product sit for the correct amount of time, for that product to do the heavy lifting for you. That way, you don’t have to spend time scrubbing, and the product will do what it was intended to do, which is lift that dirt or kill that bacteria. Now, while that’s happening, you can accomplish so many other things. In fact, when I’m cleaning, I will pre-treat my surfaces, unload the dishwasher, put things away. So, by the time I get back to that surface that’s been pre-treated, I have to do less work. I just have to wipe the surface down instead of having to scrub or work a little bit harder. Think about it. When it comes to laundry, you can throw a load of laundry in, run through your dishwasher, get a few tasks done, and stack them instead of spreading them out over a period of time. I’m likely one of the few people on the internet who talk about cleaning that will say this, don’t overclean. I think so many people online love creating all of this cleaning content and they are cleaning things that don’t need to be cleaned or they’re spending way too much time cleaning something. In my opinion, that’s just a waste of time. I think cleaning is something that has to be done and should be paid no more attention to. And with that being said, I also know that there is a spectrum of cleaning emotions. Some of us care deeply about cleaning. Some of us barely care about cleaning, hate doing it, don’t want to think about it, and want to do the bare minimum. Be honest with yourself, know where you fall. And if you’re kind of like me and you’re over here, don’t feel that you’re obligated to spend the same amount of time that the people over here spend. When I teach cleaning, there’s a trifecta. Products, tools, and techniques. I think if you know those three things, you can accomplish anything when it comes to cleaning or in fact when it comes to mastering any task. As long as you know the products, tools, and techniques that you need, you can get the job done. And when I think about what really upset me about cleaning when I was growing up and even when I was starting my business, like why I had this negative visceral reaction to it, it’s because I was frustrated. I didn’t know how to do it and I would attempt it. I would waste my time. I wouldn’t know how to get the job done. I wasn’t getting great results and it just felt crummy. So, my recommendation if you hate cleaning is to spend a few minutes and research the technique. We have tons of videos on how to do that. Almost 800. We also have an ebook that’s available. I’ll put it in the link down below for you called the three-wave system. And it basically teaches the method that I use to clean any room in a home. I go on autopilot. It’s how I train my cleaning staff. It’s called the three-wave system, and it is amazing because it gives you that strategy. It gives you those techniques so that you know what you have to do and you’re not wasting any more time. As soon as I figured out this strategy, I felt way calmer. I don’t want to say I hated cleaning any less, but I just didn’t get that same level of frustration anymore. You live your life. You have your people, your job, your circumstances, your community. It is really hard to live a life where you are comparing yourself to other people. Whether it’s a neighbor, a friend, a family member, or for heaven’s sake, an influencer. Remember, influencers jobs are to make it look like they are cleaning all the time and they live in a perfect home. I mean, not me. I don’t ever try to espouse that. But so many people in this space, that is what they try to do. And what does it do for the average viewer? It makes them feel bad about themselves. So, no, let that go. Let go of what other people are doing and just focus on you and what you can do today. I’ll give you a perfect example. Sometimes I’ll get messages from people who have just had babies and they’re like, “I can’t keep up, Melissa. What did you do when you had a baby? How did you keep your house clean?” What I did, I hired help and I lowered my expectations and I told myself, “My house isn’t always going to be this messy and hectic, but I have to give myself a break right now. I have to lower my expectations and I have to spend money on help because that is what is giving me sanity. And I didn’t feel bad about it. It was like a totally guilt-free move. So, please let go of those expectations. Let go of what other people are doing and just focus on you and what you need to feel good and clean in your home. So, look, even if you don’t love cleaning, what it’s all about is finding a few smarter ways to either trick your brain or just change up your routine so that you can get your work done in the most efficient and effective way possible. And while I can’t promise that you will love to clean, you will at least feel immensely satisfied when you’re done your cleaning because you will have actually got the work done and you will have gotten it done in a really short amount of time compared to the amount of time you would spend doing it if you were miserable and seething and frustrated. So, we’re in a good space. And that brings me to this week’s comment question, which is, what is the one tip that I mentioned here that you think is the most doable for you? Let me know in the comments down below. If you love what we do here at Clean My Space, you might also love our newsletter. It’s called The Dirty Dish, and I’ve got a link for you to subscribe down below. Basically, we help you solve cleaning problems. So, go ahead and check that out. And if you want to help support me and my very small team here at Clean MySpace, consider becoming a member. If you struggle with cleaning, there’s a good chance you also struggling with getting motivated to declutter. Honestly, that is most people in this world. And here’s a video that will help you crack that code. Quick reminder, if you haven’t done so already, to subscribe to the Clean MySpace channel. Thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you next time.