Home Management 101

Do you ever feel like you are domestically challenged? Like you just can't get your home together? You want to get it together, but stuff is just all over the place. You're all over the place, and when you come home, you don't have peace. Well, if that's how you feel, you're not the only one, and I want to talk to you a little bit about that today. Hello there. I want to thank you so much for joining me here for another episode of the Sister Circle Podcast. You're either watching me on YouTube, you're watching me on Facebook, or you are listening to the audio of this podcast on Spotify, Google, I don't know, Apple, Pandora, all the places, all the things. I'm glad you're here. Wherever you happen to listen, watch, I want you to make sure that you are following me on that platform and that you're subscribed so that whenever a new episode of the podcast is displayed or played, you won't Miss it. I'm here most weeks, twice a week, releasing a solo episode for myself and an episode where I have a guest. And I like to talk about all the things. So if you're new here, welcome. I'm glad you're here. And I believe that this podcast is going to give you some useful information. Listen, I am no wonderful genius home manager. However, I have for the last 22 years been married, had multiple children. We have 5. I've had to manage a home despite homeschooling 5 children and doing a lot of that often by myself because my husband traveled a lot for work. And so, to be honest, I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna die. I thought, I'll never be able to keep up with all of these needs of all these people to eat. I'll never be able to keep up with all the paper. I'll never be able to keep up with all the clothes. I'm never going to be able to keep things happening in my home on a routine basis. It was very overwhelming to try to keep my home going, especially because we were there all the time. So I I desperately reached out for help. And back then, because why do I feel like I'm old when I say this, but it's true, I couldn't listen to a podcast. There was not a whole bunch of stuff on this. There were no YouTubers talking about home management when I started doing all this 20 years ago. And blogs were a thing, but it wasn't as much of a thing. And so my go-to was to find a bunch of books. Now, because I was homeschooling and I would go to the Homeschool Book Fair every year, I would find books that weren't just about the children's education, but they were also about mom's education as well. Not only how do you teach your kids, but how do you manage a home? It's like the equivalent of a teacher learning to teach children, but you can't teach children if you can't manage the classroom. So the classroom management skills are just as important as the teaching skills. How do you— what is the appropriate scope and sequence for early elementary or for middle school? Both of those things are important because you can't do the job if you don't know how to manage the environment. And so over the years, I have given myself the opportunity to learn by utilizing a bunch of books. Now, some of these books I don't even think you could get anymore. I'm going to show them all to you because I want you mainly not to focus on the books, but to focus on this fact: whatever I'm about to tell you today, it's because I had to learn it. My mother was an amazing woman. She kept an amazing home. It was clean. We always had dinner on the table. But I will say that while she taught me a lot, a lot of it was like, get out of the way so I can do it. And so there were things when I started having children I had to call my mom about, but my mom never homeschooled her kids, so she didn't have kids home all day every day year round. And so there were some things that she just let us do during the summer, but during the school year we got back away from that. So she didn't really try to manage home during the summer, she just let us tear it up, and she figured by the time when August started she'd get it back together. Whether you're single whether you're married, whether you have kids, whether you have— whether you're an empty nester and your kids are older or your kids are young, it doesn't matter. We all need to have our own rhythms for how we manage our homes. Not only does this help you keep your home clean so that you're not walking in it and you're frustrated, but also it helps you to keep your time clean. Because what happens if things get out of order in your home? Well, you spend the whole weekend cleaning up. You get frustrated when you go in your room and you just get underneath the clean clothes that are on your bed and get under the covers, but you don't have peace when you come home. You don't have, um, peace with your stress levels because if your home is always out of order, then you have stress when you're looking for something and you can't find it. If you always feel like you're running out of time and you just— you're running to the grocery store at the last minute, guess what else that messes with? It messes with your food budget because if you don't plan your meals and you're buying stuff just as you need it, then guess what? You're going to probably spend more money without planning ahead. What else does that do? You'll have stuff in your refrigerator that goes bad because you didn't have a plan for how to use