Why is it so hard to clean with ADHD, even when the mess has been bothering you for weeks? After years of asking myself the same thing, it finally dawned on me (courtesy of decluttering expert Dana K White) that perhaps my brain was lumping everything into one big job called 'cleaning the house', when really there were three separate layers to deal with.
First, there was the mess of daily life, like dirty dishes. Under that was clutter, the stuff that had been sitting there for a while. (If the everyday jobs are already under control, you can skip straight to this step.) At the bottom, buried under the other two, was the cleaning itself (which turned out to be the easy bit).
Hello and welcome! I'm Dr Bea Bobbin, a Professional Organiser and Certified Decluttering Coach with an ADHD brain of my own, and before that I spent more than ten years as a medical doctor.
In this post, I'll walk you through those three layers, then why the research suggests cleaning can be harder for people with ADHD (and why that's no reflection on you). Then I'll share what's helped my clients and me, from everyday mess, to decluttering to a weekly cleaning rhythm.
Here's what makes cleaning feel so huge for brains like ours, and what actually helps.
Table of Contents
Why Cleaning Feels So Hard
Let's imagine everyone in my house has had the flu this week; we've all been on Struggle Street, and nobody has done the dishes (or much of anything else) for days. (Totally fictional, of course.)
Now it's the weekend, and 'clean the kitchen' is on my to-do list. I walk in to find an enormous pile of dirty dishes next to the sink. That's the first layer: the everyday mess generated simply by existing.
Beside the dishes is a pile of random stuff next to the fruit bowl. That's the second layer, clutter: anything that regularly gets out of control in your home.
And underneath it all is the third layer: the pasta sauce-decorated kitchen bench I was planning to wipe in the first place (the actual cleaning).
Picturing the layers this way explains how 'cleaning' the kitchen can apparently turn into a multi-hour slog of SO. MANY. DECISIONS. in a row.
Most of the decisions aren’t related to cleaning. They’re lurking in the clutter, like where each thing in the fruit bowl pile lives, or whether any of it can go. That takes a lot more brain power than figuring out whether something is dirty and needs a wipe.
Clutter also physically blocks the cleaning, because you can't reach the surface underneath (and neither can the robot vacuum that's beached forlornly on a stray sock).
It's also why so many people feel their house isn't clean enough for cleaners. Someone needs to deal with the daily mess and the clutter before a cleaner can actually get to that last layer to clean it.
So when all three layers are rolled into one job called 'cleaning', no wonder it feels so bloody hard.
Want to try it? Read How to Declutter Your Home Without Making a Bigger Mess for the full step-by-step process.
Why Cleaning Can Be Harder for People With ADHD
ADHD brains have differences in what are called the executive functions: the cognitive processes that help us plan a job, start it and keep going until it's done.
In a 2011 study of adults with ADHD, Dr Russell Barkley and Dr Kevin Murphy found that most participants had real difficulties in daily life with things like managing their time, organising themselves, staying motivated and concentrating.
These difficulties showed up in ratings from the participants and people who knew them well, even though standard neuropsychological tests in the clinic only detected problems in a small minority.
When it comes to cleaning, those everyday difficulties might look something like this:
Planning and prioritising: looking at the whole house as one giant job, and finding it hard to see the separate tasks inside it or decide where to start.
Task initiation: knowing the dishes need doing and really wanting them done, but finding it hard to get going.
Sustained attention: starting to clean the kitchen, spotting your laptop on the dining room table, then somehow starting an Etsy shop 20 minutes later.
Goal-directed persistence: starting to tidy the lounge room, then running out of puff and ending up with a growing pile of unfinished projects.
So if you've ever asked yourself, "Why is it so hard to clean with ADHD?", it's likely due to brain-based differences, not anything you're doing wrong.
Wondering if the mess in your home could be linked to ADHD? Read Is Clutter a Sign of ADHD? What the Research Says, and Where to Start.
How to Make It Easier
1. Start With the Everyday Mess
When everything feels too hard, I recommend focusing on just two things: the dishes, and a quick tidy-up whenever you can. In her book How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind, Dana K White talks about four daily tasks. I keep it even simpler with just these two, both for myself and my clients.
If you can only manage one thing each day, I'd make it the dishes. If it's been a while, that first day can be kinda epic (à la Hercules mucking out the Augean stables), but after that it's usually around 20 minutes for the average family if kept up daily.
The second thing is a Five-Minute Tidy-Up. You set a timer for five minutes, throw away any obvious rubbish around you, then start on the Easy Stuff: anything that already has a home somewhere else. Take it there now, as Dana K White says, rather than adding it to a 'put away later' pile.
When the timer goes off, you're done. The point is to keep it easy enough that it never feels like a punishment.
Five minutes might not sound like much, but if there were ever one of those clickbait 'Professional Organisers hate this one hack!' ads, it’d be for this.
I know it seems stupidly obvious, but regularly picking things up and putting them away is what stops everyday stuff from morphing into clutter. When life gets busy and this slips, the stuff piles up, and that’s a big part of why is it so hard to clean with ADHD. It’s one of the fundamental things that keeps my own home under control, and I recommend doing it whenever you notice the mess level rising.
If pulling everything out has left you with a bigger mess before, read How to Declutter Your Home Without Making a Bigger Mess for a gentler way to start.
2. Declutter So There's Less to Clean Around
Once the dishes and tidy-ups are ticking along, you'll be able to see the clutter more clearly.
Clothes that won't fit in the drawers or wardrobe, or kids' toys constantly spewing out of the toy box are both signs of clutter.
