What if home management could be easier?
What if your days felt more purposeful and effective? What if you could even enjoy managing your home?
I’m reading a lovely book at the moment called Beautiful in God’s Eyes (affiliate link) by Elizabeth George. It’s about the treasures of the Proverbs 31 woman and one of her beautiful characteristics is that she is an effective home manager.
She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
Proverbs 31:27
Now before you click off, because the Proverbs 31 women feels like too much to live up to, don’t. I’m about to share with you a secret the enemy doesn’t want you to know…
What the enemy doesn’t want you to know is that as a woman, wife, and mother you have amazing power to set the tone in your home but also you have help.
That help is grace and it’s what we’re all about here at Grace Filled Mom!
And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
2 CORINTHIANS 12:9
Each morning I get a new chance no matter what the past has held, no matter how I feel I have fallen short, no matter what my home life currently looks like. Now is the time to start again with the help of Christ and His Spirit even if I feel weak and overwhelmed.
Home management is a ministry and a higher calling than we may have realized. But know this…
You’ve got help from above momma!
That Sometimes Irritating Question: What Did You Do Today?
Have you ever felt your mind race when someone asks you that innocent but probing question, “What did you do today?”
Sometimes as busy moms, it’s hard to know. We do so much and yet it can feel like so little.
Maybe you were trying to start a load of laundry only to get interrupted by your toddler spilling a bottle of juice. Maybe you were trying to make an appointment online but the baby started crying. Maybe you sat down to finally eat lunch at 2 pm but your little one woke up before you could taste the first bite.
Motherhood can feel a bit like managing a forest fire. You handle one thing and a spark starts somewhere else.
Domestically Challenged Or Overwhelmed
Maybe you feel like no matter what you do you just cannot get yourself and your home together.
There’s hope and there are so many practical tips we can use to manage our lives and homes even as busy and distracted mommas. Home management skills do not always come naturally. Learning to manage our homes is part of our growth and development as moms.
You probably wouldn’t go into a job in the corporate world completely untrained and unprepared. You would go dressed for the part with the skills needed and a plan to do your best. The skills needed you didn’t yet possess you would learn. And you would have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure your success.
Home management is a job that can be learned. Do we take it seriously?
If you feel like you will never be able to keep up with all the things, check out the tips below but first why is home management even important?
What Is Home Management And Why Is It Important?
Besides setting the emotional tone in our homes as we’ve already mentioned, when we don’t manage our homes well chaos ensues and stress rises. Motherhood is overwhelming enough without added stress and issues from our environment.
Home management is simply a series of routines and systems that encompass all things that need to be managed in your home.
When our homes are out of order we feel overwhelmed and frustrated. This often leads us to be more irritable and short with our family. It also can cause us to lose time that we will never get back and waste resources. It can affect our health both physically and emotionally.
Bottom line: Poor management steals our joy and peace.
Some easy home management tips can help us thrive. and our whole family thrive
Good home management can help us buy back our time for other things we truly enjoy.
I love what Deniece Schofield says in her book Confessions of an Organized Homemaker (affiliate link):
I enjoy an organized lifestyle because it helps me get what I want. Good home management skills provide me with a cheerful background for living.
As we get into the tips remember that acquiring good home management skills takes time and effort but it has lifelong rewards that reach into eternity.
Tips For Easier Home Management
Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
Your home, your schedule, your routines, all of it. I talk about this a lot because it’s so important and transformative. And we always have to come back to it when things aren’t working well.
If you don’t know my story I moved abroad from the United States over 10 years ago with 3 suitcases. It was hard. I’ve had to simplify and re-evaluate multiple times since then. It’s a continual process.
You don’t have to go to that extreme but evaluate your stuff and home, your schedule, your commitments, and even your diet and lifestyle. Where can you simplify to make life better?
What’s essential?
Essentialism is not about how to get more things done; it’s about how to get the right things done. It doesn’t mean just doing less for the sake of less either. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at our highest point of contribution by doing only what is essential.
