I’m a lazy slob by nature, so all too often I fall into a bad cycle: I make a bunch of small messes which accumulate over time into a disaster zone. Unfortunately, my lovely wife follows a similar pattern, which means this happens twice as fast. When it comes time to clean them up (say if we have visitors) we madly clean up which ends up taking a long time and is both frustrating and exhausting.

One thing I’ve come up with lately was what I call the five minute rule: when watching a movie or a tv show, every 15 minutes you take a 5 minute break to clean something up. I use my time cube for this, which has convenient 15 and 5 minute settings along with a loud alarm. The nice part is that if you buy/rent/download a tv show, the five minutes ends up taking the same amount of time that the commercial breaks would take if you watched it live.

You can do a surprising amount of stuff in 5 minutes. Take out the trash/recycling, no problem. Empty or fill the dishwasher, no problem. If you watch a 45 minute long show, you’ll end up getting a fair amount of stuff done, especially between two people. If you watch a movie you could probably repaint your apartment or something in all that time! And even though it’s the same amount of time, it really doesn’t seem as nearly annoying as doing the whole thing in a contiguous 15 minute span.

If you’re a lazy slob like me, you should totally try this.