7 Expert-Backed Cleaning Strategies if You Struggle with ADHD

Unmotivated and all over the place? This pro offers a perspective shift—plus actionable ideas—to tackle a messy home

We all know cleaning is a chore. But for folks with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD, it’s more than that. Cleaning can be an overwhelming, seemingly interminable task that’s hard to motivate to start—or complete.

“There are several things that makes cleaning especially hard for people with ADHD, including compromised executive functioning, trouble with time management and shifting focus, plus problems with working memory, and behavior initiation,” says KC Davis, a licensed therapist whose Struggle Care podcast and social media channels focus on helping people with challenges with neuro-divergence, mental health, or other factors manage home and personal care. 

Related: 7 ADHD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Fridge

“For someone who’s naturally neat and tidy, it’s easy to say, pick up as you go. But for someone with ADHD, if cleaning is not the task they’re trying to accomplish, making that shift between tasks without losing track is a challenge,” Davis says. For example, Davis, who has ADHD herself, might walk into a room to get her kids a snack. But if she grabs the snack but then stops to do the dishes from earlier in the day, she might walk out of the kitchen without the snack. “And it compounds over the day, so it’s hard to keep things tidy,” she says.

We chatted with Davis, who suggested her best cleaning strategies for people with ADHD.

Let Go of The Shame

Redefine Clean as Functional

Cleaning is not black-and-white, Davis says, it’s a spectrum between the absence of a speck of dirt and a cluttered, soiled space—with lots of gray area in between. Recognizing that there’s no such thing as a perfectly clean home can take away some of the pressure and defeatism folks feel when faced with a mess. “I love to say, everything worth doing is worth doing half-assed,” she laughs. “For most tasks, ‘good enough’ is perfect.”

So instead of striving for a clean home, Davis says, consider what needs to get done to make your home functional. “If your home is so messy that you’re tripping over stuff, or you have so many dirty dishes that you can’t use the sink, then your home is no longer functioning for you—and you deserve to have a functional space,” Davis says.

Break it Down

“When things get very messy, we get paralyzed, we’re overwhelmed,” says Davis. “That’s when I use my favorite tool, the Five Things Tidying Method.” Her “Five Things” are a cleaning ritual she uses both to make the task seem less daunting (tackling the challenge with behavior initiation) and to break a big mess into smaller steps (making it easier on executive functioning). “I remind myself that there are really only five things I need to tackle in there: trash, dishes, laundry, things that have a place, and things without a place,” she says.

Armed with that short to-do list, Davis is mentally prepared to go into a room and tackle each in order: first, she picks up all the trash; next, she gathers the dirty dishes and gets them into the sink; then, she piles up any laundry; then she puts things with a place in their place; then , then gather any dirty dishes, etc. She’ll go through all five, making piles if need be, before moving on to the next space. “If I take something out of the room, I’ll get distracted,” she says.

Davis notes that her Five Things approach works for both big messes and for day-to-day maintenance. “It’s always my approach, and always in that order,” she says.”Even when I tackle my kitchen at night, it’s trash first, dishes into the sink, then put away the random doodads on the counter.”

Find a Routine

Another strategy that helps with behavior initiation and executive functioning is to set aside a specific day or time for cleaning tasks. When Davis was a stay-at-home mom taking care of two young children, she found it easiest to assign a day of the week to each of her cleaning tasks. “Laundry on Mondays, bathrooms on Tuesday, groceries on Wednesday, and so on,” she says. Every day had something—so she didn’t have to think about what to do—but that didn’t mean that every day was the entire thing. “Bathrooms just meant, something in the bathroom, it didn’t have to mean cleaning every bathroom all the way,” she says. “Some days I was just wiping away toothpaste, other days I’d be cleaning a bathroom top-to-bottom, depending on what else was going on at the time. I found that it was enough of a routine to stay on track, but enough flexibility to meet my needs.”

Davis notes that routines should also change when they’re no longer working. These days, Davis is more on a 9-to-5 work schedule, so she’s gotten into a different routine: Each night, she does what she calls her “Closing Duties”—a very short list of tasks to get her home functional for the next morning—then she sets aside a couple hours each Sunday for a bigger reset (Five Things in each room, load up the laundry, do the dishes, etc).

To find a routine that works for you, Davis suggests asking yourself some questions, like what are a few small tasks that you feel you can accomplish every day and when do you have pockets of time where you have the most energy. It may take a little trial-and-error to land on a routine that works, and it can be easy to feel defeated if your first system fails after a couple days or weeks. “Just remember that if a system doesn’t work, you haven’t failed, it’s just not a good fit,” says Davis. “Changing that mindset will help you stay motivated to keep trying to find a system that does work.”

Find Total Focus

Since shifting focus can be a challenge, Davis often finds that batching a task—saving it all up to do at once—can be easier than chipping away at something little by little. “It creates a situation where you can have total focus,” says Davis. For example, instead of doing dishes after every meal, leave them in the sink and do them all at the end of the day.

Start on Your Feet

Task initiation can be especially hard if you’re already, say, laying on the couch scrolling Instagram. That’s why Davis finds it’s easier to do a household task when she’s already on her feet and moving. “Right after I put the kids to bed, or right after I get the kids to school or walk the dog, I already have momentum, so I try to spend another 20 or so minutes on a home care task,” says Davis. If you’re already up, that’s a good time to tackle a sink full of dishes or one of her rooms with her Five Things method.

Work with Your Household

If you share your home with a partner, roommate or family with different cleaning approaches, Davis suggests having an explicit conversation about how to divvy up tasks, including discussing the point at which they need to be done. “People have different schedules, physical capacities, preferences, and energy and ability levels,” says Davis. “You need to figure out what functional means to both of you, then figure out how to get it done.”

The goal, she emphasizes, is not necessarily to split the work up equally among participants—after all, it might take one person 15 minutes to do a task that takes another an hour. Instead, she says, it’s to grant everyone the chance to be ‘off the clock.’ “It’s not about who’s doing more or less, but about making sure you each have the same amount of rest and autonomy,” says Davis. To have this conversation with a partner, she recommends Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play system, a gamified way to identify and talk about household tasks.

Let Go of The Shame

“There’s no shortage of tell you how having a clean house is good for your mental health, but for someone who’s struggling, that’s not helpful—cleaning turns into just another thing you ‘should’ be doing that you’re not doing,” says Davis. She’s found that people carry a lot of shame around having a messy house, which can be seriously demotivating. Instead, think about cleaning as a means toward getting your home to serve you better. “A clean house is not ‘good’ or ‘right,” it’s morally neutral—you’re not a bad person if your house is messy,” she says. “But you deserve a home that takes care of you, even when you’re not functioning.”

Davis recently published a book, How to Keep House While Drowning, which outlines her approach in a short, easy-to-read format. “I hope it offers both a perspective shift and a lot of practical tips, with lots of encouragement,” she says, noting that many of her fans would come across one of her videos, but not understand why she was approaching a task that way. “Everyone just wants to jump to the hacks, but I kept encouraging them to go back to the philosophy—this book gets it all in one place.”

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