Greg Mckeown, Essentialism
Here are some posts to check out:
How To Simplify Motherhood And Enjoy Parenting More
20 Ways To Create A Joy Filled Home And Simplify Living
Study Time Management
I know I know we’re busy moms so how will we ever have time to work on these things but we can if we make it a priority. And it’s important because if we manage our time well we buy it back so we have more freedom later.
I read books on things I need to learn while I’m rocking our daughter to sleep for her nap and before I go to sleep. I’ve got some tips on how to read more here because we can learn so much from reading: Read More As A Busy Mom
But you can also listen to videos and podcasts while cleaning, doing laundry, or giving yourself a little at-home self-care time.
Energy management is another component of managing ourselves well. I talk about that here: Energy Management Versus Time Management and Why It Matters For Moms
Food Management
So much of our work at home involves food. Prepping food, cooking food, buying food, cleaning up after eating food. Our food choices and prep are so crucial if we want our family to be healthy but also huge in how much energy we have.
If we don’t eat well, we don’t feel well and cannot manage our homes or lives well.
Dinner. It feels like a constant struggle sometimes but there are easy ideas here: Easy Healthy Dinner Ideas
I prefer ingredient prepping over meal planning as I’m not a fan of eating reheated meals and the same thing over and over. But preparation over the weekend to set our kitchen up for a better week helps so very much. Having a specific day for grocery shopping helps too. Our grocery store has sales on different sections on different days of the week so I like to pay attention to that. On Wednesdays, the produce is 20% off so I go that day if we need a lot of veggies. See how planning ahead helps so much financially too?
I love our family having home cooked meals but I know this can feel like a full-time job in and of itself. I remind myself that we save time and money when we plan our meals or at least ingredients to make meals ahead of time. This is still a work in progress for me for sure.
Keep an ongoing grocery list that every family member has access to when something is used up so it can be written down immediately.
Track and Reduce Mental Clutter
We have to have a place to track things if we want to manage our homes well. You can use a digital system or a paper planner. I use a combination for my planning system. I found this little notebook that has different tabs and that has been quite helpful for me to write things down that I’ve been working on in different areas of my life. I also love to have a binder that I can just grab that saves important information.
I’m excited to be able to offer you a Home Management Binder that is new in the shop. If you think that is something that can help you reduce the mental clutter then please check it out.
It’s over 70 pages! There are trackers for medical and emergency, meals, vehicle maintenance, cleaning, pets, planning, and more! Track and manage all the things for your home. I used watercolor illustrations and soft pastels to make the process of getting your home binder set up fun and calming.
Host Admin Days
This is another thing that can be such a game changer. You know all those pesky admin tasks that just clutter our minds that we never seem to get to? We can schedule days in our month to handle all those things.
We can keep a running list somewhere that we always have access to so we can jot down those tasks that need to get done and handle them on Admin Days.
This is so helpful that I created a whole post about it: Life Admin Day: Better Productivity For Busy Moms
Clean and Declutter Regularly
Whatever cleaning schedule your family needs create it and stick to it. You don’t have to clean the whole house every day. You can break the cleaning up into sections if that works better for you. I prefer keeping up the house a little every day over having days that I have to deep clean the whole house but do what works for you.
And if you want to buy that time back by hiring someone and can afford it do it. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about it as long as you agree with your spouse.
You will also want to set a regular time to declutter. Keep a bag or box available at all times to put things that need to be donated and make it a regular habit to drop those things off and get them out of your house.
As a momma of young children, I know toys can be a major contributor to a cluttered home so if you are experiencing that then check this out: How To Organize And Declutter Kid’s Toys Without Hassel
Make sure you have cleaning supplies ready in a tote or something you can easily move from room to room so you can clean quickly. Consider creating a laundry routine too and for watering the plants and any other needed home tasks.
Track these things so you know what day you need to do what. There are cleaning schedule trackers in the Home Management Binder so be sure to take advantage of those if you grab it.
