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Becoming An Organized Stay At Home Parent

ByKim Anderson
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Becoming a more organized stay at home parent

I think everyone feels like they could be a little more efficient and little more organized.  Even those extreme cleaners or perfectionists.  What I didn’t realize when I stopped working a job outside the home over 4 years ago was that cleaning and organization didn’t get any easier.  It wasn’t the magic solution that revolutionized my ability to stay on top of everything.  I’m writing this post to give you a few simple suggestions on becoming an organized stay at home parent.  These are just small things that might encourage you in your daily schedules.

Freedom to Build Your Own Routine
After being a stay at home wife for 4 years I decided to tackle the challenge of writing my own ebook based on what I had learned from my own life experiences.  The Organized & Efficient House Spouse: Organization & Cleaning Strategies for Your Unique Home, Family & Personality.The Organized & Efficient House
My vision for the book was to be sure that it catered to every lifestyle and gave stay home individuals tips that ranged from basic cleaning to money organization.  My other hope was to encourage people who have decided to stay at home.  To help them relax a little while challenging them to increase efficiency through tweaking their routines.

 

5 Tips For Becoming a More Organized and Efficient House Spouse

1. Give Yourself Some Breathing Room

  • Being a stay at home spouse doesn’t make you a robot.
  • It is almost impossible to get everything you ever want to get done, done in a day.
  • If you don’t give yourself some room to breath and accept that you can’t do it all, you’ll just start to break down, allow feelings of worthlessness to creep in or feel resentment start to build in various aspects of your life.
  • If you don’t get something done today, slide it on to that next day’s list.  IT’S OKAY!

2. Know Your Worth

  • You are valuable in your stay at home role.
  • You have time on your hands to help your family in ways that people working outside the home are limited by.
  • Embrace it, love it and be thankful for it.

3. Evaluate Your Most Important Tasks

  • There are days that I get it in my head to do various cleaning projects and my husband doesn’t even know they were done because the sink is full of dirty dishes.
  • Always tackle life’s biggest daily cleaning projects first.  The one’s your spouse will notice.  Biggies like dishes, bathrooms, floors and laundry.  If you can keep up the basics you can keep your home feeling clean.

4. Plan Plan Plan

  • No matter how you organize your day from planners to apps, planning is vital to keeping you on track.
  • Pick a tool you know you’ll use.  If you are a paper & pen type, don’t try to use an app.  If you are an app pro, don’t try and use a printed household notebook.
  • Pick a day each week as your “planning” day where you can get in a quite spot and evaluate all that you need to do for the week.  Write your tasks & projects down and decide which days you’ll tackle them.
  • If you don’t have anything to aim for you’ll either wander all day aimlessly from random task to random task or you’ll start being that stay at home spouse stereotype that sits around watching Soap Operas and eating bon bons all day.  (Except these days it’s more like getting sucked into Facebook and eating Special K bars or something.)

5. Make Room For Fun

  • Staying at home also gives you a little freedom to do some of things in life you love more often.
  • Do you have a craft, hobby or activity that you love to do?
  • Make sure you make time for that hobby so you don’t get broken down and worn out.
  • Some weeks will be worse than others when it comes to time & energy vs. all you have to accomplish.  Overall, aim to include a few hours a week to just relax and do something you like.
  • I often make it my goal to get as much done Monday – Thursday as I can and if I’m well caught up I’ll take time out on Friday to do what I like.  That might be going thrift store shopping or crafting something up.

Want More Tips?

I wanted to give you a few basic applicable tips for becoming more organized and efficient in your house spouse journey but the book really has way more to offer than I can put in a blog post.  My ebook if full of diagrams, free printables and simple solutions that you can pick and choose to use in various areas of your life to help improve your organization and efficiency without trying to fit into someone else’s routine or lifestyle. Plus it’s only $5 on Amazon or you can just snag the PDF version from me here for the same price!  If you are looking for ways to improve your organization and efficiency working with your own personal strengths and weakness please consider clicking this link and buying my ebook: The Organized & Efficient House Spouse: Organization & Cleaning Strategies for Your Unique Home, Family & Personality.  It’s self published so you’ll be supporting a stay at home mom as well :).