It's interesting, I use precisely the opposite approach. I work in passes, each one intended to make the room cleaner as a whole but not necessarily finish any part of it.

For example, let's say I've had a big party and the kitchen is a mess. Step one might be to put the trash can in the center of the room and dispose of all visible debris. Step two might be to move all remaining small objects to one side of the room to improve visibility, then repeat the trash pass. Step three might then be to wipe down the counters, which are now clear of objects. Etc.

I tend to work in a similarly incremental way on programming tasks. Do you have a more "touch-once" approach there?

That's how I clean - pull everything out, assess, and put it all away. It's very efficient if you have enough space, but it drives people nuts because they see it as causing more of a mess.

An issue with this approach is it turns 'cleaning' into a time-consuming task that needs to be completed to avoid making the situation worse. That can cause some folks anxiety and require a building up of sufficient willpower to even begin the task.

Contrast that with a transaction-based approach to cleaning where an individual item is moved to it's destination place/state, then you move on to the next item. No middle state where things are worse, and you can stop at any time yet still have gained the benefit of any work completed to that point.

However, with the second approach it's key that everything has a suitable destination 'home' to be moved to. Often, that 'home' is the trash can :)

My wife attempts to use this method, but usually gets distracted at peak-messiness and things just end up worse off than they started.

No, you can't blame your wife for that method.

It was my method first.

She must have stolen it from me. ;)

I get scorned for doing it this way all the time!

Heap sort vs insertion sort.