If you have a yard to manage also be sure to have routines for yard work too.
Think about cleaning tasks needed in the frame of:
- Daily Routines
- Weekly Routines
- Monthly Routines
- Quarterly Routines
- Yearly Routines
A clean home feels so good and so does always having clean clothes.
Delegate and Involve The Family
Think about the routines and tasks that you need to do on a daily and weekly basis and who takes care of what. If we can delegate some things to other family members it teaches us to work together as a family unit while relieving the burden of all the things from mom.
Even small children can get involved and help. Our daughter is only two but she is responsible for feeding the pets in the morning, with supervision of course. I let her know that is her job that she is responsible for and she enjoys doing it.
Family Meeting Time
Have a family meeting and brainstorm the ways that you can make the home run better together. It could be simple things like having the children put their dishes in the sink after dinner. It could be creating a chore schedule where tasks are shared on rotation. It could be assigning specific areas of the house to certain family members.
Break down daily tasks and divide them up according to each family member’s ability. Have a family calendar and plan it all out. Get things done together and then you can spend that quality time doing other things.
Prepare for Emergencies
Something we don’t like to think about but a needed part of home management is having an emergency plan. None of us expect a natural disaster or medical emergency to happen but they do. The home binder has a medical page where you can put emergency contacts. That’s why I like the idea of having all the needed home and family info in a printed-off binder because we can grab it and go in case of an emergency. There is even a place to record where your First Aid Kit is located.
This is something I have not prepared well for our home but I want to work on. These are hard things but help us to feel more at ease knowing we are a bit more prepared.
Look With Fresh Eyes
Take a walk around your home with a pen and paper and look with fresh eyes like you don’t live there. What do you see? Are there cluttered areas? Are there areas where the furniture placement is all wrong? Are there areas that need some maintenance and repair? Write it all down.
As you go through your day and week do the same thing with your routines and schedule. Keep a notepad handy and track times that always seem to cause stress. Think about what you can do to change things. Often there are simple solutions if we just look.
Family life is what’s important so look at how you can prioritize that.
You Can Do This!
You do not have to do a big overhaul of your home management all at once if that feels too overwhelming. Think about the areas that most need a change and will have the biggest impact on other areas. This will get you started and help you add on the systems as needed. Think about what are the most important things to you and your family’s needs. A first step can lead to many more positive steps.
One area that is a great example is decluttering. If you get the excess out you have way less to clean and manage. An organized home can have a positive impact on so many areas of our lives so decluttering and organizing is one of the best tips.
A phrase that is good to keep in mind is, “Prioritize people over things.”
Remember the best planners and systems for you are going to be the ones you will actually use. What works for someone else may not work for you. Try things out and find what does work. It could be an area to start praying for understanding if you’re struggling. There are different systems for everything and everyone so again find what works for your family.
When I’m having a problem in an area of home management it’s amazing how I receive help and ideas when I pray.
Home Management is a continual process that will never be perfect but it can get better and better if we allow it to change as our families change and grow.
I got a lot of inspiration and value from this video by Chrystal Evans Hurst so be sure to check it out: Home Management 101 and visit some of the other posts I linked to in this post for the specific areas that you need extra help with.
I write these kinds of posts to help and encourage you but they motivate and encourage me too. There is always work to be done and things we can improve. But as we grow let’s not forget about how far we’ve come. Little things can make a big impact and that’s good news!
Effective home management can be a challenge because it involves diligence and managing ourselves. Let’s not “eat the bread of idleness” (Proverbs 31:27) but reap the rewards of a life well managed and lived.
Take a deep breath and get creative. You’ve got this momma!
*And don’t forget the care of a home is important and can be a beautiful ministry to our family.
I want to know in the comments, do you have your own home management system? Do you have a home management plan? Is this something you want to work on? I hope these simple tips have helped you and that you’re feeling encouraged to set up your own successful home management system. If you have some practical knowledge to share, let’s hear it!
Cheers to a well-managed home.
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