Money Saving Mom®

If you missed the first part of this series, be sure to read it here. You can see a video of my Homemaking Binder here.

4) Clear the Clutter

You know one surefire way to add more time to your life? Get rid of excess stuff. I truly believe that the less you have, the less time you have to spend on upkeep, maintenance and cleaning. Either you control the clutter or the clutter will control you.

If you feel overwhelmed with clutter, don’t throw your hands up in despair. Instead, create a realistic plan of attack. Take one room at a time and commit to working on it for 15 minutes five days each week until it is thoroughly gone through and then start on the next.

I’ve written quite a bit on this topic before, so I encourage you to go read my posts on Dealing With Toy Overload and Five Ways to Cut Down on Clutter.

5) Tame the Laundry Monster

While I might be pretty good at keeping on top of most of the clutter in our house, I struggle with keeping up with the laundry. In fact, after my third child was born, for a few months, there was almost always a massive pile of clean laundry in our room waiting to be folded.

I never seemed to have the time or energy to tackle it. So, truth be told, most of the time it didn’t get folded and put away; we just took the clothes straight out of the pile and wore them. (Does that make me Worst Homemaker of the Year?)

I constantly felt guilty about this and overwhelmed by laundry. It just seemed I could never come close to staying on top of it. And finally, I decided enough is a enough. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life overloaded by laundry. So I devised a plan (with my husband’s help!):

::Do a load of laundry from start to finish every day. My goal is that there is never a clean laundry pile of any sort in our room. This isn’t always the case, but if I aim to do a load every day from start to finish (wash, dry, fold put away), I usually stay mostly on top of the laundry.

::Get help. I mentioned before that, after our third child was born and I was struggling with postpartum depression, we hired a girl from church to start coming over once a week and helping out. One of the tasks she often helps with is doing a few loads of laundry.

It is such a huge relief and blessing to know that, if I get behind on laundry, someone else is going to help me get caught back up so I don’t fall hopelessly behind and we resort back to piles of laundry in our room again. I’m also teaching the children to help with laundry and we have a time block in our schedule where we all help fold and put away the laundry.

Maybe these solutions won’t work for you (or quite possibly, you don’t struggle with staying on top of the laundry like I do!), but I encourage you to evaluate areas in your homemaking which you struggle with and work on coming up with possible solutions. It might take you a few tries to find a solution, but you’ll likely hit on something which works well in the process — or which at least helps you see some noticeable improvement!

6) Simplify Meals

You know my mantra is “Keep it simple.” There’s no need to over-complicate life any more than it already is.

If you love making six-course gourmet dinners and you have time to do so, than go for it! But if you’re feeling stressed and overwhelmed with life, can I encourage you to give yourself freedom to keep meals simple?

In fact, if your family is okay with it, you might find it helpful to just have two weeks’ worth of go-to quick and easy meals that you rotate. Or, you might consider taking one day a month to prepare most of the food for your main dishes for the next month to stick in the freezer.

We stick with really basic meals around here and it works well for us at this season of our lives. Breakfasts are cereal or oatmeal, lunches are leftovers, sandwiches, salads or macaroni and cheese, dinners are some type of meat (fish, chicken or beef), some type of carb (bread, rice or potatoes) and a veggie. Most meals can be put together in 15 minutes or less, with pretty minimal clean up, too.

Having this simple plan and giving myself the grace to not feel like I needed to be making more than this (unless I was inspired and had time!) has really provided me a lot of freedom from guilt — and it’s saved me a lot of time and energy, too!

7) Let Go of the Myth of a Perfect Balance

I’ve shared a lot of thoughts and tips on time management in this series, but I want to reiterate to you that, while things are so much better in our lives and my priorities are in order much of the time now, please don’t get the impression that I have found a perfect balance in my life. There are still those days when I don’t get enough sleep, the house looks like a tornado came through, I stay in my pajamas all day and Jesse brings home dinner.

As I’ve given myself grace and sought to put the “big rocks” in first, I’ve realized that it’s okay if everything isn’t perfect or even close to perfect. Life is full of disruptions, messes and curveballs.

At different times in your life, you’re going to need to put more energy and effort into some things while other things are going to slide or be put on the back burner for the time being. Something’s always going to be somewhat out of balance… and I believe that is perfectly okay!

True balance is not spending exactly equal amounts of time on every facet of your life, but it’s making sure that, over the course of a few months, you are giving focused attention to each important area in your life and that the unimportant things aren’t creeping in and crowding out what really matters.

Beginning on Wednesday, I’ll be sharing some excellent guest posts on time management from readers who are in much different seasons and situations of life than me. I think you’ll be blessed and encouraged

I wanted to end this series on Time Management with some thoughts on managing your time when it comes to homemaking. I’m still learning right along with you, so I hope you’ll chime in and share some of your tips and ideas, too!

