How I clean my kitchen at the end of the day

This is a guide on how to clean my kitchen. I wrote it up because I was writing it in my head while cleaning my kitchen and found that helpful. It was originally a set of notes to self really, but when I posted it on the notebook blog people found it interesting and helpful, so I thought I’d promote it to the newsletter.

It’s not actually currently accurate, as for reasons I’m not currently the one in charge of cleaning the kitchen, but it was accurate when I wrote it and I expect it to be accurate again in the future.

So. This is how I clean the kitchen when it’s my responsibility to do so. Previously, this was at the end of almost every day, now it’s only occasional, but I expect it will go back to being a routine again in future.

Many of the specifics of this are only useful if you share a kitchen with me, and thus have the exact same sets of problems, constraints, and affordances. And if you do share a kitchen with me, this post isn't really intended for you as it would be massively passive aggressive for me to write a whole essay telling you how to clean the kitchen. Instead, if you share a kitchen with me, I refer you to the large poster with helpfully big letters and clear easy to understand instructions that I have posted on the kitchen wall.¹

Anyway, there are some things you should understand before embarking on cleaning the kitchen:

The first is that it will take about an hour. It might take a bit less. If it's a really big dinner or a lot of debris has built up over the course of the day it might take more. But it will probably take about an hour, and trying to speed that up massively is going to mostly stress you out without saving a huge amount of time.² You should probably just let it take an hour. You can resent that, or you can just put up with it, and you'll have a better time in that hour if you do the latter.

You can spend the time in contemplation, maybe with the aid of some music, or a noise track. Much like the shower is a great time for thinking, so can cleaning the kitchen be. Maybe you can write an essay (possibly about how to clean the kitchen) in your head. Maybe you can just treat it as meditative, or lightly daydream. If you can’t face the idea of spending an hour alone with your thoughts right now (which is fine, it can happen), you can put on a video or an audiobook if you want.

Whatever you're doing though, assume it will take an hour, so make sure to start at least an hour before bedtime.

The second thing to understand is that there is no such thing as "clean", there is only "clean enough". You are not attempting perfection, you are attempting to achieve a consistent standard of cleaning. You get to decide what that standard is, but it should be roughly centred around making sure the kitchen is ready for use tomorrow, with the only leftover tasks for the morning being to put away clean dishes. This is not a standard of clean that is sufficient to keep the kitchen spotless, but combined with a deep clean every week or two³ is sufficient to keep on top of things.

The third thing to understand is that it doesn't matter if you're too tired to clean the kitchen. The kitchen still needs to be cleaned, and if you don't do it then tomorrow will go much worse. If you get part way through the process and you really can't continue, you can stop, but you'll probably be fine, because the process is on your side.

The fourth thing to remember is that the process really is on your side. It's there to help keep momentum up, make it feel achievable to do more, and minimise the amount of decision making you have to do, so you can mostly just autopilot the entire experience, and it's there so that if you do give up midway through (you probably won't), you've done the right things first, and so that you won't at any point have to go "Oh fuck, I didn't do that thing, I can't be bothered to do that now...".

Anyway, here is the process.

The process consists of a rolling series of goals. You should always do the highest priority one.

The goals are, in order:

There should be no full bins. There is a recycling bin, a waste bin, and a food scraps bin, and if at any point (including the start) of the process one fills up, you should stop whatever you are doing and empty it. If it's obvious at some point that it's going to fill up later, you can prioritise filling it up and then emptying it, but this isn't required.⁴

The dishwasher should be running. Once the bins are empty, all actions should be directed towards getting things in the dishwasher and getting it running. If it's currently got clean dishes in it, first empty it, then load it, then run it. Having the dishwasher running means that there will be clean dishes tomorrow

Surfaces outside the kitchen should be cleared. That means the dining room and living room table need to have everything taken off them and the tables need to be wiped down.

From here, it's a process of narrowing the area that still needs to be cleaned over time, one surface at a time.

My kitchen has two counters. Let's call them sinkside and kettleside. The next goal is to get the kettleside counter cleaned and wiped down. This is partly to narrow the cleaning area, and partly because you'll need the space to put extra drying up. This involves moving all the dirty dishes to the sinkside counter and putting away any ingredients that have been left out. Once it's clear, lay some cloths down to put extra drying up on it.

The sinkside counter has two halves, left of stove and right of stove. The next goal is clean the surface left of stove, corralling all remaining dirty dishes onto the stove top and right of stove area.

The next goal is hand wash the dishes that didn't go in the dishwasher. Some of these are things that can’t go in the dishwasher, some of them are things that could go in the dishwasher but it was too full. Either way they get hand washed. Be sure to do it properly. These will be left to dry, you're not going to manually dry them up.

Now get the right of stove counter completely clean. This usually is just wiping it down after all the washing has been done, but might also e.g. involve throwing out any recycling that has accumulated there.

At this point if you're genuinely exhausted and it's late, you may stop, but ideally you would not.

If you can face it, clean the stove top. Don't do a proper deep clean of it, that's not your job, but do get the worst of debris and the like off it.⁵

Now, clean the sink. Throw out any food caught in the food traps, give it a general wipe down.

Finally, sweep the floor. This doesn't have to be super thorough, just get the most obvious debris off the floor.

Now, do a final inspection. Take a quick look around, see if there’s anything unusual that needs sorting, or that you’ve missed. Usually there won’t be as if it were common there’d be something in the process, but it’s always worth checking whether you’ve missed something.

And, finally, done. Good job.

Having a process like this really helps, because it lets you maintain momentum, see clear and visible progress as you go, and prioritise in a way that makes sure the most important tasks all get done.

1. Ha ha, just kidding. I haven't really done that. Yet.

2. Some of this process can be sped up by having an extra pair of helping hands but honestly our kitchen is a nightmare to have multiple people in and it doesn't speed things up that much, so I mostly just prefer to do it solo.

In other kitchens I’ve had, cleaning up can be a more social activity, which is helpful for both speeding up the process and making it more pleasant, but in our setup this mostly makes it worse.

3. Which we uh… definitely do. Yes. Definitely.

4. I've not historically been super reliable about this making this top priority is a modification that became clearly good as a result of drafting this post.

5. We have a gas stove and I hate it so much. I dislike gas in general, but I especially hate how gross and hard to clean it is.