Congratulations, you have been blessed with a place you can call your own. Before you start to clean it, put your hands together, close your eyes and say a prayer of gratitude.
The first step before you begin to clean your room is to observe the current state. Empty your mind of any judgement and walk around. What does your room look like? Look at the details if you have to. How is the floor? The shelves? The windows?
Obviously if you have felt the need to clean it you must be comparing the current state to a previous well-organized state of affairs. Familiarize yourself with the surroundings. The more you examine, the more you will find things to clean, mop, improve or discard. This might irritate you at first, but you have be objective and honest, we cannot begin the process of improving unless we know where we are.
While you are observing, start to frame a vision of the final cleaned room. It might feel overwhelming. Because there are unlimited number of ways in which your room can be improved. The floor needs mopping, the windows need cleaning, you can see trash sticking from under the couch. All the things that you have avoided are now coming back to haunt you.
But before you give up on cleaning and crash on your couch; Understand this, there are unlimited number of ways in which you can improve it. The limiting factors here are your will and the available time. Instead of looking at the whole room as one unit, divide it into multiple subsystems: The floor where you walk, the closets , the shelves, the cabinets, the windows, the washroom and the kitchen sink. Once you divide, focus on one thing that you can improve within the time and will power that you have.
Maybe you just want to clean the floor and not worry about shelves. Maybe you just want to clean the marks off the walls. Maybe you just want to clean the windows. Or maybe you want to do a deep clean of every surface. Every choice requires a different level of sacrifice. It might get overwhelming once you understand that your reality and your vision are poles apart. You will start to question can you even do it? But the key here is to be humble. Remember, we are finite beings. Once we accept our humility we can take pride in the smallest of tasks.
A helpful advice here would be to start from the subsystems that you use most frequently. The floor, the couch, the bed, the washroom and the sink for example. There might be some objects that you see every day as well, like your book shelf but you might be too overwhelmed to dive into that. Treat that as a separate subsystems to be focused in future.
Now that you know about the current state of the room and where you want it to be. The next logical step is to examine your tools. Ask yourself, are they sufficient for your vision? A vacuum cleaner is more helpful on a carpeted floor than a wooden floor. A mop with an integrated wipe is far superior to just a rag. There are some tools that are better suited for your vision. Do you have those tools? Can you improvise them if you dont have them? If not then why not ask for external help and borrow those tools from someone else? The key here is to be efficient, but you cannot be fully efficient the first time. And consequently you don't need the best tools, you just need the appropriate tools for the job. This distinction you can only learn while doing the cleaning.
Now we finally start our cleaning. Understand that this is not a linear process. We could have started cleaning and done all these steps in parallel.
While you are cleaning, a helpful advice is to clean the edges first and then move to the center since trash and dirt tends to accumulate there more. Also our eyes tend to catch corners more often. So it would help to put more effort into cleaning the corners.
As you clean you will start to see more things popping up, things you already observed in step number one. Since we already planned it we should not be anxious. Feel free to try different things, For example you only planned to mop the floor but you saw the windows need cleaning too. Try cleaning one window or even one side of a window, that will give you a fair idea on how long it will take you to do the complete set of windows.
We should be aware of our final goal here, we have limited time and resources and we want it to focus on our vision.
While you are cleaning also observe the spots which tend to get dirty more often, for example where you sit on the couch, or your toilet. Based on these observations you can also make a speed-clean program where you only clean the areas that are most dirty instead of cleaning the whole room. That should be suitable when you are pressed for time.
While you are cleaning, is there one thing you can improve to the degree that it is almost beautiful? Could be something simple. For example I try to make my bed as clean and presentable as possible. The beauty then inspires me to make other objects more beautiful as well.
It would help to turn on music or something you enjoy listening while you clean the floor. While you are cleaning, do not rush. Enjoy the process and you will see that something as insignificant as mopping the floor can bring you joy.
When you are done, examine the work that you have done and pat yourself on the back, literally, like a parent would pat you. You have successfully cleaned your room. Now you can take on the world
Background:
I wanted to write this for one simple reason. I want to write on the simplest possible things. If I can write about something as mundane as cleaning and make it interesting, then I can write about everything else as well. Till then, be humble and stay on the ground.
It turned on more complicated than I thought, who knew that cleaning your room can become so complex. But partly because I wanted to make it so that it can be applied by anyone anywhere. Whether I succeeded in it or not? Only the readers can tell.