Just typing about this topic puts a smile on my face.
The reality is that I have lived my life both extremely unorganized and extremely organized with varying degrees of organization in-between. When I am unorganized my house tends to be messy, we eat out a lot, I feel like I am running in a hamster wheel. On the other hand, when I am organized we out less, my house is clean, and I find that I have more time to get stuff done and still have time to relax as well.
With everyone running in what seems a million different directions in my house (As a homeschooling mom of 4 I was very late to the game in this chaos, but have now joined the rest of America in this harried pace of life with Josh in public school/soccer, Andy working/homeschooling, Sarah homeschooling/receiving services from the local public school for her service plan/volunteering at the horse ranch, and Elizabeth homeschooling/soccer/volunteering at the horse ranch too.) I knew that if I did not become super organized that I would definitely drown in the busyness and would bring everyone else down with me. I didn't want that kind of responsibility, so I took an inventory of what I would need to accomplish super organized status and began (re)implementing systems I have used in the past that really work for our family. I thought I would share these with you in case there are any organizational crazies out there like myself.
On a side note - I truly feel 100% better after having put these systems back in place (I have used all of them in the past), but it does take planning time which at first seems like it takes forever, but after several weeks things speed up a bit and it doesn't seem to take so long. So for a little while, I was doing (what seemed like) double the work because I will still wasting time living my semi-organized life while taking the added time to get these systems in place. That small time period where I felt like I was doing double the work really has paid off. So, if you are thinking of implementing your own organizational systems I would totally recommend it, but please be aware that it may seem like you are doing more work rather than less while you are getting everything into place. Once all systems are a go life really does look so much differently.
I will go into more detail of each system a different post of two, for now I just want to give you an overview.
In the above photo I have: my daily game plan (bottom left book), my family management book (upper left notebook), school planner (upper right hand book), my daily school plan (bottom right clipboard), and the kids' chores for that day (bottom middle), along with my colored pencils/pens.
I have already written a blog about how I plan my day, so no further explanation should be necessary.
This is my Family Management Book. I created one in Las Cruces after reading a book about a woman who created on for her family. I love that I brought this back into my life after not really using it in Portland. This baby is a lifesaver and will definitely need its down post. I keep track of our family meeting notes, menus, grocer lists, daily chores that need to be done, and a few other things. This is the main way I run my household efficiently.
This is my Erin Condren school planner. I love this planner. (I also bought a day planner for myself by her, and I use it, but not as much as I use the school planner. I don't think I will purchase another day planner, but I definitely will purchase her school planner next year.) Anyway, this is where I keep track of what gets done this week school wise. As you can see everything is color coded because I like things in different colors rather than all one color.
This is my daily school plan. I use this every day that we do school work and cross things off as they get completed. This allows me to keep track of who should be doing what. If I didn't use this there would be at least one subject (but probably more) that I would forget to follow up with the kids on and check their work.
And finally, this is the kids' chore list. I just implemented this because we all like a sparkly clean house, but I don't have the time to do all that I do and also get the house scrubbed down on a regular basis. (It is picked up on a regular basis, but I am talking about being scrubbed down.) This is where my kiddos come in. They each pick around 1-3 items per day depending on what I need to get done (and I get that information from my Family Management book). They are old enough that I do not need to assign them chores. They can pick for themselves and I just go around at the end of the day with this list to make sure that everything got done. If something isn't done I will just ask them who was supposed to do said chore and then make that child redo the chore if it was done in a half-assed way or complete it if it hasn't been done at all.
So, this is how I keep everything running smoothly in the Gregg household. If you are looking for an organizational system in your life, or just love reading about them like I do I hope you have found this post somewhat helpful.
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