A bachelor is supposed to live a life of clutter and untidiness unless of course, there is a Jeeves in the offing to do the cleaning up. This is an image that is long since out of date and bachelor or not, there is no longer any excuse for living in messy surroundings.
With the cost of eating out going up everyday and health concerns driving more and more people towards a healthier home cooked diet, keeping a kitchen clean and tidy is becoming an increasingly important aspect of home cleaning. While it's always a good idea to use a house cleaning service on a regular basis, it's easy to keep a flat and especially the kitchen from getting too dirty between the cleaner's visits.
Don't just stand there waiting for your water to boil. Use the minute or two it takes to put things back in place or just tidy up in general.
Is the thought of cleaning up afterwards one of the main reasons why you don't cook at home? Designate a fixed counter space where you will do your work and discipline yourself to work only there. This will reduce the amount of space you need to clean.
Wash pots and pans immediately after use. It's easier to do it before the oil and food particles congeal and become hard to remove. Do the cleaning while other things are being cooked on the stove. Keep doing this and when the cooking is over, you won't have more than one or two pots to clean.
Once you finish eating, wash up immediately. A few plates won't take much time and once its done, you're free!
The basic thing to keep in mind is to learn to multitask in the kitchen. Say you have something on the stove that will take 20 minutes to cook. You could go and watch TV during this time (and each time you cook) and get to the stage of dreading entering a kitchen in dire need of cleaning. Or you could use the twenty minute to get all the cleaning done and then relax.
You have a busy life and can't be expected to devote time to home cleaning. But you can't have the cleaners in every day and you can't live in dirty surroundings. If you learn to clean up in the kitchen when waiting for something else to be completed, you'll find it becomes a habit and as time passes you will be able to do the cleaning much faster. The kitchen cleaning is only a matter of minutes a day, not hours.