Whether you live at home with your parents, in a dorm room, or in your own apartment, we all know the struggle of keeping our space clean. So, in order to avoid my responsibility of cleaning my own room, I decided to write about the process.

1. Denial

Think of it as a cycle, and this is the part between the end stage of your room being clean and the beginning of starting to clean it again. During this stage, you find every possible thing to do that is not cleaning. You decide to Facebook stalk all of your old friends, you try to cook yourself a fancy new dessert (then not clean that mess either), you stare at the wall, watch 12 hours of Netflix, or if you’re me, you write this article. You try to push all of your mess into “the pile” on a chair so it seems like your room is cleaner than it is, and you keep on living with it for another week.

2. Determination

At this point, your “pile” (you know the one) has become a mountain and toppled over, filling your entire floor with the mess you were trying to ignore. There is no avoiding it now, and you finally resign to cleaning your room. This is the point where you set your mind to the task and start to organize the overwhelming disaster that you’ve created. You play some music and make some real progress, until you come across something you were looking for or think is cool.

3. Distraction

Now you’ve found something in your mess that looks fun to play with or to look through. Maybe you found your old yearbooks and start to reread everything that your friends wrote in it, or maybe you found an old yo-yo and start trying to see if you can still swing it around the world. Whatever it is you remembered you had, it has now stalled you for a solid hour.

4. Dedication

Realizing that you just wasted a significant amount of time playing with something weird, you reset your efforts back to cleaning. This time you are focused on finishing the task and won’t let anything distract you, no matter how badly you think you want to finish that old Rubik’s cube. You finally get back to the point where you can invite people into your room and your mom wouldn’t complain about how badly you need to vacuum. You can walk across the floor again without having to go through an obstacle course, and it looks like you have twice as much space as you used to. Congratulations, it’s clean!

5. Destruction

But we all know that cleanliness only lasts for about three days when you have to wash all the dirty clothes you found and don’t feel like folding them right away. Slowly (or maybe not so slowly), things creep back onto the floor and onto “the chair”, and you’re back in a state of denial.