“5 by 5s” five star rating!

Recently I’ve been really enjoying catching up on the excellent videos and resources produced by Steph at The Secret Slob.

She has a great speed cleaning hack that she calls “5×5”. She uses a timer to keep on task, and zips around cleaning five rooms, for five minutes each. If she has extra time at the end of a room, she pops back to the “worst room” to do a little more there. (There is so much more on her Youtube channel, have a look around!)

I decided to give this technique a try this afternoon to help get ready for the weekend. I made a quick list in a new routine with the areas that needed attention, set my timer for five minutes and got on with it!

I’m very distractible but these five minute chunks were easy to keep focused for, and it made a really big difference. It was fun to zoom around and it really did lift the ambient tidiness level in such a short amount of time!

There is no reason you can’t use a little more time per room, or go around the loop of rooms more than once if you need to. As always, a few small improvements in each room can make a surprising difference.

(To illustrate the difference it made: my 11-year-old just came in from the school bus and asked if someone was coming over 😅)

I will definitely be using this idea again!

2025 update

This is an excellent technique to use with the One Thing feature of Home Routines to step through the rooms!

If you subscribe to Home Routines Premium you can even shuffle the task cards to keep it a bit random!