Asklemmy

Depends on the home. Different places I've lived in have different needs.

For dust in particular, you should consider sources of dust and airflow.

I grew up in a house with central air conditioning, so that system had a filter that needed to be replaced periodically. You can buy a variety of different filters- coarser filters last longer but let small particles through, while finer filters need to be changed more often but get the air cleaner.

I now live in a much older house that does not have central air (radiator heat, window units for AC). My wife also likes fan noise to sleep, so we bought an air purifier that we generally leave running in the bedroom and I change that filter periodically. Our basement gets bad dust because it's unfinished with a concrete floor and rafter ceiling, and the litter boxes are down there, so we got another filter that stays on there.

Porous and soft surfaces hang on to dust. Carpets, rugs, tapestries, upholstered furniture, piles of clothes or bedding. Putting your clothes away in a closet or dresser helps. Storing extra bedding in a cabinet or closet helps. Vacuum the carpets and rugs. Don't let dirty laundry pile up. Wash bedding regularly (every week or two). A lot of couches have removable, washable covers that are nice to wash like once a year.

Hard surfaces are easier to clean. If you put those clothes in a dresser, wipe the top of it off with a damp cloth every now and then. A broom can help with floors a bit, but wet dusting with something like a Swiffer is better. If you have rugs you can take them outside and beat them., although vacuuming is often easier. If you have carpets... You're really screwed unless you get a vacuum.

The hardest part is decorations. Frames hanging on walls are just a pain because you simply have to wipe them down. Knick knacks on open shelves are terrible because you've got to pick up the thing, wipe it off, and wipe off the spot under it. Glass display cabinets are much easier to keep clean because dust will almost never get inside. As long as you keep the horizontal surface clear it's just an easy flat thing to wipe off. Vertical glass panes will need the occasional wipe, but not as frequently and it's still way easier than all the books and crannies of a figure or crystal or trophy or whatever else you've got on display.

As for prevention, I brush my hair in one particular spot in my bedroom and clean the brush out after each time. Shower regularly. Stay on top of laundry. The idea is to get skin and hair disposed of, and doing so with water tends to prevent it from getting into the air and settling as dust. Trim your nails somewhere so they will be disposed of properly. Brush your pets.

If you’ve got central HVAC: replace your air filters. Consider going for the high-grade HEPA ones, too.

I pay for a cleaning service to come through quarterly. My partner does most of the home maintenance stuff. I'll do dishes when I cook, but she likes to handle it when she cooks and I'm ok with that because she got mad at me enough times for asking her not to do them before she moved in and they were my dishes. Otherwise, if you see a mess, clean it up. This applies to stuff that got forgotten the night before, vomit from the kitty who sometimes pukes, etc.

The quarterly deep cleaning take care of mopping the hard floors, dusting everything, whatever else.

Its always an ongoing thing. We clean as we go.

Shoes stay on our front door mat and don't come inside.

Fake feather dusters (or swiffer) to clean tricky stuff and under things.

Swifter the hard surfaces every other day.

Damp cloth to wipe down a surface that is showing dust.

Frying stuff means using hood extractor even if it is not visbly needed, because without it we would later find soot/dust all over certain areas that are colder like window sills ...the aerosolized oil/soot would travel and drop by convection near windows and baseboards.

Carpets are bad for trapping dust but also they are good at creating dust from broken carpet fibers. These get weekly vacuuming and twice yearly steam cleaning--the water coming out is always murky brown even though the carpet looks relatively clean.

For the 'remove the accumulation' part - get a pack of microfibre clothes. One wipe over a surface will be enough to get most dust, plus they do a great job of windows & mirrors, windex/glass cleaner is much more effective followed up with microfibre rather than another cloth or paper towels.
Once the cloth gets a bit of dust built up put aside and use the next clean cloth and keep cleaning, throw them all in a normal wash whenever you're done (just do NOT use fabric softener).

Air purifiers are your friend. They drastically reduce dust and make every room feel better.

I should clean more often.

But my humidifier is also an air purifier and it pulls a LOT of dirt from the air. I change the water every week and it's filthy. Surprising how much dirt is in the air to "purify."

Usually after a while of being able to see the routes I walk in my apartment visibly, it manages to stress me to the point where I can do something about it and I'll spend a solid 10 hours cleaning and tidying

I walk around the house with a swiffer mop before I take a shower. Then vaccum the carpets in the rooms once a week. Showering is usually the trigger to do some sort of maintenance cleaning in the house. My logic is that if I’m gonna get dirty, I’ll do it before I shower.

So many things factor into this...

Our house became significantly (like 97%) less dusty when our dog passed.

The age of your house

The type of furnace filter

Routine

We have 3 small kids, so we try to tidy up physical stuff (toys, clothes, bags, etc) every day. Dishes too.

