Many in today’s society don’t realize that a home needs adequate management to avoid undue stress. Even if you live alone, you will find far more peace in managing your home rather than doing daily chores to keep it clean. I know of plenty of clean homes that still cause a considerable amount of stress. 

I regularly deal with feeling overwhelmed when my home is not managed well. I don’t like falling behind on tasks because they become overwhelming. When that happens, I won’t do them… which makes them more overwhelming. It is a pain in the butt. When I manage my home well, the mess and clutter feel less overwhelming. 

In this post, you will find an overview of everything you will need to know to streamline your life and home. Hopefully, by the end, you won’t feel stressed, but rather in control of your time, your space, and your life. Let’s get started.

**** I would like to preface this post by saying that this will be predominantly for Stay-at-home managers. I have no clue how people go to work and manage their homes effectively, but I know many who do. Impressive!!!!! ****

What is Home Management?

Home management refers to organizing, coordinating, and overseeing the day-to-day tasks and responsibilities involved in running a household. Your family’s values and beliefs help you define what is important to everyone involved. 

Key components:

• Time
• Finances
• Cleaning
• Scheduling
• Organization
• Routines

Benefits of Effective Home Management

There are several benefits to putting in the work to run your home effectively. Here is a non-exhaustive list:

• Reduces household stress
• Saves time and enhances efficiency.
• Improves family communication and coordination.
• Helps manage finances better.
• Creates a clutter-free, comfortable living space.

Key Areas of Home Management

1. Time Management:

Managing your home can feel like a never-ending daily task list. Sometimes it helps to break things down to define what needs to be done on what day. Creating daily and weekly routines can help drastically. The last thing we want to do is forget about the yearly filter change or bill. Here are some tips for how to create your routine and rank tasks:

• Sit down and create a dump list every Sunday night or Monday morning.
  • Take everything in your head and put it on the list. From something small like putting the batteries away to big like booking a major doctor appointment or visiting family. Be sure to include due dates if need be.
    • If you struggle to remember what is supposed to be on the list, take your paper and pen or your phone and go from room to room and write down anything that comes to mind.
• Figure out what is the most important and assign them to different days of the week. Not everything needs to be done in one day.
• You can also assign days to be certain things. Here’s an example of what works for me:

There are many tools and apps that you can use to help with time management as well. Here are a few, 

• Google docs
• Google Calendar
• Trello
• Notion
• Task list
• Pad of paper and pen

2. Budgeting & Financial Management:

One of the pivotal parts of managing your home is knowing what money you have incoming and outgoing. It will influence everything you do. Be honest when you create your budget. It needs to serve your family’s needs while helping accomplish your goals. I prefer the Dave Ramsey methods for budgeting and paying off debt. Not only because he is a Christian but because IT WORKS! I’ve done it…. and in all honesty, I have to do it again…. Ahhhh covid…. covid finances sucked…. Anyway, here are some videos to help you get started.

3. Cleaning & Organization:

Nothing can be as defeating as having a constantly cluttered home. There are always dishes in the sink, laundry to do, and toys everywhere regardless of how many times you ‘tidy up’. Some of that could be too many things in your home. Another part could be that you don’t have a system that works for you. Here are some tips and resources to help:

• Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. There are already people who have tried and tested several different types of organization methods. Here are some:

• The same is said for cleaning methods/schedules. Here are some that can get you started:

The job is always made better when you have the right tools. Here’s a list of cleaning supplies that I use:

• Mop
• Vacuum
• Homemade cleaner
  • 1/4 cup of dawn dishsoap
  • 1/2 cup of lemon juice
  • 1 cup of vinegar
  • 1 and 1/4 c water
• Stovetop cleaner
• Scrubbies
• Gloves

4. Meal Planning & Grocery Shopping:

If there is one question that I dislike above all else, it’s the dreaded “What’s for dinner?”. Or worse, when I ask them what they want, they say “I don’t know.” One of these days, I may print a piece of paper that says I don’t know and serve it to them. 

Enter the meal plan. My ideal is to plan a good month and do as much batch cooking as I can do. It eliminates a lot of the guesswork, and I can do far fewer grocery shopping trips. 

On the topic of batch cooking, because I have access to a pressure canner, I have certain meals always made on hand. Things like chili, spaghetti sauce, soups, stews, and sauces for meatballs always have a permanent space in my pantry.

Now, without further adieu, here are the steps to a successful meal plan

1. Make a menu

You know what your family will eat. So sit down and create a menu of four or five main meals. These will always be in the rotation. They are a reliable backbone to your meal plan. I have those options on a menu on the inside of my cupboard for those days when I don’t want to cook what I planned.

