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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
I’ve tried out many systems over the years. There’s always something “new,” from bullet journals, Getting Thing Done, time blocking and so forth. I would often find it very tempting to write the things that I should do, or intend to do, on my calendar. My thought process was that if I put it on…
You can make lists and lists and lists, and have the best of intentions, but some days you can only manage the basics. Having a pre-prepared list of the absolute priorities can help out on difficult days. If you look around at what other people consider to be “basic lists” it can be helpful or…
Tsh at The Art of Simple has an excellent article today with twenty ideas to help develop a routine at home when you have little kids around There’s nothing magical about any one particular routine — it’ll probably change in a month anyway, as routines often do with little ones in the house. But simply…
I’ve got this pair of little black shelves in my dining room, and I had not been keeping up with it. Oh, no, I had not. But last week was dining room week in my focus zones, and something had to be done. So I set my HomeRoutines timer for 15 minutes and got on…
