Now is the time when we all start organizing our stuff, buying new supplies, and preparing for another fresh start: a new school year. I always get ambitious about how much better this new, upcoming season will be. This time will be different, I tell myself. Turns out big overhaul projects never stick and usually…
I am very much impressed by the people who regularly set aside time daily, weekly, or even monthly to get their school stuff in order and laid out. As a planner, it seems like I should be able to do the same. But the truth is that I am not a details person. I can…
After making a list of what was great about last year and what was not so great, I made a “next year” list which I populated with the things that worked last year. So it has things like: Plus, I also included ideas for improving upon our successes. For example, Then I added ideas for…
Breaking up your year into intervals is a simple way to sharpen your focus and stay engaged with projects and the things that need to be done to keep life at home rolling along. Instead of looking ahead over an entire year and making goals, try looking only at the next six weeks. What has…
Use the theory behind interval training to maximize your planning effectiveness. Just as runners train and gain strength and endurance by running in short, intense bursts and then going at a slower pace for awhile, so we can follow the same pattern in our day-to-day lives. Breaking up your year into intervals, with rest periods…
Often when we plan out our goals, we think in year-long chunks of time, either personal goals in January or academic goals in August. If you’ve ever done this, perhaps you’ve noticed that it’s really difficult to keep those goals. A cycle I’m familiar with goes like this: Commit to a huge life-overhaul, personal transformation…
Getting Things Done by David Allen has been a key source in my own attempts to get and stay organized at home. GTD is very applicable to homemakers. I have implemented and re-implemented and revamped and reorganized my GTD processes and approaches so many times over the last six years that I’ve stopped counting. Every…
Esse quam videri, or Virtue The Education is for Life series In Christopher Perrin’s lecture, “Eight Essential Principles of Classical Education,” he talks about educational virtues, but for these musings of mine, I want to expand it beyond education and to our lives generally and broadly. While outlining this series, I wanted each of my…
It’s a simple fact: We need to track the details of running our households in order to maintain sanity and reliability. Our job isn’t to impress others, but it is to serve others, and we can do that better when we have a grip on the details involved in doing so. A home management binder…
In my Habits Project for 2013, I decided on 3 categories of habits: Health, Home, and Happiness. That’s the alliterative version. The more accurate titles would be Health, Organization, and Mothering. I picked the three aspects of my life right now upon which all others are built: my own physical stamina and energy, my ability…