The power hour of cleaning. Whenever I can’t sleep, I watch videos of people dedicating an hour a day to clean their house.

They start in the kitchen, taking everything off the counter tops, wiping down every surface, and they move on to the living room where they take the couch cushions off, vacuum every inch of the room – including curtains – and do the same in every room.

They call that their “power hour.”

I’m exhausted watching them.

I decided to do the same, so I set the timer on my phone for 60 minutes.

The first 10 minutes is spent convincing myself I’m going to really clean the house for sixty minutes straight.

Piece of cake, I tell myself. Then I start thinking about cake and have to mentally slap myself to get back to the job at hand.

The first thing I tackle is making the bed. Straighten the sheets, plump the bed pillows, throw the comforter on and toss two decorative pillows on top of that.

Dusting would be wasting power-hour time, so I move on to the laundry, checking to see how many more minutes there are in the hour – 50 is the answer

Since it’s just the two of us, it’s easy to sort the clothes – jeans, cottons and T-shirts are the first load and towels are the next load.

Going through the pockets, I find the grocery list I was looking for a few days ago, so I head into the kitchen to put those items on the list again.

While I’m in the kitchen, I decide to fix something to drink because cleaning is tiring.

That’s when I notice I forgot to turn the coffee pot off. Good thing I was in here, I think, and then decide to load the dishwasher since there’s just the breakfast bowls.

“You could do some power cleaning in your kitchen,” a voice in my head says.

Those people in the videos take everything off the counters and clean, but geez, there’s a lot of stuff on the counters. That would take at least half of my remaining time.

So I put that off and decide to vacuum. That’s not a weekly chore for me – it should be, I know – but the dog hair is starting to colonize in the corners.

Out comes the vacuum cleaner, but I notice the canister is full.

I take the canister apart, dump out the contents – geez, that’s a lot – and then spend a frustrating 10 minutes trying to put the vacuum cleaner back together again. Then I’m back in business.

I consider taking the couch cushions off but quickly talk myself out of that extra chore, because I’d have to change to the hose and that would eat up valuable power-hour time.

With the vacuuming done and the washing machine humming along, I start to convince myself I need a break, but promises were made this morning.

I look in my office. Straightening my desk out would take at least three power hours, so I decide to move on.

Looking at the layers of Legos on the dining room table, I tell myself the grandkids will have more fun digging through the piles than if I take time to sort them.

Thoughtful, that’s how I see myself.

Then it’s on to the grandkids’ bedrooms. I pick up the toys from the middle of the floor and wipe the toothpaste from the sink and the counters. I see a picture our grandson drew, and I decide to hang it up because I have an extra frame in my office.

Then I have to find a nail and the hammer, and that takes me back to the laundry room junk drawer. There’s the box cutter I was looking for last week and the bottle opener we needed yesterday.

I wander through the junk drawer for a little longer, trying to remember why I put some of the things in there.

And then the timer goes off.

My power hour is over but the furniture’s still dusty, I haven’t touched the mop bucket, the refrigerator is filled with leftovers and the bathrooms are calling my name.

But tomorrow’s another day, another chance to conquer the power hour.

Victory awaits.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.