Home Routines blog

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Rock that timer – 15 minutes of sucky tasks

ByRosie

I wrote yesterday about rocking your timer, but this morning I read Steady Mom’s post about Suffering for 15 minutes and it was groundbreaking to me. A lot of advice seems to assume that once you decide to set your timer to do something that you’re immediately going to spring up full of vigour and wipe the aftermath of toilet training from your bathroom floor while singing Happy Happy Joy Joy and doing a vigorous, improvised toilet-cleaning boogie. But Gretchen Rubin (of The Happiness Project)…

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Rock that timer: Using a timer to get started and keep going

ByRosie

Take five minutes. Just five. Set a timer. If you’re on the couch or in bed, look to see the closest surface to you. It’s probably the coffee table or your nightstand. For those five minutes, just focus on that one surface. Clear it off, throw stuff away, maybe even dust it. So when your five minutes is done and you’re back in bed, you have one clear surface to look at. You have an accomplishment to focus on. You did something. You don’t have…

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Find your Most Important Tasks. Do them.

ByRosie

I don’t know about you, but I usually have about a million things that I feel like I should be doing.  The end result is often… not actually doing them. I try and keep the regular, recurring tasks under control by corralling them into routines and zone tasks, but there are always one-off jobs and projects to keep under control. You can follow all sorts of powerful techniques to identify what to do next; what is urgent vs what is important, and what is urgent…

Playgroup labels and dish-rack
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Why is it easier to clean up somewhere else?

ByRosie

Twice a week I take my rambunctious preschoolers to a local playgroup hosted in a church hall. It runs from 9:30 till 11:30, there is instant coffee and chocolate cookies, interesting toys and a sloping path for the kids to hurtle up and down riding on plastic tricycles. It is also securely fenced in, so I can take my eyes off them to make a cuppa without them making a run for the hills or the main road. Around 11am, a mysterious force calls us…

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Power through your To-Do list with a dice!

ByRosie

Some years ago, Lori (one of the regulars on a Flylady system based Facebook page) invented a collaborative game she called “Flylady Bingo” as a motivating way to get through her to-do list, completing 6 x 15 minute tasks in two hours.  The facebook group has now closed, but fortunately you can use a variation on this technique and go it alone with a dice (or dice app), a glint in your eye and a determination to get things done. This is an excellent way…

CHOO CHOO
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Imaginary railroads, stations, and zones

ByRosie

Back in 1998, Pam and Peggy from Sidetracked Home Executives announced an update to their housekeeping system. They had come up with the idea of dividing your home into Stations: Sounds familiar?  This concept of Stations has been further developed into what is often called “Zones” and followers of the Flylady system still use the 5 week schedule that they described. I really like the idea of calling them stations, though, because I can imagine a little train track going around my house, stopping at…

Morning High Five for the kids and myself

ByRosie

The daily rhythm of my home is changing soon, and it will be more important than ever to make sure our mornings run smoothly. I remembered reading on Life As Mom about the idea of a Morning High Five for her kids. Picking the five most important chores, she made for them a colourful chart, like this: I decided to be creative and/or mysterious, so I traced around the kids’ hands on coloured paper before school this morning, and quickly whipped up my own version…

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Just one thing: The power of the timer

ByRosie

So this morning I shared a post from I dream of Clean on the HomeRoutines Facebook page, and asked: Do you have one little thing that would make a big difference if you got it done? We often have these little things on our “quality of life” to do list! I have a giant toddler handprint on my living room window – I think I will get to it because it is terribly distracting! and then kept on sitting on my butt reading through my…

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Plan, Do, Review, Revise (or, How’s that routine working out for you?)

ByRosie

Back in the early aughts, I used to design and develop computer based training.  We’d take the staff development goals of businesses, and find which ones could be turned into learning objectives, then design training programmes to run on a CD-ROM or the internet. As we designed the programmes we continuously improved them – so many rounds of feedback, so many changes and tweaks. Sometimes, a idea I thought was the best thing since sliced bread didn’t work out in the real world, so I…

Experts: The Whole SHEBang

ByRosie

On The Whole Shebang, SHE stands for Self, Home, Endeavors – a potentially more positive definition of SHE than “Sidetracked Home Executives.” It was created by Krista, a professional organiser, who is sharing her beautifully designed resources and plans with all of us. The basics of her plan are on her SheBang 101 page: Creating your own Morning, Afternoon and Evening routines (we like routines 🙂 Krista’s example routines are great too. Creating a special SHE spot of your own in your house – a…