There's a book that comes highly recommended especially by neurodivergent folks titled How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organising by KC Davis. I haven read it yet but I hear a lot of glowing praise for it.

Unsolicited advice:

I find that my spaces work best when I have designated places for things. Containers, racks, drawers, trays, you name it. If things have a home then it's easier to keep things tidy.

When it comes to creating designated spaces, I like to take a desire path-influenced approach to this; if you find certain things piling up in certain areas then that's an indication that you should try creating a designated space there for those things, or at least within reach if that exact spot isn't suitable.

Shoes piled up by the front door? Maybe it's worth putting a shoe rack or a hallway bench table that is cushioned so you can seat yourself there when you take your shoes on and off. If you're already sitting at the bench then you're probably going to tuck those shoes you've just taken off under the bench or you'll put them on the shoe rack.

Letters and paperwork piling up in a corner? You might want to try putting a small table or cabinet in that spot. Or maybe you don't have the space for that so you could try a letter organiser that you attach to the wall instead.

In the picture I can see a few tells about what you might benefit from based on this design approach:

A reasonably sized trash bin near your bedside would help with keeping rubbish off your floor.

A shoe rack would help you keeping your shoes organised.

You can get underbed shoe racks with wheels so they pull out, or you can just get an underbed plastic storage tub for less cash and use it in the same way. Or you might prefer a shoe rack or over-door hanging shoe organiser. Alternatively you might prefer a valet stand if you have a bit of a floordrobe issue that you want to address - you can tuck your shoes under the valet as their spot and any clothes that are too clean to go into the laundry but that are too dirty to go back into the wardrobe can hang out on the valet, along with other bits and pieces like fashion accessories and watches etc.

Here's one example of a valet, although they come in all sorts of styles and they seem to be resurging in popularity:

Note that you don't need a specific piece of overpriced furniture to make a valet stand. You could get creative and put together a chair and maybe a small hanging rack behind it to achieve the same function. It probably won't look as aesthetically appealing but that doesn't matter because if it helps you to be more organised that's what counts.

I think I spotted some clothes on the floor. If you don't already have a laundry basket in your room then I would recommend getting one. If you do have one and you find that your dirty laundry piles up on the floor anyway then that would be an indication that your laundry basket isn't suitingyour needs - is it too small? Is it tucked away behind closet doors, meaning that you forget all about it or that it feels like it's too much effort to get to? Etc.

The last thing is that it seems like you would benefit from having another bedside table on the other side of the bed because there's a lot of stuff there. If you have a working space there, it might be easier for you to manage keeping that area tidier.

If it helps, you can even label your designated spaces either temporarily (using something like post it notes) or permanently. If you have little indicators telling you where things belong then it removes the unnecessary mental burden of remembering/figuring it out.

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As for cleaning, you could try a few different approaches:

• Making a big list of each task and crossing them off as you progress

• Using a sorta pomodoro timer method and setting a timer for 5/10 mins then cleaning whatever you can in that time period before taking a break and later switching back to a short time period of cleanup, that way you are less likely to feel overwhelmed

• Picking a single spot and addressing that, without concern for the other stuff that needs to be done

With that last one you might find yourself shifting 50% of the junk to another pile elsewhere in the room. That's okay. You want to carve out a space where things are clean and tidy and organised, like a little oasis for yourself. With big cleanup tasks often I find that I will shift an object from one pile to another and another as I clean and tidy each section before I eventually find a suitable home for that object. This is part of the process for me. On this, I find that if I spend too long trying to figure out where one object should live often I get bogged down and distracted, thus losing all of my momentum, so I take the approach that if I can't come up with a place for that object within a few seconds then it goes into the pile of things that require a home which I sort out later on.

To expand a little on this strategy, with big cleanup tasks I like to create a few containers to help me sort out what I'm doing:

• Trash (optional: also recycling)

• Donations

• Stuff that doesn't have a home and needs to be organised

It can be garbage bags or empty boxes or containers or laundry baskets or anything, it really doesn't matter. Just having those three-ish categories means that it's much easier to sort through things, at least for me.

Final thoughts:

Don't overwhelm yourself.

If you have a pile of dishes at your desk and you only take your most recent one back to the kitchen, that is still good progress. Try to get into the habit of just doing one thing - if you're leaving your bedroom and going into another room, try taking just one thing that needs to be cleaned or put away and dealing with that as you go about your day. One bowl or one glass or one piece of trash. Something extremely simple that will only take a few moments to sort out. No big commitments, no huge demands or expectations; just one little thing.

If you cultivate this as a habit then you're going to make the big cleanups easier and you're going to sustain the clean and tidy state for a lot longer.