The hardest part about cleaning a living unit shared with others is that bottlenecks occur frequently unless there are clearly designated cleaning times. Say you’re totally in the zone for vacuuming, so you decide that it’s vacuum time. But then, as you make your way to the closet where the vacuum is kept, you realize that your housemate’s boxes and miscellaneous items are strewn all over the living room. So until those things are put away, you don’t have the space to vacuum. Deflated, you end up frittering the time you had budgeted for cleaning on useless activities…such as writing this blog entry.

The second difficulty is when you don’t have the proper cleaning supplies (i.e. no rags, so you have to substitute rolls and rolls of paper towels). That increases the difficulty of cleaning significantly, and simultaneously decreases the motivation to clean drastically.