How I Clean

How do you make it fun? Ask Mr Dobson, my Year 5 primary school teacher who was, incredibly, only 23 years old at the time.

I know there are people that enjoy the process of cleaning, but I am not one of them. We all have our own personal chore hierarchies, and cleaning is very far down my list. Laundry; fine. Hoovering; okay. But it takes a lot of internal bargaining to get myself to clean the bathroom, the cooker, to scrub the limescale off the kitchen draining board. At some point every single day I think to myself: I wish I could pay a cleaner.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what exactly it takes to stop dragging our feet and do whatever it is we’re putting off. Mostly because I’ve designed a writing challenge to address exactly this. Honestly, I think you have to kind of baby yourself, and turn things into a game. This is what works for me. Maybe it’s not fair to say ‘baby yourself’ as if that’s disparaging. Rather, I mean, you just have to make it fun. We know, of course, that we’ll feel great when we’ve done the thing we’re avoiding – but sadly… this knowledge alone is not enough to get me scrubbing the bath. What does work for me is a silly bit of fun. And failing that, inviting friends over is a surefire way to make my bathroom… respectable, if not sparkling, exactly.

How do you make it fun? Ask Mr Dobson, my Year 5 primary school teacher who was, incredibly, only 23 years old at the time. He arrived at our inner city primary school fresh from teacher training with all these interesting ideas about how to motivate us, and in particular how to uplift the kids that were having a really hard time with ‘behavioural issues’ by taking them under his wing. He mentored us, he encouraged us to have fun, he was kind and firm and never punitive. He was an early advocate of the Pomodoro Technique: lesson time was structured around the idea of 25 minutes of work, followed by 5 minutes of rest. It won’t surprise you to hear that we respected him, deeply.

As is the way with influential teachers, I think of him often, but only recently I realised this: Steve Dobson taught me how to tidy up! The ‘gamifying’ technique he taught us, is what I still use today, whether I’m cleaning or tidying.