Dwell time is the tool nobody uses

Spray, wipe, done is the way most people use a cleaner, and it wastes most of what they bought. Detergents lift grease by chemistry, and chemistry needs contact time. An acid dissolving limescale is a reaction with a rate; interrupt it after fifteen seconds and you have removed fifteen seconds of scale.

Five minutes is a reasonable default for a surface cleaner. Ten to twenty for descaling anything visibly crusted. An hour, or overnight, for a showerhead in a bag or a burnt pan soaking.

The practical trick is to work in a loop rather than in place: spray every cupboard door, then go back to the first one. By the time you have finished spraying, the first is ready to wipe, and nothing has been left standing around waiting.

The one qualification is that a cleaner must not dry on the surface. If it does, you are removing dried product as well as the original dirt — which is the usual reason a well-intentioned deep clean ends up streaked.