Life gets busy, priorities take over and slowly our cleaning habits fall by the wayside. Housework can quickly turn into a whole-weekend event if you leave it until everything needs doing at once. This soon becomes a routine, which Gemma Bray, creator of The Organised Mum Method, calls ‘boom or bust cleaning’: exhausting yourself with a big reset, then struggling to keep up with it afterwards.
Her method breaks cleaning into a routine of short daily jobs, a 30-minute clean focused on one room and a weekly slot for less frequent tasks. It strives to build momentum over time, rather than make everything spotless in one go.
‘The aim of the whole method is to maintain your home over a series of visits to that room,’ Gemma says. ‘It’s not about doing everything in one go or making it look perfect.’ Here’s how the routine works and how to tailor it to your home so you can reclaim your precious free time, without sacrificing your home's cleanliness.
What is The Organised Mum Method?
Gemma came up with the method after the birth of her first child. Feeling overwhelmed, she found herself cleaning for hours each day and wanted a way to stop housework taking over what little time she had for herself. She started mapping out a routine at her kitchen table, built around shorter, focused cleaning sessions and weekends free from housework.
The Organised Mum Method, or TOM, is now a rolling eight-week cleaning plan. It has three parts: daily do’s, a 30-minute room clean from Monday to Thursday and Friday Focus. Gemma describes it as ‘cumulative’: the routine builds over time, so regular visits to each room help keep the house ticking over.
The daily do’s are separate from the 30-minute clean. They might include making the beds, giving the bathroom a quick tidy and keeping the laundry moving. They’re meant to be light-touch jobs, taking around 15 minutes in total, and can be fitted into pockets of the day rather than done all at once.
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The room cleans give each weekday a focus: living room on Monday, bedrooms on Tuesday, hall and stairs on Wednesday, and kitchen on Thursday. On Friday, the usual room clean is replaced by Friday Focus, which follows an eight-week cycle. Each week gives a different area extra attention, making space for the jobs that are easy to postpone – like cleaning underneath furniture or tackling the inside of the fridge.
‘Very often, people clean on autopilot. Things that aren’t an immediate priority, like cleaning underneath things, tend to get forgotten and don’t get done,’ says Gemma. ‘The reason for giving these jobs a place in the routine is to create a dedicated space of time in the week to go one level deeper with those less frequent jobs.’
How to do The Organised Mum Method in your home
Choose your daily do’s. Pick a few quick jobs that make a noticeable difference in your home, such as making the beds, a speedy bathroom clean or putting on a load of laundry. Keep the list manageable: Gemma says these jobs should take no more than around 15 minutes in total, and you can spread them throughout the day.
Give rooms a regular place in your week. The suggested routine is the living room on Monday, bedrooms on Tuesday, hall and stairs on Wednesday and kitchen on Thursday. You can move the days around to suit your schedule, and you don’t need to be chasing a gaggle of children around either to use the method. ‘Everyone who has a home has some version of the same jobs,’ Gemma says. ‘The routine should reflect the home that you actually have.’
Set a timer for 30 minutes. Choose the most important jobs in that room and work through them until the timer goes off. If you don’t finish the list, stop there. ‘Time-boxing the cleaning makes us intentional, helps us focus and makes us stick to the priorities,’ Gemma says. Treat the list as a set of suggestions, not a demand to do every job. If the same task keeps getting missed, move it higher up your priorities next time.
Use Friday Focus for a deeper clean. Friday Focus replaces that day’s regular room clean. It follows an eight-week cycle, but you can swap the day if Friday doesn’t suit you. Choose one or two jobs that would move the room forward, rather than trying to deep-clean the whole space. ‘It’s still just 30 minutes,’ Gemma says. ‘Look at the room and decide what one or two deeper cleaning jobs are going to help move it forward. It could be cleaning the cupboard fronts or cleaning out the inside of the fridge. Then leave it and carry on with the regular schedule.’
Start small and let the routine build. You don’t need to begin with a huge house reset. ‘It’s much better to start with a realistic amount of time that you can fit into your day and week, then slowly build on that while you get into the habit,’ Gemma says. The method is intended to help you stay ahead of the less frequent jobs, instead of always reacting to whatever feels most urgent. ‘We call this proactive rather than reactive cleaning,’ she says.
Gemma's final tips
For Gemma, this method is all about dividing and conquering, as well as being kind to yourself – something a lot of us struggle to do when life gets so busy. We wind up punishing ourselves by trying to tackle everything all at once, an approach that never really works. ‘The biggest mistake I see people making is trying to sort the whole house out in one go. It’s essentially boom or bust cleaning,’ says Gemma.
‘They’ll let the house fall down their list of priorities, then they can’t stand it anymore and do a whole weekend of cleaning. They exhaust themselves, can’t stand the sight of cleaning anymore, leave it and then go back into the same cycle,’ she explains. If you let cleaning become a mammoth task, it will always be a mammoth task. ‘You can’t clean until you’re exhausted because you won’t ever want to do it again.’
Instead, Gemma says she hopes the main takeaway people gather from her approach to cleaning it to start slowly and recognise that the house probably didn’t get this way overnight. ‘Give yourself time to get back into a routine.’
