Progress is sometimes a smaller mess, not no mess. Count it anyway.

Scoring yourself all or nothing deletes most of your real progress. If the only passing grade is no mess, then a mess half the size counts as a failure, and you lose the information that something is working. Almost nothing improves by switching off. It improves by getting smaller, less often, easier to recover from.

So measure the direction rather than the state. Three times a week instead of six, one late night instead of four, a kitchen that takes ten minutes to sort instead of an hour. Write the smaller number down somewhere.