I am not a neat person by nature. I try, but it has never been a particularly easy or intuitive process. In quieter times I can do it, but when life gets chaotic, which is pretty much all the time now, keeping the house clean feels like an almost impossible task. In these times, a handy survival trick I have learned is the “junebug” method of cleaning.

This is the cleaning method for people who, in addition to being bad at cleaning, are also exhausted, frustrated, distracted, and have only a few shreds of executive function left. The junebug method is not the most efficient way to clean, nor is it the most photogenic, but it gets you started, even when the simple act of doing something seems impossible.

Just as a dirty fly will try to enter a screen door through different places over and over again, cleaning a dirty fly involves choosing a specific spot in your home to clean, such as the kitchen sink that is full of dirty dishes, and then returning to the same spot over and over again, no matter how many times you change places to do something.

Junebugging is cleaning through distraction, a process where you put some dirty dishes in the dishwasher, only to be distracted by the pile of laundry that needs to go in, which reminds you that there are a million LEGOs scattered across the living room floor, which brings your attention back to the dishes on the counter, which brings you back to the kitchen sink, where you put more dirty dishes in the dishwasher, and (eventually) turn the machine on. As Megan Griffith writes for Yahoo: