The Dirtiest Spot On Your Desk, According To Research — And How To Clean It

For this new report, appliance insurance and repair company Cinch Home services surveyed nearly 900 remote workers to learn more about their maintenance routines.

After gathering germ samples from various surfaces in the workers' home offices, they sent them off to the lab to be tested. The results indicated that the mouse was consistently the dirtiest thing in people's home offices, containing up to 4,000,000 CFUs—colony-forming units—per 10 square inches. That's 3,448 times more bacteria than your average toilet handle.

Long story short: It's important to clean everything—and that means everything—in your office, at the very least once a week.

And as you might have imagined, cleaning electronics looks a little different from cleaning regular hard surfaces. Luckily, cleaning your mouse or trackpad is pretty straightforward. Before you do anything, you'll want to unplug your mouse or computer.

If you're just looking to give it a quick wipe, use a slightly damp cloth (be sure not to spray any water directly onto the surface itself, as it can damage it). If you're looking for some disinfecting action, green cleaning expert Becky Rapinchuk recommends pouring a little rubbing alcohol on a soft cloth and wiping the computer mouse or trackpad, then allowing it to dry.

You can use that same method with your natural cleaner of choice, and for the hard-to-reach places of the mouse, you can try dipping a cotton swab in the cleaner or rubbing alcohol to get in those crevices. Simple as that!