Once a week is wiping down nin-kitchen surfaces

Once a month is wiping down baseboards and door trim

The way I do it is to start by dusting all the countertops, cleaning the tables, and throwing every food or dirt down on the floor, then I vacuum all the floors (tiles), moving tables, chairs, and other things around. I mop and I clean the bathroom (toilet, sink, shower) while the floor dries. Finally, I mop once more and I make a coffee to relax.

edit:I also clean the kitchen countertop, stove, coffee machine and everything else on the kitchen.

I'm constantly cleaning. I live alone in a 100+ year old building. It's no exaggeration to say that there's a coating of dust moments after I get done dusting.

I use a microfiber duster for daily cleaning and a heavily diluted mixture of water, vinegar, and soap for deeper cleaning.

The only thing I can think of, but haven't tried, to minimize dust accumulation is to run a humidifier. That should theoretically give the dust particles something to cling onto and be less prone to becoming airborne as you move about. Perhaps a daily water misting from a spray bottle could work - I should give that a try.

I have an air purifier in my bedroom. It doesn't do very much. I don't really understand how they're supposed to work anyway. There's no way it's going to suck in dust from the other side of the room. I wonder sometimes if it actually makes things worse. I use it mostly for the white noise to sleep with.

If we're strictly talking dust accumulation, there's a few things you can do to reduce this.

• Make sure to change the filter in your HVAC system and intake vents every few months with a high quality filter. The better the filter, the more you need to change it.
• You can also add an air filter to individual rooms. I added them to all our bedrooms and it helps a ton with keeping dust down.

Aside from that, you'll still need to dust every so often and how often will depend on how fast it gets dirty again and how deep you want to clean. I use a vacuum and damp rag to dust shelves and such every month and I dust other things like blinds and fan blades and pull out furniture and appliances once a year. Every few years we'll need to remove something that usually never moves and we'll clean up the dust from that. I will say it's much easier to clean stuff regularly when you don't have lots of things laying around or taking up space. Keeping literal objects tidy makes it less of a chore. It's a lot easier to just wipe a table than to wipe a table and all the knick knacks.

When I was with my ex: every saturday morning. It sucked, but the reward of both chilling on the sofa in the afterglow of a clean apartment was awesome. God I miss that.

Now: rarely. If it begins to affect my mental health, I might pick up clothing off the floor. I don't clean for myself, I clean for the happiness of others

I only vacuum every other week to a month.

I offset this by having air purifiers running in every room.

If you have HVAC, make sure the filter is replaced regularly and try running a higher MERV filter.

I run my robot vacuum every day, just because it's possible and it always manages catch some amount of dust every day.

A large part of why robot vacuums are great is because they decouple basically all effort from the task, making it easy to do it frequently and hence keep up with it. The same applies for dishwashers.

I have dust mite allergies. 2 most important changes I did were:

(1) no carpets, no curtains, only tile floors.

(2) and I love my robot vaccuum. They do 80% of the work, daily, whilst I'm away.

About once a week, though I live in a one bedroom apartment. Deep cleaning is about once a month.

As @xmunk said, cleaning needs to be embedded in other tasks. If you cannot figure out how to embed a given task then you can set it for a fixed schedule. For example, you say that you clean your desk or office on Saturday morning and you have a given set of steps you accomplish.

Another trick I learned from corporate world is to delegate the tasks. It is more manageable to follow up on someone doing it for you than you actually doing it. This can be someone else living with you, or someone you can hire to do. For example, you can hire someone to clean the house every Sunday. This later option could be expensive.

If you want to embed tasks and do it yourself, then you need to make them easy for you, for example, you can overstock cleaning products. Let's say you have a kitchen microfiber towel that hangs nearby and a dedicated cleaning product at reach. You consider that a meal (launch or dinner) equals, fetching the ingredients, cooking, eating and cleaning dishes, putting away dishes, and finally cleaning them. If you don't clean dishes then you consider you did not finish your dinner.

Same thing for the bathroom, you need cleaning tools at reach when you are in the bathroom, don't reuse kitchen stuff to clean the bathroom. Then when you shower, you clean the bathtub, the mirror, the sink, your underwear, wipe the floor, etc.

I wipe my floor with a damp cloth/mop every two weeks or so. That removes a lot of the dust with relatively little effort.

As someone with ADHD I actually keep a broom leaning against my standing desk and sweep to busy my hands whenever I'm thinking or on a call. Dusting/washing walls simply doesn't happen in our household due to how many steps are involved - but for most other cleaning we build it into tasks - so as I cook I clean cookware as I go - when I finish showering I squeegee the glass, and there's cleaning fluid within reach if I notice build up.

These are all really exploits designed to help ADHD people do shit but maybe they'll help you!