This more efficient approach to cleaning house will revolutionize your cleaning routine.

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Whether the thought of getting out the vacuum fills you with dread or happens to be incredibly therapeutic for you, we all have to clean our homes. And if it’s something you have to do, it might as well be as efficient and painless as possible, and that starts with your cleaning plan of attack. A commonly used method is to clean room-by-room. Whether you block out an entire morning one day a week to do all your cleaning or spread it out to do a little each day, this tactic would have you clean the kitchen top-to-bottom before moving on to the bathroom. That plan might seem logical and give you a sense of accomplishment that an entire space is completely cleaned, but there’s a different approach that we think will transform your cleaning routine for its efficiency and approachability: task-based cleaning.

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When you’re doing task-based cleaning, you do one step—say, dusting—in every room of the house at once and then move on to the next task. This way, you only get out the supplies you need for that task once, instead of moving all of your cleaning supplies with you from room to room. If you like to split your cleaning schedule up over the entire week, task-based cleaning is especially efficient. For example, Monday is for dusting, Tuesday is for laundry, Wednesday is for vacuuming, and so on. And while you may prioritize keeping certain rooms cleaner because they’re used more than others or will be on display for company coming over, you likely have certain tasks that are most pressing all over your house, whether it’s vacuuming and sweeping or cleaning surfaces like counters and tables. When you’re task-based cleaning, you can prioritize those steps when you have limited time to clean.

If you’re anything like me, once you get focused on a certain cleaning task, it’s hard to stop at the end of one room when you can see the need for it in the next room over, which is why task-based cleaning is a great approach and takes advantage of that in-the-zone mentality. There’s also added satisfaction to know that you’ve touched every room in the house, and even if you’re working on dusting at the time, you’ll be more likely to tidy up as you go, meaning more of your house is clean at any one time. The last advantage of task-based cleaning worth mentioning is its practicality when you’ve got multiple cleaners working at once. If helping to clean the house is part of your kids’ chores, it makes sense to divvy up tasks instead of rooms, especially if you only have one Windex bottle or one vacuum to share. And if you’ve been cleaning your house room-by-room for many years, switching up your routine will hopefully make it a little more interesting and a little less dreadful.