Becoming An 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.
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 :).
Kim Anderson is the organized chaos loving author behind the Thrifty Little Mom Blog. She helps other people who thrive in organized chaos to stress less, remember more and feel in control of their time, money, and home. Kim is the author of: Live, Save, Spend, Repeat: The Life You Want with the Money You Have. She’s been featured on Time.com, Money.com, Good Housekeeping, Women’s Day, and more!
I have been a stay at home Mom since our son was born.That was almost 23 years ago. My husband and his dad farm, and I was a CNA… and we didn’t want the babysitter seeing all those special, precious “firsts”, so we sat down and talked it over and decided that I would stay home. We were blessed to have 2 more daughters and I wouldn’t have traded a day with my children for anything. Yes….it meant sacrifices, but being here for our children has been so worth it. It was also a relief to my husband to know that I was home with our kids and here if he should need me. It also gave us time together that otherwise we wouldn’t have been blessed to enjoy. They are grown now, but I am finding that they still need “mom” just as much as they did back when they were growing up….just in different ways, and I am thrilled to be able to be here when they need me, and for my husband, if and when he needs my help on the farm. Thank you for sharing, because a stay at home Mom is anything but the stereo type of sitting around watching soaps with her feet up and eating a box of chocolates. Sometimes there just isn’t enough hours in the day to pull everything together. Thank you also for reminding us that our calling is a very precious one. God bless and thank you for the encouragement.
Tammy, thanks for taking the time to share!
I just found you via Pinterest, and it couldn’t have been better timing. I just cried my eyes out because of the frustration I felt over not being able to do my schooling, keep the house *very* clean, run my home-based business, work an additional part-time job as well as chop wood and keep the fire going 24/7. This is still a new experience for me, as I’ve been living with my Partner for only 5 months, plus I have a bad back and joints, and it just got overwhelming. I’m saving your blog post to look at whenever I start to take on stress. Thank you so, so much!
Kailynn, I’m so happy that this post came at just the right time for you! Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and what you are going through. Sometimes as a stay at home spouse you just need a good solid cry to get out all your frustration and depending on your personality type things can really get under your skin and make you feel like you don’t measure up. Give each day what you can and then do it again the next day. Don’t feel bad, don’t get down on yourself. Sounds like you are doing everything you can. It might be time to say “N”o to stuff in your life that doesn’t get you closer to your goals with all you have going on. You only have so many hours in a day to give. Choose the one’s that keep your home happy and keeps you pursuing things you are passionate about.
I needed every word of this. Thank you! 🙂
Sarah, so happy you found some encouragement.
I just finished reading your blog and it felt as if you were directly speaking to me. Everything you mentioned will help me try to plan out my weeks better. I couldn’t get ituntil now. Thank you, I really have tons of pins on cleaning and oorganizations but none like yours. You really just have to break things down because if not we will just get burned out. Thank you again. I am currently a stay at home mom and student until I find a job.
Soraya, I’m so happy that you found the post helpful. You have to do stuff to your own rhythm and make it work for you. No one has to do your routine each day but you and if you don’t do it in a way that makes sense to you, you’ll always feel behind or not right. Really glad you found that article at the right time!
Hi Kim,
Just wanted to say thank you for your blog 🙂 although I am not a stay at home parent, nor do considered myself a homemaker in the conventional sense, I found it useful and it helped me define my role in my life.
Wishing you a great day 🙂
Darlene
Darlene, thanks so much for reading. I’m really happy that you were able to glean some encouragement from the blog! I appreciate you taking the time to comment and share that you like what I do because sometimes it’s nice to hear that someone benefits from something you invest a good part of yourself in.