Ok, not literally, but it’s amazing what you can do in 15 minutes! I have recently discovered the 15 minute clean and rediscovered the “power nap” and it has made quite an improvement to our days.
First of all, here’s how the 15 minute clean works: once the baby is down for their nap (especially if they take a few minutes to cry themselves to sleep like mine does), pick one room that needs to be picked up, set the kitchen timer for 15 minutes and get to work. When the timer goes off, you can keep cleaning if you feel so inclined, but even if not, you’ve probably done quite a bit. A little bit each nap adds up to quite a bit. I’ve found that the procrastination of emptying the dishwasher really takes longer than actually doing it. There’s something about the challenge to get as much done in that 15 minutes as possible. I also use this little trick so that I don’t get carried away with all the things I feel I must do during nap time and miss the opportunity for a nap of my own.
Speaking of naps, now that my little one is sleeping pretty good at night, I don’t need a crazy long nap each day. But I often do need a little one. In college I often took power naps between classes and they always helped me recover from those late nights “studying”. Sometime after getting married, my naps grew longer and longer in order to be effective. Then, during pregnancy if I didn’t get a 2-3 hour nap each day, I couldn’t really function… and of course with the new baby, any chance to get to sleep was absolutely mandatory. Coming out of that, I can finally say that a power nap is actually helpful. Just 15, 20, maybe 30 minutes can recharge the batteries for the rest of the day.
So I encourage you to take 15. 15 to clean, tidy up, fold laundry, etc. and then take 15 to rest, nap, read, sip some coffee.
I’ve done this for years, I now do 45 work, then 15, rest, read, nap etc. Or if the work is very labor intense, I do 15 work & 45 rest (needle work)