1) Streamline Your Homemaking Routines

Most of you know that my mantra is, “Keep it simple.” There’s no need to have an elaborate system if something really basic works for you (though, if an elaborate system works for you, more power to you!).

And there’s no need to feel like you have to scrub every little nook and cranny of your house all the time. Give yourself grace to let some stuff go.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, stick with the basics. In our house, if we have clean laundry, sufficiently picked up rooms, clean bathrooms, the dishes are loaded into the dishwasher and the floors are swept, I consider things to be in pretty good shape.

I aim to complete the tasks on my Daily, Weekly and Monthly checklists, but I don’t always get to all of them. However, I’ve found that if I shoot to get them done, even if I skip a few things every few days, the house stays in pretty good shape. It’s never perfect, but it’s usually 45-minutes to Company Ready. And I’m satisfied with that at this point in my life.

2) Take Time to Plan

I touched on this before, but I’m going to talk about it again. Without a plan, you don’t know where you’re supposed to be going. You’re aimless and purposeless and you’ll usually be more apt to just run around in circles putting out fires.

Planning one cleaning project to do each day and actually doing it, is much better than waking up with 447 projects in your head you feel you really should do but you’re so overwhelmed that you end up doing nothing.

I encourage you to set aside time in your schedule each week to make a simple plan of action as well as goals for the coming week. I usually make out this list for the upcoming week on Saturdays and then try to review my list the following Saturday bumping whatever didn’t get accomplished during the previous week to the next week.

Reviewing this weekly list of goals is always so encouraging to me because even on those weeks when it feels like nothing really got done, when I review my list at the end of the week I’ll realize that yes, I really did accomplish some things — despite what it may have felt like!

I use a list similar to FishMama’s (above), only mine’s not so detailed. It just has sections for Home, Jesse, Children, Personal, Ministry and Blogging. I try to set 3-5 goals for each section each week.

In the home section, I might write an extra organizing or cleaning project and two cooking projects. In Jesse’s section, I might write to set a goal of writing him one note, doing something fun with him and a specific prayer request to pray for him daily. In the children section, I might set a goal to finish a book we’re reading together, do an extra craft project and plan one fun outing.

In the personal section, I usually set goals for Bible memory work, a book I want to finish and some other area I’m working on improving in (such as going to bed on time!). For the ministry section, I might set a goal to have a friend over, write a card to someone and make food for someone. And in the blogging section, I’ll usually set goals for whatever posts or projects I’m hoping to finish that week.

Now obviously, I don’t always do everything in every section every week. In fact, some weeks I only get a few things off my list done. But planning these at the beginning of the week and then referring to my list of goals as I make out my short daily to-do lists helps me to be a lot more purposeful in living my life.

3) Involve the Family

My husband and I are firm believers in families being a team. No one person in a family was designed to carry the load of everything; it should be shouldered by each individual member to the level of their ability.

Now, I know I am very, very blessed to be married to a man who doesn’t shirk when it comes to work — whether that’s in his professional role as an attorney or when he’s at home changing a dirty diaper. He works from sun up to sun down and then some and I’m constantly challenged by his discipline and work ethic. [I often tell him, “Would you stop making me feel so lazy?!” :)]

My husband and I are a team through and through and we both contribute to our family economically as well as keeping up our home, training our children and doing the myriad of tasks, errands and chores which must be done to keep a home and family humming along. While I know our particular family dynamics wouldn’t work for everyone, I do encourage you if you feel like you are shouldering too heavy of a load to talk openly with your family members about how to shift some of that load elsewhere so that it doesn’t crush you!

We’re also in the process of training our children to also be assets to our family. While we very much want them to enjoy their childhood and just revel in that carefree state, we also feel like one of the greatest gifts we can instill in them is a strong work ethic.

No matter where you end up in life, a hard-working, persevering attitude is always going to be a huge benefit. Plus, I believe it is so much more fulfilling to live a life of service, rather than a life of selfishness.

We have found that modeling hard work and servanthood before our children is one of the best ways for them to learn, as well as encouraging them to work alongside us from an early age. And we give them age-appropriate chores to accomplish each day, as well as encouraging them to take initiative in helping outside of their daily chore list. (By the way, you can download some fun and free printable chore lists here, if you’re interested.)

We are still learning the practicalities of imparting this to our children in a Godly and balanced manner, so I won’t give you any tips for what works. But ask me in about 25 years from now, and hopefully I’ll have some words of wisdom to share. 🙂

On Wednesday, we’ll talk more about clearing out clutter, taming the laundry monster, simplifying meals and letting go of the myth of a perfect balance. If I have time, I’m also going to do a little video blog tour of my extremely simple homemaking binder for those who are looking to set up a simple home organization system.

How do you encourage your children to help around the house and develop a strong work ethic? I’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions!