Home Routines 4 is live
Home Routines 4 is now available in the app store!
Newsletter June 2025
Hello, friends! How is your June going? It’s the middle of winter, here in New Zealand. Where we are (Auckland) it’s pretty mild, so for me this just means a light cardigan on errands day. Or a puffer jacket if I go for a walk down the chilly beach (for mental health purposes, and to…
Blog | Techniques | Timer
“5 by 5s” Five Stars
Recently I’ve been really enjoying catching up on the excellent videos and resources produced by Steph at The Secret Slob. She has a great speed cleaning hack that she calls “5×5”. She uses a timer to keep on task, and zips around cleaning five rooms, for five minutes each. If she has extra time at…
Mmm, frog
I’m kind of fond of frogs. My maiden name was a little bit froggish (well it had a “croak” in it!) and I used to love the Mercer Mayer books about that mischievous wee froggy and his shenanigans with his boy. Anyway, there is a lot of advice shared about eating frogs in the productivity-sphere…
Rock that timer – 15 minutes of sucky tasks
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…
Rock that timer: Using a timer to get started and keep going
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…
Find your Most Important Tasks. Do them.
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…
Blog | Blog posts | Routines | Timer
Why it’s easier to tidy up at playgroup than at home
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…
Imaginary railroads, stations, and zones
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…
Morning High Five for the kids and myself
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,…