I was doing some chores and tidying around the house today when I had a funny thought. Forgive a brief detour while I provide some context. When I was in school long ago, I took a data structures course where I learned about tree traversal. Two of the most common algorithms for traversing a tree are depth-first search (travel down the tree before visiting sibling nodes) and breadth-first search (travel to sibling nodes across the tree before descending). My little bit of humor today came when I realized that my partner and I have different approaches to cleaning that could accurately be described as depth-first vs breadth-first.
My partner cleans depth-first. If the house is a mess, they will start by cleaning, sorting, and organizing drawers, cupboards, closets, and pantries before getting on with any basic tidying of the general living space. This means that all the contents of said containers are inevitably left strewn about before being replaced in a more efficient manner. I've lived with this for 20 years, so I know well what to expect. It's an algorithm for cleaning that I would personally never employ, but it works well for my partner. To be honest, even after all this time, it still makes my eye twitch a bit, and I usually retreat to one of my private spaces while the existing clutter of our shared space gets worse before it gets better.
I am a breath-first cleaner. Ok, more honesty: I'm really more of a tidier than a cleaner. I remove clutter and clean topically, at a surface level, and eventually (sometimes) beyond that. Cleaning things off of tables, desks, counters, and other surfaces is my cleaning religion: empty surfaces make me feel at peace. Weird, right? I love me a good IKEA Kallax, because out of sight is out of mind, baby. In my view, a mess unobserved ceases to be a mess. This (rightly) drives my partner crazy, especially when I give up before getting to the bottom of the tree, and things don't get truly clean. Hey, we've lived together for 20 years, so they're used to it by now.
So, which of these cleaning algorithms is better? The fact is, they're both equally good...as long as you invest the time to traverse the entire cleaning tree. Both approaches are individually pretty unsatisfying when you stop halfway, which unfortunately tends to be what happens in my household. However, one benefit of having a partner with a different preferred cleaning algorithm is that a bunch of partial attempts do eventually yield a space that is both uncluttered and clean, and everyone ends up happy.
~nullish
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