Keeping your apartment clean is hard. Even keeping your room clean is hard. There's an invisible wall you have to climb over to muster the motivation to pick up your clothes and vacuum the place. That wall grows higher and higher as dishes pile up and laundry builds in the hamper. Finally, at some point, it all topples over, and you spend an hour cleaning it up.
That's it. One hour. Maybe two. Even if you don't finish everything in two, it's most of the way there. You look at how disgusting your bathroom sink has gotten over the past week and it only takes 2 minutes to make it sparkle.
It's an incredible feeling to have a clean place. It's like when you first moved in. It's a feeling of possibilities. Each thing that needs to be taken care of is like tar stuck to your feet. Eventually you start tiptoeing around things and it's hard to get around your own home. When it's clean, you're completely free.
You're a lot more diligent picking up the small stuff when there's nothing to be picked up. But it always ends up that one day you're in a rush and you leave one thing alone as you run out the door. You come back and you still don't pick it up. In fact, you throw another thing on the table here, a bottle of water there, an empty can in the kitchen, a receipt on the dresser room. Before you know it, two weeks pass and it's back to what seems to be its default state.
And then there's the work we do. In our case, bugs and changes pile up extremely fast, and same with the equivalent of bugs in any other profession. If you keep it clean, keep it organized, you've got a clearer head to move forward on the work you want to do, instead of having all that shit in the back of your mind, stuff you know you have to go back to and you feel bad about not doing. It's worth it, even to spend an hour or two every day, to keep clean.
It's about momentum. When you're not on a roll, you don't feel the need to start. But when you are, the little details start to matter. You don't even have to be perfect. You just have to be consistently good, and you'll be way ahead of everyone else. And you'll feel amazing. You already know you will, so why not do it?