all of it because you just bought it because you needed it once on Monday. What does that mean? Wasted money. Without some kind of forethought about how you plan the rhythms of your life and how you plan for the life in your home, you will not only waste time, you will waste energy, and you will waste money. So it is to your benefit to invest time in being a person who takes care of their home. Some of us are naturally born organized. We're born as planners. We're born thinking about how we can make our life more rhythmic. Some of us, y'all, are just plain lazy. Like, we're gonna get to it when we get to it, and we get to it eventually. But in between when it bothers us and when we are bothered enough to do something about it, that gap for many of us is we just don't want to do it, and we'll live with it the way it is. I want to invite you to a better way. I want to invite me to a better way. And I'm in a season right now where things have been crazy. They've been a little out of control. Lots of travel, lots of unexpected wonderful things. And every time we have guests come over, I take everything that's on the kitchen table and I throw it in my bedroom, and I'm gonna clean it up later. And here it is right now, and I'm recording this episode, and my bedroom is still a hot mess right now. So I'm not talking to you as someone who's got it all together. I'm talking to you as someone who has, uh, not only done the work to teach myself some skill, but I'm constantly having to do the work over and over again to apply that skill. It's kind of like studying your Bible, right? You could have gone to Sunday school as a kid with your mother. She made you memorize scripture. She made you go to Sunday school. She made you sit still in church. But no matter how much knowledge you got because you had to learn it, it only helps you if you apply it. If you read read the Bible one Sunday and then 36 weeks later you're like, I don't feel close to God. Well, girl, Joker, pick up your Bible. You have to keep the rhythms going in order to have and experience the continued blessings of those rhythms in your life. So I want to first of all just flash some things to you, and I want you to know this is where I am and this is where I get back to. And then I have to remind myself how to do it, how to find rhythms. I really think rhythms are important, and I want to also show you these resources because I want you to know you're not the only one. Years ago, I was traipsing through a homeschool bookstore, and I found this book that this lady had typed up and just bound together at the, at the office supply store. It is called Kitchen Management for the Domestically Challenged, and the subtitle is A Guide to Your Kitchen Whether You Love to Cook, Hate to Cook, or Just Have to Cook. Do you want to know why she created a guide to your kitchen? Because everybody was asking her, how do you do it? She said, this is for the person who's never baked a cake from, cake from scratch because they think it's too much work. This is for the person who knows they could be a better steward of their grocery money and their kitchen time. This is for the person who knows the first 3 numbers on speed dial are for Pizza Hut, Domino's, and Papa John's. This is for the person who makes their dinner menu while they're shopping with their children, with their hungry children, because that's not the way you should do it. So because there were more than one person who was saying, can you help me? She wrote a book. This is out of print, you can't get it, but I picked it up and I learned something. You're saying, I don't know how to manage my home on a budget. I would like to come home and make myself available, but we have to work. Do you really have to when you count up the cost of your clothes to go to work, the gas, or the cost of daycare? And I know some of us do, but some of y'all, it's because you haven't sat down and figured out how to be miserly. This is a book I picked up from Joni McCoy years ago, and she said she and her family are proof that you can live on one income. They successfully transitioned from two incomes to one while living in the most expensive part of America. This will help you save thousands of dollars a year on everything from groceries to electricity, as well as reveal the hidden cost of common household money wasters. So she said, this is how you save money. Here's how you cut down on your bills. Here's how you meal plan. This is how you, um, shop, because the biggest way, honestly, to change your budget is your money on food. You got to have a house, you got to have a car, but what are you spending on food? What are you spending on events, on birthdays? What are you spending on, um, um, things around your house that are— you're buying new that you don't necessarily need to buy new? Y'all, on one income, I had to figure it out. I picked up a book. You are not the only person who's trying to figure out how to organize their home. This woman Denise Schofield has written a million books on organizing your home. Just look them up. This one is called Confessions of an Organized Homemaker. She said, okay, it's time to fess up. Are you constantly straightening your home, putting away toys, clothing, and miscellaneous stuff that seems to scatter throughout the house? Do you forget appointments? Do you habitually run out of staples like bread and milk? Okay, if