1. Gather your laundry and supplies.
2. Prepare your children for the experience.
3. Take along activities for the children.
4. Take along a lunch plan for the children.
5. Fold your clean laundry into baskets.
6. Go home and put everything away.
7. Make sure your laundry problem is fixed.

The post How To: Go to the Laundry Mat with Children appeared first on Home Plain and Simple.

This is Part One of the Series How to Manage Your Home and Homeschool Simultaneously

It’s easy to get busy and get scatterbrained about our home management work.  I clearly remember chaotic days when it was all I could do to make sure that everyone had food, water, and sleep!  The basics of housekeeping were clean floors, clean bathrooms, and clean dishes—and that accomplishment was a very real challenge!

Boundaries for Home Management Tasks

Assigning days of the week to my home management work was a gamechanger for me.  It eliminated the overwhelming feeling of being surrounded by never-ending tasks.  Mentally, I could look at a pile of laundry and tell myself that I would do all the laundry on the day that I assigned to laundry.  Today, I will do one load and it will be a priority load.

That boundary that I created brought relief.  I did this for every area of home management.  On the assigned days, I set aside a block of time to work on the tasks for that day and as my children grew older we worked as a team.

Generally, my days are Laundry Day, Office Day, Kitchen Day, Town Day, Cleaning Day, Gardening Day.  Your days might look a little bit different.

There was a season when we had an assigned Sewing Day because my girls and I greatly enjoyed that.  I put Office Day with Town Day because I could drop off some kids at piano lessons and pay bills at a picnic table at the park while the rest of the kids played.

We are all unique, with different homes, one-of-a-kind families, there are different times of life that affect our homes, and we must create what works for us.  Take the idea of assigning your specific work to a day of the week, put your focus on the specified tasks for that day and then let it go for until next week.

Don’t do other home management tasks on the assigned day

When I assigned a day for a specific work, such as grocery shopping or cleaning, then I did my best to not do the work from other assigned days.  These boundaries meant that I could focus and do better work in the area that I was focusing on.  I wasn’t scatter-brained trying to do many things at once and not doing anything well.

By assigning the work to specific days I knew that the work would get done eventually.  The house cleaning had a day and I could let things go in the meantime, knowing that the work would get done on its specific assigned day.  On Cleaning Day we give the house a reset point.

When we try to do a little bit of everything throughout the day we act in a disjointed manner and nothing truly gets to a “done” place.  Of course, nothing in the home ever stays “done”.

But we can:

• give it a new starting place
• get a sense of accomplishment
• mentally let go of it until the next time

Stop Working

Boundaries are stopping places.  By doing a work to a certain place and stopping we gain freedom.  Freedom from the pressure of undone work.  Freedom from mental overwhelm.  Freedom from guilty pressure.

We gain freedom to take time to play with our children, to do hobbies, to have a side-job.  Fact: the work of home never stops. You must choose to start and stop the assigned work for the day and do a fun thing.

People wear clothes that get dirty, eat food that needs made, dishes that need washed, floors get dirty because people walk on them, children never stop learning their gross-motor skills and they will make messes along the way… make a boundary for yourself and your family so that you can stop working and have fun times.

Assign a time of the day for the home management work

I am not going to tell you to plan every half-hour of your day for each person but it certainly helps to have some routines and hard-stops during the day.  I created routines for myself, for my babies, for my preschoolers, and for my school-age children.  These times gave everyone direction for getting their work accomplished and when they had free time.

Create a strong evening routine to set up a great morning.  A morning routine that gives everyone in the house a good start to the day sets up a productive morning of schoolwork.  Meals at set times help create circadian rhythms for the family’s sleep schedules, this helps for bedtime and naptime routines.

Assigning a time of day, or times during the day, for the home management work means that we get focused time on work and we don’t have to live in a mess.

What about laundry?!

I have a large family and we live on a farm.  With livestock.  That’s a lot of very dirty clothes, to state the obvious.  For a lot of years, I assigned a certain number of loads per day and on my assigned Laundry Day I played catch-up and cleaned the laundry room.

Because I had babies that got me up early, I got an early start to my days.  My laundry mantra was “4 loads by Noon”.  In later years, it became “4 loads by 4”.  These days, a lot of my family does their own laundry on their personal time-frame and I put my personal focus on the Laundry Room one day a week.

Assigning home management tasks to the days of the week will look different for your family depending on your situation.  Create a system that works for you.

I created a workbook to help you think about your home management work and how to plan the tasks into your week. It’s located in the Free Resource Library.

This is Part One of the Series How to Manage Your Home and Homeschool Simultaneously

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The post Home Management: How to Assign Days of the Week for Tasks appeared first on Home Plain and Simple.