I deal with clutter using the Five-Step No Mess Decluttering Process from Dana K White. It's the method I use with all my clients, and these posts break it down step by step:
If decluttering has always felt harder than it looks, read What Is Decluttering? The Meaning, Method, and Why It’s Hard to find out why.
3. A Simple Weekly Rhythm for the Cleaning
Once the daily mess and the clutter are under control, the cleaning itself gets so much faster, because it’s no longer an archaeological dig to uncover the surface that needs wiping. For a lot of us, that dig is a big part of why is it so hard to clean with ADHD.
Some people then start to notice the everyday spills and crumbs more easily, and clean them up in little bits as they go. That's how I manage the day-to-day cleaning jobs now.
I still need help to notice the less frequent ones, though, and if that sounds like you too, that's OK: inattentiveness related to ADHD can often be the explanation. I've found it can help to give each cleaning job its own day of the week, with a calendar prompt so you at least remember to notice it.
In my house, Mondays are for dusting inside, and for cobwebs inside and out, because we live in a bushy area with heaps of (apparently very productive) spiders. Tuesdays are for the garden, Wednesdays for errands, Thursdays for floors, and Fridays for the bathrooms. The weekend stays free for other things, and for doing the laundry.
I'm not perfect at it, but it helps dramatically. Without those Monday reminders, our place would likely reach ‘Haunted House’ level on the Cobweb Meter before I'd actually realise and do something about it. (At least we wouldn't have to buy fake cobwebs for Halloween decorations?)
But cleaning only stopped being a huge hassle once the daily jobs were on autopilot and we'd decluttered a lot, and I've found the same is true for my clients.
Does your house seem to get messy again the minute you’ve tidied it? Read Why Is My House Always Messy? for a kinder look at why that happens.
Would You Like Some Help?
If you have to move a chemist’s worth of lotions before you can clean the bathroom vanity, you already know why is it so hard to clean with ADHD. I can help you clear the clutter (but I’ll leave the scrubbing to someone who’s actually good at it).
If you're in Canberra, I can work through it with you at home with my Canberra Decluttering Services.
If you live somewhere else, my Online Decluttering Services bring that same support to you.
Not sure which would suit you? Book a free one-hour consultation and we'll talk it through.
And if you'd like to stay in touch, you can join the Hello Space newsletter.
Frequently Asked Questions
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It can be for a lot of us. There are brain-based differences that can make it genuinely harder for people with ADHD to keep a house clean and tidy, including how easily we can get started on a job and keep the next step in mind while we’re still doing this one.
Day to day, that might look like starting to unload the dishwasher, finding a lid that doesn’t belong to anything, going looking for its container, opening a drawer that won’t close properly, and realising twenty minutes later that the dishwasher is still half full.
That doesn’t reflect how hard you’re trying, or how much you care about your home.
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In my experience, it’s often because there’s more stuff in the house than is easy to keep under control. If the wardrobe is full, so clean clothes end up on the bedroom floor ‘just for now’, vacuuming in there means picking them all up and finding somewhere else to put them first.
So each time you clean, a lot of your time goes into moving the same things from one surface to another, and the cleaning itself takes much longer than it needs to. Within a day or two the stuff has spread back out, and it’s hard to keep up the cleaning as often as you’d like.
Even when everything fits, there can still be more stuff than is realistic to keep tidy in your current season of life, on an average day or on a really busy one.
And when that happens, you end up putting a huge amount of energy into keeping the house clean, simply because there’s more to keep on top of than you have capacity for right now.
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If you’ve spent the day making decisions and keeping track of everyone else’s needs, at work and at home, your mental capacity can be well and truly used up by the time you finish for the day.
Before you can even start cleaning, there’s usually a long string of tiny jobs that each need starting and finishing, like hanging up a jacket or emptying the lunchboxes, so when there’s nothing left in the tank, those jobs wait for later and the cleaning gets pushed back even further.
A lot of the people I work with are juggling a demanding job, school pick-ups and a lot of the mental load at home. Walking into a lounge room with school bags dumped by the door and a basket of clean washing on the couch can mean the one room where they’d hoped to sit down and rest feels like one more list of things to do, and it’s hard to switch off with it all in view.
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Work tends to come with structure built in, like deadlines, colleagues, systems someone else set up and a clear reason to start right now. At home, the jobs still need doing for the house to stay under control, but the structure that helps you start and finish them at work might not be there in the same way at home.
Things at home might also carry a lot more emotional weight. The office printer doesn’t necessarily come with cherished memories or a sinking feeling when you look at it, but plenty of the things in our homes do, from craft supplies for projects we meant to start to the pile we’ve been avoiding for months.
That emotional weight can make decisions at home harder than the same kind of decision at work, and with no deadline or colleague waiting, they’re easy to keep putting off.
I’ve found decluttering reduces the number of to-dos sitting in your immediate surroundings, so there are fewer things to decide about and keep under control, and home starts to feel more like the places where you already know you’re capable.
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A visitor gives you a deadline and a clear reason to start right now, and in my experience, that’s often what makes it possible for an ADHD brain to get going. It’s how you can clean up a mess that’s been bothering you for months in half an hour, all because someone is coming over tomorrow.
Cleaning in a rush like that can take a lot out of you, though. You might feel stalled until the last possible minute, then go flat out, get into a fluster, probably jam your finger in an appliance, and then be too exhausted to have fun with your guest.
In the rush, the clutter often gets shoved into a cupboard or the spare room so the surfaces can be cleaned, which means it’s still there waiting for next time. I’ve found that once the dishes and Five-Minute Tidy-Ups are part of most days and the clutter is cleared, getting ready for visitors becomes a much smaller job.
