Tidy Tips - the ten minute tidy!

I thought today I'd share a tip that's helped me keep my house fairly straightened lately. Sometimes when every room of your house is a tip, it can seem really overwhelming, you can spend ages tidying one room only to turn round and find every other room is in a terrible state!
What I like to do is take it in ten minute chunks. The way I see it, it's only ten minutes, you can do anything for ten minutes, right?
So, here's how I do the ten minute tidy...

1) Set a timer for 10 minutes (I use the one on my phone)

2) If it's a bedroom, make the bed and open the curtains. Then start at one corner or the room and work your way round, gathering up anything that doesn't belong in the room and dumping it at the door of the room it does belong in.

3) When you get back to the corner you started in, gather up any dirty dishes and put them in the kitchen.

4) Take a rubbish bag and chuck in anything that needs throwing out.

5) Do another corner to corner sweep of the room, putting everything where it belongs. Take a cloth or baby wipe with you and dust as you go.

6) Straighten up and covers or cushions, spray some air freshener and sweep or hoover the floor. You're done!

If the timer goes off before you're finished, stop and move on to the next room. It's better to have a house full of semi tidy rooms than one really tidy room and a house full of messy ones! You'll find that as time goes on, if you do this every day the rooms will get better and better until you don't even need ten minutes per room anymore. Yesterday I did 4 rooms before my timer went off!

I do this in the morning after breakfast, and in the evening after dinner and before bed. I'm trying to get into the habit of tidying as I go, so the house never gets really terribly messy again.

Do you have any housekeeping wisdom to share?