The house is a wreck, the laundry is in piles, you haven’t a clue what’s for dinner, and you can’t find an unpaid bill. You always feel behind and you’re quickly losing the energy or the muster to ‘go faster’. If only you could catch up!
Are you feeling this way? If so, your answer lies not in working harder, but more creatively. The regular routine of life is quite demanding but has also been tamed from many different angles. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel! There is a ton of assistance available and most of it is free!
Step back and assess your situation. Don’t assign blame! Then, focusing on solutions…
– Start simply. Don’t try to change everything at once. It won’t work. Instead, pick the item causing you the most frustration and take five minutes to actually THINK about why your current routine is not working. What one change would produce a fast, tangible improvement? Begin there.
– Subscribe to one of the many helpful organizing online newsletters. (Using your search engine, type in ‘organizing tips’.) Vow to incorporate just one tip a week you learn from these valuable resources.
– Identify the worst ‘piles’ in your home. Generally, piles happen because we don’t know what to do about the objects within the pile! Decide what to do with each item and the pile will disappear!
– Return piles to their rightful owners. Make people responsible for their own clutter. When you stop acting like a maid, you’ll stop feeling like a maid. Don’t nag. Offer a reward system for everyone completing his or her chores (including you). Keep it simple, like an ice cream cone all around. Remember, nobody likes to work for free.
– Use schedules to liberate yourself. Do one load of laundry a night. That includes folding it and putting it away! Run out of laundry one night? Iron or sew on that missing button. While watching tv on Sunday evening, plan the coming week’s menu. In fact…
– Meal-planning is just that: planning. Are you planning your menu each week? Create a shopping list at the same time. Consider how much time and energy you want to devote to cooking and choose recipes accordingly.
– Teach! Everyone in this world who makes it to adulthood will need to cook a little, clean a little, and master a little self-care. If someone in your family finds those tasks too ‘beneath’ themselves, allow them to experience real life by removing your personal maid service. You’ll be doing them a favor.
– When it comes to the dreaded paper clutter, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Keep in mind that generally there are only a handful of categories that need to be addressed to whip an out-of-shape paperwork system into shape. When you discover that you only need five or six main categories (for example, school, work, home, personal, and family. Yours may be different.) with flexible subcategories for a home filing system, the task to get clutter-free will not look so daunting.
– Find out what is driving your spouse nuts about your home life. It may not be bothering you, but by relieving some of his/her stress-ers as well as your own, everyone will feel much better.
The bottom line? Stop looking for ways to run faster and instead look for better solutions. They are readily available and just waiting for you to take advantage of them and make the mundane, manageable!
Copyright (c) 2003
Colleen Langenfeld works from home providing useful resources for personal or business use. Visit her site at http://www.paintedgold.com Grow your ezine subscriber list for FREE! http://www.subscriptionrocket.com/cgi-bin/r.cgi?r=1844
