Is waiting to clean up the most efficient way to use time?

Ok, so the most common things that must be cleaned in my house, living as a single guy alone, are the following.

  1. Dishes
  2. Kitchen countertops, with residue from past meal preparation
  3. Laundry
  4. Bathroom

It seems to me that waiting until the dishes pile up to the point that I cannot prepare any more food without washing them is the most efficient use of my time. I then shove them all into the dishwasher, doing the bare minimum of rinsing off large chunks of food, and wash them in bulk. Sometimes it takes 2 loads.

Ditto the kitchen countertops. I only wipe them if company is coming or I need to clean up in order to prepare something complex.

Same story on the laundry. Am I out of socks/underwear/clean pants yet? If no, just let the laundry pile up. I just have a clean laundry basket right next to the drier, where I dump all the dry laundry after washing it. I “store” dirty clothes on the floor until it is time to gather them up and wash them.

And the bathroom. Why wipe the toilet every time I miss a little? Just wait until I have to clean it, since it’s just going to get dirty again.

This is the most efficient use of my time, right? I’ve heard the argument that letting the dishes pile up and the food to even ferment a bit makes it dirtier, but it seems to me that the time needed to wash up is still about the same. And there’s reduced “overhead cost” of beginning a task. If I have 10 dishes to wash, there’s an overhead time of walking to the kitchen, turning on the faucet, finding the soap, etc, that is the same cost if I have 30 dishes to wash. So I spend less total time if I do it in bulk. Same for the tasks above.

For this matter, why do people fold their clothes at all? It seems like a complete waste of time.

Sure, if you value and clean and a dirty living space equally.

That is, if you draw no distinction between a clean and a dirty house, and you are just as happy living in filth as you are living in neatness and cleanliness, then it probably is a more efficient use of your time to clean as little as possible.

Your question assumes that time efficiency is the only measure in calculating the value of cleaning. Some people, it might surprise you to know, take other things into account when determining how often to clean their places.

Obviously, any time you spend cleaning is a bad use of time; time which could be spent doing something useful.

Therefore, I suggest that you never clean anything at all.

That’s what I did when I was single. :slight_smile:

(yes, I was single for a long, long time)

The tidiness and cleanliness of my home contributes to my sense of well-being.

(But I don’t fold my clothes either)

Well, I like for certain things in my house to be clean all the time. So for me the most efficient use of my time is to clean as I go. I particularly like the bathrooms and kitchen to be clean. It takes ~5 minutes to speed clean a bathroom (i.e. wipe sinks, wipe toilet, hang up towels) on a routine basis and is much more pleasant than having to scrub grime due to not having cleaned. Same with the kitchen. I clean as I cook, and generally when the meal is done the kitchen is also clean. That is, for almost anything I cook there is a period of 10 minutes or so when I’m waiting for something and I use that time t mop up. When my husband cooks he makes a godawful mess which he then spends an hour cleaning up after dinner, so I think my way is more efficient–but I’m not going to tell anybody else how to clean their house.

I fold my clothes so I don’t have to iron them.

Obviously, different people have different tolerances for clutter and dirt. People who gung-ho on super-clean spaces just do not comprehend that there are people who genuinely do not care that the sink and countertops are not pristine and sparkling.

That said, there’s point where putting things off goes beyond time conservation into making the problem worse than it would be otherwise.

I am going to suggest that you rinse and put the dirty dishes in the dish washer as you use them, then turn it on when it’s full. This reduces the chances of attracting insects or vermin, which would impose further cleaning duties on you unless you wish to acquire mice or roaches or ants as pets. It will also minimize the chances of unpleasant odors arising from the unwashed dishes. It strikes me as a compromise between your desire to minimize time spent on household chores and prevention of possible additional mess down the road.

I’m OK with that (it’s your house, after all) so long as the intervals between such cleanings isn’t so long you wind up with encrustations or mold/mildew in crevices. If the company/complex cooking is of sufficient frequency to prevent that sure, why not?

That system is surprisingly common, and I’ve even seen it used in families with kids. You’ve got a means to separate clean and dirty clothes so you can easily access clean ones. People don’t always admit they use this system, because it’s not the ideal held forth by society, but it clearly works.

Again, the only concern I would have is letting dirty clothes lie long enough to become a further problem If they’re dry and sitting on a dry floor for a week, maybe two, no problem. Damp, or worse yet, wet clothes in a pile will rot - mold and mildew that will ruin clothes. Had to break my spouse of that VERY bad habit of leaving wet, soiled clothing in a pile/hamper/basket. Hang damp/wet stuff up until it dries thoroughly, then throw it in the dirty pile. Clothes lying on the floor too long can also provide housing to vermin. Again, a week or two is no problem, go for it. It will annoy the neatniks, but it’s not their house, it’s yours.

Seasonal clothing should be stored at the end of the season. Winter coats, for example, I cover with those clear bags you get from the dry cleaners and get hung up at my household. The bags keep the dust off while they’re spending months in the closet. Basically, if I’m not using it for several months it goes in a bag or box and then storage, mainly to keep it clean and dry until I intend to use it again. Storing it keeps it out of my way for the duration.

If you’re the only one using it, sure, OK. Just be sure to clean it up before company, who is going to know, right? As long as you’re hitting it often enough that mold and mildew don’t build up (because that’s a lot harder to get rid of than spilled pee or a toothpaste splatters or beard stubble or whatever) sure, whatever.

If you start living with someone it’s a little different, of course. We keep cleaning supplies on top of the toilet tank so if one of us gets a bit sloppy it’s a quick spritz and a wipe to be considerate of the other person, but I’ll be the first to admit the sink and shower don’t get scrubbed daily at my house.

