It’s easy to get started on a project – like our handy Ikea Hacks for your apartment – only for your interest and energy levels to dissipate entirely. From cleaning up your bathroom to – squirrel! – organizing bookcases and shelves, it’s important to keep your house in order, not only for guests but for your own mental wellbeing. The tips below are certain to put you on the right track and help you through getting all those lingering chores finally complete!

Identify the task, and make it specific

This sounds silly and oversimplified, but you’ll be surprised how much it helps to say, “I need to sort and organize my spice rack” rather than, “I need to clean up the cabinets.” From the outset, if you have a clear, focused goal, it becomes much easier to manage and much easier to execute. You can always add to the plan later, but for now, “Picking the clothes up off the floor and doing the laundry,” is a much better goal than, “clean up the apartment.”

Keep track of your steps

It really helps to have some kind of tracking mechanism – like a chore ‘to-do’ list, whether that’s a whiteboard, an app or just a piece of paper.  By ticking off steps as you complete them, you’ll be much more encouraged to continue and you can feel better about the whole process as you knock out the list one by one!

Prioritize

What’s the next step in the productivity quest? Prioritizing the breakdowns you’ve just written! This is where you learn to triage your life – instead of thinking about all the little things you need to do in your apartment, getting flustered at the scope of it all and give up, think about what the most important parts of the plan you just thought up are. If your task is to clean the bathroom, “putting away the toothpaste and hairspray” ranks a bit lower than “clean the toilet.” You need to do both, but if you only get one done, it’s much better to knock out the important ones first!

Keep it regular

Most projects take a long time, which is why we don’t really like doing them. Even something as trivial as doing the laundry can be a multi-night affair depending on your schedule, so it’s important to try to do things as regularly as possible. It’s much easier to do laundry when there’s only one load than when there’s six.