you need to know how to simplify your planning, if you need to know how to schedule cleaning time, if you need to know how to store stuff because you have too much stuff but where to store it, if you need buying information for suggested products, meal planning. If you're overwhelmed trying to keep up with your home, then this is the book for you. How do you get your kitchen organized? How do you tame paper? How do you deal with storage? How do you plan? Because if you fail to plan, it's because you're, uh, planning to fail. That's what you're actually doing. How do you make a schedule? How do you keep your house clean? People write books for this. Why? Because you're not the only one. The first book I read when I came home was Professionalizing Motherhood, and it taught me how to look at home and the rhythms in my home the same way I would look at a job. This mindset, whether you work or not, whether you have children or not, this mindset is what will help you to do a better job. So let's think about this. When we go to work, right, there's a plan We have a job to do. We know when it's supposed to be done. There's an SOP, there's a standard operating procedure. We might have KPIs, key performance indicators. We may have all these things that measure what we have to do, when we have to do it, and what is a good job. You have to think about the most challenging areas of your life and say, what do I have to do? When do I have to do it? And what is the process for getting this done? So what I wanted to talk you through are some of my most important rhythms. I am now a work-at-home mom. I have a home office. This was pre-pandemic. This was my life. I also homeschool my kids. In different seasons, I've done that well. In different seasons, I've done that poorly. But I have been a single parent. Um, I had a 10-year corporate career before I came home to be with my kids, and now I manage my own business and ministry. So I have been the the employee, I have been the coworker, and I have been the boss. So I have, I think, a 360 view towards what will help your life have ease. And I want to just give you a few of those tips today. So already before I recorded this episode for you, I have already been on live with my inner circle now 2 hours at this moment, going in a little bit more detail with a little bit more fun and foolery about some of these things. But I wanted to just give you in bullet-sized form, um, 3 of the ways, at least 3 of the ways, we'll see if anything else comes to mind, that I help my life. So one of those things that helps me to keep life and work and home in balance is having a rhythm for my week. And I can tell you, I have struggled for the last 5 years, and this is why this is so important to me to talk about right now. I have struggled for the last 5 years to regain rhythm. 5 years ago, I was in the hospital for 3 weeks. I And then I had leg struggles right now. Like, even right now as I sit here recording, my leg is propped up. I've had leg troubles ever since then, and it's not bad. I just gotta sometimes prop it up. That whole year was me learning how to walk again. That whole year was me learning how to function when I was walking around in my house with a walker. So I, I struggled that year. In 2019, my mom was sick. We lost her at the end of 2019. I had no rhythm because I was taking care of my mom. In 2020, none of us had rhythm. In 2021, we were trying to figure out rhythm. In 2022, 2022, we had another— and in 2021, my husband had a major surgery. In 2022, he had another major surgery, and both of those knocked him out for months at a time. So I am talking to you as a woman in 2023 who is trying to figure out, with all the changes that have happened in my life, the changes that have happened in my extended family, with my parents, with my husband, with my children— I've been launching kids going to college, I've had change on my team, I've had people come and go, we've started over multiple times— like, sometimes life makes it hard for you to have a rhythm. And I just want to acknowledge that, that if you are dealing with grief or job change or you've moved, you need to give yourself some grace. But here are the things that if I can just get these things on a rhythm, then my life is greatly helped. Number 1, food. Food is number 1 for me simply because if I am not on a rhythm, I won't eat well. If I'm not eating well, I won't feel well. If I don't feel well, I won't perform well. Right now, I manage my life 3 ways, actually. Number 1, I put work and life in my current project management tool of choice, which is Asana. My whole team runs in Asana, and I have a private board for all of my things related to home and all of the rhythms of the things that keep my home going. Literally, water the plants, because listen, don't nobody remember to water the plants. I only know that when they start dying. So I put those things in there, and I plan my week with rhythms. Food happens. Asana reminds me on Thursday, meal plan. The other two ways I manage my life is I use my digital calendar to iCloud, a combination of iCloud personal and Google for work. And then I use my own planner. It's the 90-Day Own Your Life Planner. And I literally open it up, um, right now you can't get them on the shop because we're sold out of the hard copy, but there is a digital copy there if you want to check it out. But every week