The Science of Spring Cleaning

Kate Morgan
3 min readApr 1, 2021
“Cleaning Supplies at the 99¢ only store” by futurowoman is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Last week, I decided to paint my bathroom.

It seemed like a simple enough project. It’s the smallest room in the house, so it couldn’t possibly take long, I reasoned, to clean out and organize its cabinets and closet, then scrub, spackle, and sand the walls. And a fresh coat of paint would make it feel so clean: the pay-off was huge.

Days later, I’m still working on it; for such a small room, it really has been a disproportionate amount of work. But I’m doing myself a favor, and not just because at the end of it all I’ll have a new and improved place to shower.

I’ve leaned into this year’s spring cleaning itch with a vengeance, and I’m feeling what Katherine Milkman, behavioral economist and Wharton School professor, calls the “fresh start effect.”

Spring is what Milkman refers to as a “temporal landmark” — a time when people are most motivated to set and achieve goals. In a study, Milkman and her fellow researchers found that temporal landmarks get people moving on things that will better them or their lives because the landmark represents a line between a person’s past and their future. There’s a near universal desire for the future to be better than the past.

There are other temporal landmarks, too. (New Year’s is a big one, hence all the resolutions.) But there’s a reason people tend…

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Kate Morgan

Kate is a freelance journalist who’s been published by Popular Science, The New York Times, USA Today, and many more. Read more at bykatemorgan.com.