Do you feel like you have tried everything and your house is still chaotic?
If you have been following along since the beginning of my How to Easily Manage Your Home series and implementing the routines and putting everything into practice but your house still isn’t running as smoothly as you would like – this post will hopefully help you out!
I wanted to troubleshoot with those of you who are still struggling to manage your home and see if there might be some other reasons that are leading to this problem.
If you prefer to watch the video that goes along with this post, here it is:
1) Possible Problem #1
If you are still struggling with the day-to-day management of your home, the first thing that could be tripping you up is if you have not effectively integrated your family into helping you out around the house.
Now I know this can take some time, so you may still be working on it.
But there are a couple of other areas you want to be aware of as you get them to help you out.
Especially if your children are young, you want to make sure that you’re coordinating your cleaning routine with their chore schedule.
It doesn’t have to match exactly, but ideally it should coordinate with what your children will be doing each day.
For example, if I am cleaning my downstairs, I am not going to send my young children upstairs to clean their rooms. Kids are pretty social as a general rule, so it works much better to have them do some cleaning on the same floor that you are on.
I will have my kids dust the furniture on the same floor that I am cleaning on or I will have them clean the bathroom as I am vacuuming on the same floor.
And that way you’re just all in the same space and are working together, and if they have any problems or need some help, I’m only a few steps away.
2) Possible Problem #2
Another thing you want to keep in mind when you are getting your children to help out around the house is to make sure you are giving them enough chores so that they feel like they’re actually making a difference.
This can be a little counterintuitive, especially if your children aren’t used to doing chores. You may think you want to start them out kind of easy.
If they’re currently just in charge of making their bed and cleaning their room, they will feel more grown up and feel like they are helping out more if they have other chores that help the entire family.
Now, I don’t think that children need to work all day long, but I think that each child should have enough chores for their age.
And I’ll tell you a story about something that happened very recently at our house . . .
I decided to increase the number of chores that my six-year-old was doing because she had just recently turned six.
At first she was not happy about it. She didn’t understand why she had to do so many chores, and she wished she was still three like her sister because her sister doesn’t have to do as many chores and “it just wasn’t fair.”
But after only a couple of days, she started doing her chores faster. She started doing them better. She started actually completing the chore in a way more like I would’ve done it than she had been doing it before.
She also started trying to do the chore before I asked her to. She would sneak around and try to get her chore done before I realized it, and then come and get me and show me what a good job she had done.
So I found this very interesting because it validated everything that I had heard about children really wanting to be valued and wanting to be an important member of the family.
They don’t just want to take from the family, they want to give as well.
3) Possible Problem #3
Now, another area that you may want to look at if you are still struggling to manage your home is Meal Planning.
I have a series on YouTube where I show you How to Easily Plan Your Meals, and that will give you all the steps you can take to Easily Meal Plan,
So in this post I’m just going to give you a short list of things that you can do today to make your Meal Planning Easier.
Make Breakfast Super Easy
I’m talking about eating the exact same thing every weekday easy.
Or if you think you would get bored with that, you could come up with a five-day rotation like this:
- Monday could be Granola
- Tuesday could be Eggs and Toast
- Wednesday could be Hashbrowns
- Thursday could be Oatmeal
- Friday could be Pancakes
By putting your breakfast menu on autopilot it takes you much less time to cook and clean up each time you do it.
Choose Simple Lunches
At our house, we eat leftovers every single day of the week.
This is a great way to reduce food waste, it takes no prep work at all, and it requires very little cleanup.
But again, if you think you would get bored with leftovers every day, you could come up with a five-day rotation like this:
- Monday could be Sandwiches
- Tuesday could be Salads
- Wednesday could be Tacos
- Thursday could be Leftovers
- Friday could be Quesadillas
Then you could just repeat this rotation every week.
Use Theme Nights for Dinners
Now for dinners, I’m not gonna tell you to eat the exact same thing every week because that would be boring.
I may be a minimalist, but I’m not a minimalist when it comes to loving food!
Just about everyone in my family is a foodie so that would not work for us to have the exact same thing for dinner every single day.
So instead, what I suggest to simplify your meal planning is to create a Theme Night for every night of the week.
Then, each night of the week, all you have to do is come up with a meal that goes along with that Theme Night.
I have a blog post on How To Set Up Your Theme Nights With Over 50 Different Theme Night Ideas.
4) Possible Problem #4
Now, if you have your family helping you out, and you have your meal plans all taken care of, and your house still doesn’t feel like it is running on autopilot, you may want to take a look at you clutter.
Clutter can be a lot of different things. It can be :
- Physical Clutter in Your House
- Clutter on your Schedule
- Clutter in your Mind
But I highly recommend that you look at all of these areas and figure out if any of them are causing stress in your life.
Yes, the routines that we discussed in this series will help your house run on Autopilot, and I recommend setting those up because it just gets your house going in the right direction.
But once you declutter, your house feels clean – All.The.Time.
I have a series on YouTube if you want to check out the four steps to Completely Decluttering Your Home. But I do want to give you a couple of things to get started.
Start with the Physical Clutter
You may have problems with clutter everywhere in your life, but starting with the physical clutter will be the easiest way to start easily running your home.
You can start by dedicating just 15 minutes a day to decluttering and it won’t be long before you notice results.
As soon as you get a bag or a box full of stuff, put it into your car so that you can drop it off next time you are near a donation center.
Next, Work on Simplifying Your Schedule
If your problem is having too many time commitments, I recommend going back and reading this post about How to Create a Weekly Rhythm, and that will help set you up for success.
Then you can implement some boundaries in your week so that you can start simplifying.
I also recommend setting a limit with your kids for how many extracurricular activities they can do so that you don’t ending up running people from one practice or event to another.
Freeing up you schedule allows for the truly important things to happen that often get pushed aside, like having dinner together.
So practice saying, “No.”
Practice saying, “No,” when you really don’t want to do something, but just kind of feel obligated to.
And practice saying, “No,” when your kids say, “Hey, can we do this other think in addition to all the other things we have been doing?”
5) Potential Problem #5
And if you have all of those areas working for you and you still don’t feel like your house is running itself, you may want to look at your Budget.
I have a full post on How to Start a Budget, and I will be doing a series down the road on Budgeting.
But I will give you a couple of tips here if you wanna get started:
First, create a spreadsheet for your budget so you can see where every single dollar is going.
Second, if you have any debt, whether that’s student loans, car loans, or credit card debt, you want to pay it off as quickly as possible.
It is so freeing not to have that hanging over your head every single month.
If you want to see the steps we took to paying off our student loan debt quickly, check out this post.
I hope this post helped your make your home less chaotic. If you want any help Putting Your Home on Autopilot, taking your home from Cluttered to Calm, or creating a Set It and Forget It Meal Plan, check out my courses because I would love to help you out!