Some types of clothing will get unattractively wrinkled or out of shape unless properly folded/hung/ironed/whatever. Women’s clothing is more prone to this than men’s due to the different materials used. Some jobs require that one’s clothes be of this sort, and that one does NOT come to work with a wrinkled shirt or dress. This isn’t always a high status job - my current retail gig involves uniform shirts that will wrinkle quite nicely unless folded or hung up. So, for some people, it’s part of their job and in that sense they’re getting paid to look a certain way.

So, my socks and underwear live in a “clean laundry basket” like yours do, as do my jeans and sweatshirts, but the shirts and pants I need for my job get hung up so I don’t need to drag the iron out and use it every morning. When I worked in construction and the main concern was that I showed up in sufficient clothing not to bitch when the weather was cold I didn’t bother with folding/hanging either.

Basically, I don’t care what your system is, so long as I don’t see or smell rotting food when I walk in your house, your toilet appears clean enough to sit on, the plates/glasses/utensils you use to serve me food/beverages are clean, and your clothes don’t look like you filched them out of the neighbor’s trash can. Your home should not be a health hazard but that’s actually a fairly low bar to meet. I don’t care if you clean daily, weekly, or just before I come over - and really, no one else should care about that either. Do what works for you.

When I lived alone I had a cleaning woman come in monthly. She was a friend’s mom, really needed the money, and had a cleaning OCD thing. The day she worked I’d come home to a “like new” house. I loved her. She did all the regular cleaning, plus she’d do things like empty, clean, and refill the refrigerator.

Huh? How do you “refill” the fridge?
Most folks call that “going shopping”…And if you’ve got a lady who does that for you, she’s usually more than just a cleaning woman. :slight_smile:

Stop cleaning when you have a prospective girlfriend over. You need someone with standards as low as yours. Otherwise you’ll get into fights, resentment, divorce. Neither of those are an effective use of your time.

Most things in nature do not make efficient use of time their top priority. If you are so concerned about using time efficiently tell us what you are doing every minute while the dishes are stacking up. Another issue is vermin and roaches.

No, she emptied the refrigerator and cleaned the shelves as well as the threads on the salad dressing bottles, etc. Then she put things back into the fridge the way everything was “supposed to go”.

She was amazing (though mentally ill).

I’m going to have to disagree. I think it is way, WAY, more efficient to keep your house clean, as you go along. And much less work than restoring it to cleanliness once things have been allowed to pile up.

How is putting a few plates into the dishwasher each day more work than having to load it up and do two cycles?

Just about the only thing that has going for it is that it’s more energy efficient to only run dishwashers and washing machines on full loads, but other than that I can’t see much to recommend waiting for a crisis to take even the most minimal course of action. And do you know what the perfect storage compartment for dirty dishes is called? A dishwasher.

It’s pretty straightforward really, just take into account the time it takes to get out the soap/windex/scrubby brushes/vacuum or whatever. If you pull those things out 12 times a day a soon as a spec of dirt shows up, versus pulling those things out once a year when the house is a disgrace, you’ve spent a lot more time just pulling out supplies. Super inefficient.

I’m terrible at keeping the house clean but when I do finally get it in order, I do my best to keep it that way. Once a mess starts piling up, it’s easier to let other messes go untended and the whole house quickly slides into a state of total disrepair. If you stay on top of small messes it’s mentally easier to keep it in a “surprise guest” state, efficiency be damned.

Seriously? You’re pulling out your cleaning supplies 12 times a day?

You’re kidding about that, right?

There may have been some argument ad absurdum in there…

You’re also assuming that all time is equally valuable. As mentioned above, the five minutes while you are waiting for the microwave to heat up dinner is likely going to be wasted otherwise. So exchanging 10 of those “dead” five minutes throughout the week might only save you half an hour on the weekend, but half an hour is long enough to do something you enjoy.

Also, for example, I love my quiet morning time. I’d rather be inefficient other times to preserve as much quiet morning time as possible.

Back in the world of the sane, nobody is suggesting that anyone completely disinfect their house several times a day.

The truly efficient would recognize that some tasks need more attention (putting dirty dishes away) and other tasks need barely any each year (getting the hair out of the drain). Therefore, such a person would have some sort of schedule to follow to optimize how they spend time cleaning – perhaps something like,

– Dirty dishes – put in dishwasher immediately after use
– Dirty pots and pans – as needed, or not less than twice a week
– Clean bathrooms – twice a month (or whatever depending on how many people in your household)
– Clean gutters – once a year in late fall

Then, you have a good idea of how much housework you have to do, you don’t let stuff pile up on you, and you have a better sense of what needs to be done each weekend or whatever.

But I take the easy way out. I put dishes away after every use, do a few minor chores myself, and hire a housekeeper for the rest. That is the most efficient use of my time.

Suggestion about the dishwasher. Place dishes directly in the DW, not the sink. Don’t even have the dishes touch the sink on the way to the DW, directly in the DW. When full run. It is so much nicer to have a empty sink, but visually and practically, and saves steps. It after a bit becomes second nature to just put them in there, it does not seem like any more work and you will just want to put them in the DW.

When guests leave their dishes in the sink you will notice that.

That kind of habits leads to the dropped stuff getting into caulk, to mold, to…

I haven’t cleaned my bathrooms in decades, except when I get to a new house and attack whatever the previous occupants left behind (washing the bathroom floor is part of the general “washing the house’s floor” that takes place occasionally, but then, I don’t miss and my men don’t miss that badly). Leaving things clean with a bit of water and a bit of wiping is a lot more efficient than cleaning them once the dirt has turned to crust.

And another vote for “put the dirty dishes directly in the dishwasher”.