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I'm a total sucker for a decluttering hack and I find myself incessantly scrolling social media looking for the next big trend to try out. You can never have enough decluttering tips in your locker, right? And while the 'Declutter Domino Effect' and 'pomodoro technique' have been some of my recent favorites, another viral hack has been popping up on my feed that I'm tempted to sneak into my rotation – and it's called the '15 minute Friday reset'.
It's as simple as it sounds. Give yourself 15 minutes on a Friday to declutter and refresh your home, ready for the weekend. But, there are a few surprising rules to follow. As I looked more into it, it seems the viral trend really does want you to stick to just 15 minutes and it isn't, in fact, a ruse to get you to clean your entire house. It's Friday, after all.
Article continues belowWhat is the ‘Friday reset’ decluttering hack?
My algorithm is currently full to the brim with decluttering hacks and that means I'm seeing posts from creators like Trish Johnson from @theorganizedchaosnj and Liz Quick from @thequickjourney sharing their own 15-minute resets to their hundreds of thousands of followers.
It's not clear who started the trend, but for years it looks like people have been trying out 15-minute resets, whether that's on a Monday, weekend, or Friday. Aiming to do it on a Friday though means you're intentionally focusing on clearing up messes ready for to enjoy the weekend in a much more peaceful mood (hopefully).
What's really effective about the '15-minute Friday reset' is that it asks you to declutter for just 15 minutes. No longer. It asks you to complete 15-minutes, every week, without fail. As Trish puts it: "You don't need hours. You need consistency." Adding: "Small course corrections prevent large corrections later." And the beauty is, you only pick small, but important decluttering jobs around your home, from cleaning flat surfaces to putting items back where they belong.
Suddenly, just 15 minutes on a Friday makes those bigger cleans easier and your life at home a little less encumbered by mess. When it comes to your weekly deep clean, the Friday reset works hard at making it a less overwhelming job.
3 ways I tried it in my home
For the '15-minute Friday reset' to work its magic, it seems you need to have a focus. If you head into it with no idea of what you're going to do, you can very easily fall into doing more than you need to, getting distracted, or targeting every single room in your home, which is obviously going to take a lot longer than 15 minutes.
So, I tried a few different ways of implementing the trend into my home:
1. Setting a 15-minute timer
Like Liz, I decided to set a timer and focus on high-impact areas for my first Friday attempt. It meant that I remained focused on the tasks at hand, knowing that a timer would go off at some point and that I could stop what I was doing.
Only it went off when I was still wiping down my stovetop and I had to spend another 10 minutes finishing it off. I enjoyed that the 15-minute reset had got me started though, even if I went over the time limit.
2. Write down a list of jobs
Instead of wasting any time thinking about what I should do next, I wrote down a list of a few decluttering jobs I wanted to get down, like cleaning up any dishes left in the sink or giving the floors a quick mop.
This method worked really well and kept me on task, giving me a sense of achievement in a really short space of time. It's also a list I worked on throughout the week, knowing that I had my Friday reset to tick things off.
3. Target the clutter
The '15-minute Friday reset' is a decluttering technique, but it felt really tempting to weave in some cleaning jobs at the same time. Instead, I made sure to focus solely on removing clutter and replacing items back to their original places ready for the weekend. No cleaning involved.
With two small kids, it's really easy for high traffic areas around my home like the living room and kitchen to get messy, almost too fast. So, before the kids settle in for the weekend, it felt great to remove clutter and leave the cleaning for another day.
My verdict
Ultimately, 15 minutes felt like a lovely slot of time to declutter my home, but it never felt like enough time. If I'm going to incorporate this into my weekly maintenance plan, I feel like I'd need to enlist the help of my kids and my husband to make sure that in that 15 minutes, we can get a lot more done.
What I really loved about this hack though was that I was doing it on a Friday. I noticed that I felt a lot calmer over the weekend and put a lot less pressure on myself to do any of the tidying on Saturday and Sunday when I was trying to spend that time being present.
And when Monday came back around, my weekly cleaning tasks felt a lot more palatable. It's definitely easier to get the cleaning done when there's not a bunch of clutter getting in the way. Turns out, you only need 15 minutes.
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