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My apartment is not always in perfect condition, and cleaning up that mess isn’t exactly what I look forward to. Therefore, in a discussion with a friend about this subject, I complained about that I couldn’t come up with good rules for myself on how and when to clean. (I like rules — simple, consistent, and easy-to-follow rules.)

Every time I manage to actually do a proper cleaning of my apartment, I usually think: “Okay, now the apartment is clean, it shouldn’t be too difficult to keep it this way. I’ll just make sure that after every day it is still clean.” That’s a great rule in theory but it never works in practice. As soon as you slip, and let the apartment get messy, you’re lost. It has now become more of a mess than you can muster energy for to clean up.

A different strategy

But my friend suggested a different strategy: “Before you go to bed every night, make sure that the apartment is at least a little bit cleaner than it was when you woke up.” This rule has worked out extremely well for me. They both work fine as long as I follow them every single day. The difference is when I slip, when I allow the apartment to become a bit of a mess, I won’t automatically freeze and ignore it. All I have to do is to remove one single thing from the floor or wash one single glass, and I will have fulfilled my promise. If I just keep doing this, my apartment will eventually be clean. And also, once I’ve picked this single thing from the floor, or washed that single glass, it’s rather easy to take another and a third one as well.

When your apartment finally is clean, you’ll have to use a bit more imagination to fulfill the rule. You might archive those payed bills lying in your closet, remove the clothes you never use in your wardrobe and send them to a suitable charity, or do any other thing that you’ve long thought of doing. This would never even have happened with my first rule as it would have acknowledged my apartment as clean and I would need to do no work.

In software development

The reason I’m talking here about cleaning my apartment, is that I believe the very same principle applies to software development as well. It’s easy to ignore accumulating technical debt in your system, become paralyzed by it, and not have energy to deal with it. In that situation, just ensure that the system gets a little better by every commit, and one day, you’ll realize that your system is really in quite nice shape. So don’t aspire to be perfect, just to become better every day and you’ll get there (or at least very close ).