I legit open it up to my week and I plan out what I'm going to do every day. And I put my top 3 down for the week and I put my habits and all the things because something magical happens when I write things down. So I write down my meal plan and I use digital tools to do it. I use an online system called Plan2Eat. It holds all my recipes. It lets me plan my menus and from my menus, it helps me to develop a grocery list. So I plan my meals on Thursday because I do my shopping on the weekend. I will get my groceries delivered from an online grocery store. I always go to Costco on Sundays after church. I fill up my car and I buy whatever needs to be replenished, and then I go to a fresh farmer's market on Sunday after church to buy fresh produce. This is my rhythm. I have my whole family with me in tow. We treat ourselves to tacos from the Taco Shack and drinks from Sonic while I do my grocery shopping. Let me tell you what happens if I I don't plan my meal on Thursdays, and if I don't meal plan and do the shopping over the weekend, Monday comes and I'm not ready. And then Monday, which is the worst day of the week to try to figure all this stuff out, I am scrambling to try to figure out what's for dinner. There's no need for that if I do it on Thursday. Why Thursday, do you ask? Because I— yes, I'm on YouTube, and yes, I have podcasts, and yes, I run a business, but y'all, I actually travel and speak. So when I get into traveling season, I'm usually traveling on a Friday or a Thursday night, and once I'm traveling, you know, I may not think about home while I'm gone. So Thursday is a way I can be consistent while I'm home, because a part of meal planning means I have to look in my refrigerator and my pantry and my deep freeze to figure out what I already have. That's a part of it, and I can't do that if I'm not at home. I mean, trust me, I've tried. I've had my kids send me pictures of the pantry. I take a picture on that second shelf of the fridge because I need to figure out how much Parmesan we have left. I can do that, but it's a lot easier to do it when I'm just home. I ask my children, I ask my husband, what do you need from the store? There's a little black book in the kitchen where when we run out of things, they're supposed to put it there. And I legit tell my people when they say, Mom, but we ran out of this and you didn't buy it from the store, I'm like, you didn't put it in the book. It's not my job to notice every little thing that y'all need. I need you to help me. So we have a black book in the kitchen where they can put what we need, and I put our plans for food in Plan to Eat, and then I do my grocery shopping over the weekend. If you can manage your food, you will spend so much time— so much less time running around deciding what you feel like eating today. That wastes your time, and your time is precious. It will also keep you out of the fast food line. It will also keep you, um, in a place where you're not overspending, because eating out and eating last minute will always have you spending more. That is my rhythm for that. Now I'm going to tell you now what is my rhythm for paying bills, but I'm also going to cheat a little bit here because because it's not currently something I'm doing. It is a rhythm I need to get back to. I used to pay bills every Wednesday night when my husband would take my children to church. He would take them there for the Wednesday night programming for children and youth, and I would stay home and I would balance my checkbook in Quicken, and then I would pay all of our bills, and then I would put everything in a spreadsheet and show my husband, because he was not paid regularly, like with a paycheck. It was— he had like a commission job, so we always had to manage cash flow. So I'd put it in a spreadsheet because my background is in accounting, and I would have that ready for him, um, on Wednesday so he could look at it. I need a day to take care of my finances, and I don't know that in this season of my life I need every day. I think twice a month would be plenty. Once a month would be satisfactory. We actually pay all of our bills on a credit card because we want them points. Come on, free flight! Come on, free hotel! So if I'm paying that off once a month, that would be sufficient. But I think no less than once a month— twice a month is a sweet spot, every week if you need to have a high level of management. If you have a time to look at your finances, you'll know where your money is going. And I can tell you, where your money is going is where your life is going, because every day you're going to work to make money to pay all these bills. You are the one spending your time. And every time you go to work, or your husband goes to work, or your roommate goes to work, because y'all are splitting bills that money is coming in and you are spending your time buying the fries. Money is just the tool that allows you to exchange your time for goods and services. So when you go and you buy a dress, you need to think, how much does this dress cost, but how much of my life did I exchange for this dress? When you don't look at your finances and you just notice when your bank account is empty, that's not the way to do it, by the way. You are realizing what you're exchanging your life to pay for. Do I want to exchange— I love this house, but do I want to exchange my life for it? I love this