Today I am thankful for commercial cleaning.

11/26/21

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It’s been a while since I commercial cleaned. It was my go-to method of cleaning when I lived in a college residence hall or an apartment. Now that I have a house, I tend to tackle cleaning room by room, so I’d kind of forgotten about the rush of adrenaline that comes from a good round of commercial cleaning.

Here’s how it works. You pick something on TV that you really want to watch. It has to be real TV, though. Netflix won’t work due to the lack of commercials. I recommend a 2 hour made-for-TV movie, or as was the case today, a college football game. You put your tennis shoes on (this is essential!) and then begin your show. When you reach the first commercial, you jump up and tackle your first cleaning task. You have to go hard, but the second you hear your TV show come back on you stop and come back to the TV. You then resume that task at the next commercial. You repeat until the show is over or your house is cleaned – whichever comes first.

Benefits of this system:

• Guilt-free TV watching

• Cleaning becomes a challenge (i.e. how much can I accomplish in 4 minutes?)

• Even the most unpleasant tasks will only get a few minutes of your attention at a time. Sure, you might need to finish the task at the next commercial break, but you’ve had a good 15 minute stretch of TV viewing in between.

• Multi-tasking at its finest. Your show ends, and poof, you’ve done a bunch of cleaning while you watched.

• The adrenaline rush is real!

Now, like I said, I haven’t commercial cleaned in quite a long time. I tidy my house and clean up after myself like a real adult most of the time. And honestly, most TV that I watch doesn’t have commercials anymore. Between DVR and Netflix and Prime and everything else, commercial cleaning is probably a pretty outdated system. But, it was just what I needed today to kick myself out of lazy bum mode and pull my house back together, while still enjoying the Iowa State Cyclone football game. I cheered the Cyclones on to victory against TCU, while unloading and reloading the dishwasher, washing pots and pans, doing 2 loads of laundry, unpacking my suitcase from last weekend’s retreat, and picking up random stuff that I’ve strewn throughout the house the past couple of weeks.

I’d say it was a good 3 hours spent!