Housekeeping Tips and Efficiency Ideas

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Home Management:  How to Turn Up Your Efficiency Level

What do people need the most of besides money? Time. While we’re not all earning the same amount of money, everyone is given an equal amount of time. It’s the great equalizer–no respecter of persons. Like money, you can either waste it or save it. In caring for a lively family of six, I’ve learned to incorporate a few shortcuts in my daily management duties that actually put more time in my schedule.

Plan weekly menus – Write down meals on a small, dry erase board. I read this tip in some form or fashion for years, but never made the effort…no time. However, once a friend declared it worked, I finally sat down determined to give it a try. First I compared our weekly schedule to the contents of the fridge and the pantry. Might as well start planning with the food I already had. If this experiment didn’t improve my life within two weeks, it was a goner. Within two days I noticed a difference. No longer, was I baffled by what to prepare each day. The simple pre-planning not only saved me time, but also money. No mid-week store runs since I only scheduled food items on the menu whose ingredients I either had, or had shopped for earlier that day. Sunday afternoon was my grocery store run, and Sunday night I planned the weekly menu.

Keep your meal plan as simple as possible. Draw a grid with the days of the week on the left, and daily meals on top. Include what works for you: dinner only, or all three meals; every day of the week or just weekdays. I assign meals Monday through Friday for both lunch and dinner. Weekends are more of a free-for-all with lots of time away from home, so I don’t even bother to plan. Easy prep entrees are assigned to days when we’re extra busy. During breakfast I pull out ingredients for the evening meal and set them on the counter. That way meat can thaw during the day and when I’m ready to cook everything is at my fingertips.

The whole idea of planning, writing, and assigning your meals to different days of the week takes the guess work out of daily dining. But, as is often the case, a day can get off track. Not fulfilling your meal plan one day here and there during the week shouldn’t cause extra stress. Your menu board isn’t house law, it’s a guideline. If a meal doesn’t work out one day, bump that night’s entrée to another day of the week. The point is, you have meal options on the board to shuffle through to accommodate your changing schedule. Frankly, it is possible to make mealtime less hectic in your home. Why not try matching your weekly menu to your weekly schedule and see if you don’t notice an improvement.

Do laundry daily – I learned this time-saver while on bed rest with my third child. The only reason I was supposed to get up during the day was to go to the bathroom, which happened to be past the laundry room. Every time nature called, so did dirty clothes. I’d simply move piles from the washer to the dryer, to the bed for folding, and then to the appropriate bedroom as I made a slow trek past each stopping point. Granted, the process took all day, and getting laundry done was the extent of my productivity, but by the end of the night when the clothes we had worn the previous day were already clean and back in their rightful spots, it dawned on me that this was actually much easier to manage than when I was up and around and doing laundry twice a week.

Five or ten minute chunks throughout the day handling a couple of loads of laundry minimized my burden. Now I throw in a load first thing in the morning and scoot the cycle along throughout the day. I don’t go to bed until it’s folded and put away. Of course, I enlist help from others in the family. Different children are in charge of different stages. My young children can remove clothes from the dryer and the older ones can fold and put away. Clean clothes are a must whether they’re 3, 13, or 23 and the sooner they learn how to manage one of their future responsibilities the better.

In the grand scheme of daily life, meals and laundry are the top two time-consuming household chores. But with a little meal pre-planning and a few minutes invested daily on the laundry, you can greatly increase your efficiency level and use the time you save on a pursuit of your choice.

By Guest Writer Shawnee Bowlin