car, but do I want to exchange my life for it? Like, legit, right now— I say legit a lot these days, but anyway, right now I have a car that has 198,000 miles on it. And listen, we are tearing to the most with this car because I don't want no car payment. Why? Because I Cars do not have value for me. I don't want to exchange my life for a car payment. There are other things I want to exchange my life for— trips, adventure, uh, time with friends, creating memories. A car, it depreciates. One day it's going to be in a junkyard. So I am going to the most to not have a car payment, also because I'm trying to not be in debt as much as I can. So when you look at your money, decide whether you need to look at it weekly um, twice a month, or if you want to do that once a month. And then I want you to make a commitment. What day of the week is that going to be? Because where your funds go is where your lifeblood is going. You are exchanging time for everything you spend your dollars on. So the rhythm of looking at your money— where did the money go? How much did I spend? And because of how much did I spend, Am I going to keep doing that? If I've spent more money for my life on my budget than I want to right now, am I going to eat from my pantry and not go to the grocery store anymore except for the things that are perishable? Because you can choose that, you know. We actually have a financial challenge that's available inside of our Inner Circle to walk people through the basics of budgeting, getting out of debt, repairing your credit, and investing. It's only available on the inside of the Inner Circle, so I invite you to come on in the Inner Circle and not only join but find that financial challenge in our library and do the work. I want you to be successful, and where your time goes is where your money is going, and where your money is going is where your time is going. And you have to eat every day, so having those two things on a rhythm is gonna bless your life. The third thing that I want you to have on a rhythm is how you keep your house in order. Now, this is a big one because this has to do with cleaning your house. It also has to do with projects that are seasonal. What I want to talk about is is what brings you peace. Now you got to figure out what that is. I hate making my bed. I rarely make my bed. But what I can tell you is that when I do make my bed, when I come to bed that night, I feel great. When I go into my bedroom, if my bedroom is clean and if there are not things stacked everywhere, I feel peaceful, the same way I would feel when I go into a hotel room. So I need you to know that that, that brings me peace. So it is a high priority for me right now to clean out my room, because over the course of the summer and hosting different people and having guests for different things, every time we'd have company, I would take the things that were on the kitchen table and shove them into my bedroom. So it is a goal right now for me to clean out my room. So what does that mean? I have to designate a day in my week where I prioritize bringing myself peace in my home. My project right now happens to be cleaning up my room and cleaning out my closet and getting all these clean clothes back up on the hangers and in drawers. I don't know what yours is. It may be cleaning off a bookshelf. It may be cleaning out your kitchen drawers. It may be that you weekly have a time to clean out your— clean your house. Right now we have someone who cleans our house once a week, okay? She cleans the downstairs because she's there to help me. The upstairs where my boys live, they clean that. They clean the toilets. They clean, and I inspect it to make sure they did it right. When do they do that? On Saturdays. Because you know how our mamas used to do it on Saturday morning. She blasts the music and then you just cleaned, and you clean like your life depended on it. So that's what they do. But downstairs, I work, so I have help. That happens every week on a Friday, and I know on a Friday when my house is going to be clean. When my children were small, I didn't clean my whole house all at one time. I did areas and sections by day, because there's nothing worse than having little children and you clean your whole house in one day, and then 30 minutes after they come home because your husband took them the house is trashed again. So I would rotate around my home, and on Mondays I would clean my kitchen and my living room because that's where we made the most mess on Sundays. On Tuesdays I would take care of all the bathrooms because I just wanted to do that all at one time. You know, I'd skip Wednesdays because Wednesdays was my money day. On Thursdays I might— I don't know, I don't remember what it was, but because now I don't do that. But what I'm telling you is, in order to have peace, I figured out, especially with a bunch of boys in my house, that I had to hit the bathrooms twice a week to make sure until they were old enough to do it that they were up to my standards. What brings you peace in your home? And put that on rhythm. That's the first step, because you're going to cycle through spring cleaning, and you're going to take out your Christmas decor during the holidays and have to put that up, and you're going to need to do certain things at different points in time. When the spring comes, you're going to have this season where maybe