Cleaning and organizing a house is like a slow-motion juggling act using enormous antique vases full of hot coffee. If you keep everything up in the air and moving, it looks and smells great, but look away for an instant, and you have an enormous mess.
I’ve tried all kinds of techniques and tools to make these routines as painless as possible, so I eventually decided to see what ChatGPT[1] had to offer in terms of basic household chores.
After some experimentation, I found ChatGPT to be useful in some surprising ways, even if I actually still have to wield the vacuum and sponge myself for now.
1. Custom cleaning routine
The chaos of life has always meant I can’t stick to a strict schedule of cleaning; sometimes, you just can’t wait for the kitchen’s cleaning day, or maybe you don’t have enough time to vacuum the whole house.
I explained to ChatGPT the basic layout of my house, how long I could realistically clean on most days, and even what rooms bugged me the most when they got messy. After some back and forth, the AI offered a flexible schedule broken down into bite-sized chunks, like “Wipe down kitchen surfaces and organize fridge” or “Saturday: Vacuum living spaces and set up laundry bags for cleaning”. I could then tell it each day what I got to, what I didn’t, and what I might have cleaned ahead of schedule due to living with a toddler.
As I went through and cleaned, ChatGPT also encouraged me to narrate what I was finding and putting away in each room, and even shelf by shelf. Then it could find patterns and suggest reorganizing where I keep things. This means that I don’t have a drawer in three different rooms for important documents to save or forget to put a screwdriver back into the toolbox and spend an hour looking for it.
2. Clean motivation
Sometimes the hardest part isn’t doing the cleaning, it’s convincing yourself to start. ChatGPT had a solution in the form of a very tidy list. The AI provided short-term guides to making the house look amazing with only a couple of hours to spare before guests arrived, and longer-term micro goals.
For example, make a habit of doing ten minutes of putting things away and doing minor organizing of a drawer before bed, or reminding me to rotate cleaning zones so I don’t forget the windows. The sense of progress from small tasks made the bigger projects seem much more manageable.
When really unmotivated, I found simply asking ChatGPT to “talk me into doing 15 minutes of cleaning” led to unexpectedly encouraging responses like “Fifteen minutes isn’t forever. You could sort the bathroom drawer, and even if you only toss out expired stuff, that’s one less thing to do later.” This kind of psychological cleaning assistance might sound silly, but as with most things in life, that initial push can make a world of difference.
3. Supply management
You know what makes cleaning harder? When you run out of the thing you need while cleaning. Running out of paper towels or not replacing the vacuum filter puts a real damper on getting the house clean. To combat this, I asked ChatGPT to “help me make a list of all my cleaning supplies and tell me how often they should be restocked, cleaned, or replaced.” The AI helped me sort products by room, by surface type, and even by frequency of use. Then it helped me figure out where to store them so I wasn’t dragging a whole caddy up and down the stairs.
It also helped me downsize. I didn’t need three types of glass cleaner. I didn’t need five scrub brushes that looked identical. And with a little help, I figured out how to store things vertically so I could actually see them, and how to group cleaning tools by task and not just by room. The AI even set up a “reorder reminder” prompt to stick in my calendar: “Inventory your supplies and restock anything below half-full.”
The best part is that ChatGPT remembers what works for me. Over time, I’ve saved a few of my favorite prompts, refined my schedules, and updated my supply lists. I’ve built a kind of modular system for managing my house.
I didn’t clean my entire home overnight and I still sometimes forget the laundry in the dryer for two days. But I do find that having ChatGPT’s suggested and evolving schedule helps nudge me toward keeping up with making the house look nice and never being unprepared for the inevitable messiness of life (especially with a toddler).