you get out in your yard and you do some work, and you'll do that every Saturday morning. But I'm saying on a regular basis, what brings you the most peace, and schedule that when you have the time to do it. So for me, Wednesdays right now is a day when I can actually straighten my home. Um, we kind of throttle down a little bit on Wednesdays during the school year. My kids are at co-op. I have more bandwidth during the day. So that's the day when I choose right now to bring my home to the degree that I'm going to touch it back into some kind of order. I give you those 3 things because whether you're talking about your time, whether you're talking about your money, or whether you're talking about just what you want to do or you have to do, Those 3 things you have to do: managing your food budget, both from your time and what you're going to plan to eat, managing your money, and managing your, um, your home and your peace. So whatever that is, decide what it is and then put it on a rhythm. I'm going to say this as a sidebar because this should go without saying, but you need to have a morning routine and an evening routine, because whatever you decide you change in terms of your focus every day, your morning routine and your evening routine will get you How you wake up in the morning so that you don't start your day rushed, so that you don't create the mess in the morning when you're getting ready for work or getting ready to deal with your children. In the evening, that you prepare for the next day, that you have a way to wind down so that you get good rest at night so that you wake up and start the next day right. What you have planned in the middle of the day means nothing if you don't start it well and end it well. And so I would love to talk more about morning and evening routines another day, but I just wanted to save a note here about the fact that that's important. Important. Listen, when I go get a burger, I know you can have a burger without bread, but I don't want a burger without bread. And just like I don't want to have my rhythms and my routines in my week without a morning and an evening routine to sandwich them together, I want to tell you about 3 things that I think are a big part of your sandwich and tell you about the morning and the evening routine which holds it all together. Now listen, when— just like when you make a burger, you can put, you know, the basics: a piece of meat, meat, you know, some cheese, maybe some pickles, you know, a basic sandwich. But you can get creative with how you build your burger. You can do mushrooms, or you can do fried onions, or you can do red onions, lettuce, tomato. Are you going to do mayo, mustard, or ketchup? Are you going to put some jalapeños on there? What are you going to do? An extra slice of cheese? Is this a turkey burger? Is this ground beef? Or is this, you know, a slice of grilled chicken? You can make your burger and you can make your rhythms. But what I'm telling you is, in order for you to hold it all together, you have to make some decisions. And when you make decisions about how you put it together, then you actually have a sandwich that you will enjoy. You will have something that you can hold. The rhythms of your life make all the difference in the world. If you can't hold it together, it's like trying to eat a burger with a fork and a— fork and a knife. You can do it, but it's all everywhere. I want your life to be held together. And the way you do that is by building rhythms. I know it's hard to work and have kids. I know it's hard to have 2 and 3 jobs. I know it's hard to have one job, you teachers, and get there at 7 and not get home until 7. But you're going to have to backwards engineer not only the pillars of your life. I've talked about that in other episodes, not only the rhythms of your life, but you're going to have to get granular to when am I going to do the things that need to be done? So there are things in my life I don't have to think about. And if you need help, you pick up some books, you watch some YouTube channels, you search on YouTube for organized home, and you find some people you like. You teach yourself the skill of living well. And one of the best ways you can be a blessing to yourself and to your family is putting rhythm in your life for the things that you always have to do. We all have to eat, we all need to manage our money, and we all want to live in a space, in a place that brings us peace. Start with those 3, sandwich them with a great morning routine and an evening routine, and then watch other areas of your life fall into place. And listen, if you're feeling a little challenged, don't beat yourself up about it. Simply decide to learn and grow. I hope this episode of the podcast has helped you to do the same. I hope you feel like you've grown. Pick your meal planning day, pick your grocery shopping day, Pick Your Money Day and look around your house and decide, what is driving me crazy? And start with those. And then you'll see life, whoo-sa, will get a little better. I hope this has helped you. If it did, be sure and share it with a friend, and I will see you back here next week. Oh, and y'all, all the kids know what to say. Hit that like button. Make sure you're subscribed. Follow. Do all the things because I'm here every week churning it out and I don't want you to miss any of the good stuff. See you next time.