2. Take an inventory of what you have

With the cost of groceries flying higher than planes, the best thing for your budget is to shop your pantry and freezers. I know of some people who keep a running inventory of what they have so that they will always be able to shop what they have. I am not so organized. For me, when I meal plan, I walk over to my fridge, freezers, pantry, and cold room and make a list of ingredients.

3. Take out a calendar

I prefer to pull out an actual calendar, either by printing one like below (create a meal plan calendar) or picking up one from our local dollar store. There are also apps to help streamline the whole process. I use Anylist for my grocery list and have contemplated upgrading it so I can use it for my meal plan. I have used Google Calendar to help with meal planning but I keep going back to good old-fashioned pen and paper. 

4. Gather as much as you can in one place

For each meal, I get a gallon-sized ziplock bag and try to put every ingredient into one location in my pantry or freezer. That way, when the time comes, I don’t have to worry about whether I have all the ingredients. 

An example of the process: Meatballs

• Make as many meatballs as I can all at once. I prefer to make 6 lbs of ground meat, which would get me two meals of meatballs.
• Freeze the meatballs on a cookie sheet. Then divide them into individual meals and vacuum seal them. Place in the freezer. 
• Make the sweet and sour sauce, minus any thickener, and can it in appropriately sized jars.
• Put thickener (cornstarch, in this case) in small jars.
• Put both the sauce and thickener into a large ziplock bag, one per dinner.
• Put rice into a small ziplock bag and then put that in with the sauce and thickener.
• Write the directions on the large bag
• Put it all away.

How to Create an Effective Home Management System

Running a home, as said before, can be overwhelming. If you don’t have systems in place to help you remember every little necessary detail, things will fall through the cracks. Pretty quickly you’ll find the house coming apart at the seams. 

I can give you all the advice in the world, and have my home running perfectly (I don’t but track with me here) but you are not me. My systems may not work for you. That is why you need to do your research to figure out the most efficient way of managing your time, home, and life. That’s probably why you’re here as well. Here are some basic steps to help get you started in creating your personalized home management system:

• Walk around your home. What are the things that are falling through the cracks? Create a master list of everything that needs to be done, from dusting to caulking. No job to little or big. Then sit down and go over what must be done and what can wait. Once a month, revisit that list. Keep that list in a visible, high-traffic place in your home.
• Track your finances. For a month, document every transaction you make from picking up a drink on a drive to paying your rent. Don’t change any habits. At the end of the month, figure out exactly how much you made in the month and where your money tends to go. Then you can set up a realistic budget, figuring out what you need to cut and what you can keep. 
• Figure out what tasks can be broken up over several days. Example: Laundry. We have six people in our home and my husband works in the trades. That means a lot of clothes. Instead of having a laundry day, I wash the clothes every day before bed and then put them in the dryer in the morning. I do it the same way others do their dishes every day. What task can be broken up so it’s not such a big chore?
• Go into each room and figure out exactly what you would need to do to clean that room from top to bottom. Create the list and then place it somewhere in the room. That way, when you go to clean the bathroom, you don’t have to mentally remember what to do. You just have to follow directions. It makes it far less stressful.
• Find out if paper or tech works best for you. Do you need an agenda? Planner? App? Use what works best for your brain.

Make sure to set realistic goals for your daily life. Nothing is quite as stressful as thinking that you need to get a week’s worth of work done in one day. Figure out what is of the utmost importance and focus on that first. It can likely take you years to nail down an effective management system but by the time you’re done, others will be clamoring to find out how you did it. And you’ll be able to smile because guess what? You did do it.

Pro Tips for Efficient Home Management

Once you have your basic home management system set up, it’s time to level it up. I’ve touched on these throughout this post, but here’s some more detail

Batch tasks

Group like tasks together. 

• If you’re meal planning, make the grocery list as well. 
• If you’re meal prepping, make enough to freeze one. 
• If you’re washing the dishes, make it automatic to wipe down the counters. 
• When you brush your teeth at night, wipe down the sink real quick. 

These little tasks help keep an efficient and clean home.

Delegate

I often joke that I don’t do the housework, my kids do. I don’t offer allowances for doing general maintenance of the house. My children know that when they get up, they get dressed, eat breakfast, do homeschool, then do their chores. I don’t even have to tell them anymore. This frees me up to do the bigger tasks that are required when running a home.

Routine

As I said before, certain things are simply done every day. My average day looks like the following:

• Wake up and go to the bathroom
• Do devotionals and a little reading
• Get dressed 
• Make bed
• Make kids breakfast
• Get kids up and dressed
• While they eat breakfast I check emails and social
• Homeschool
• Chores, both theirs and mine
• Make lunch
• Eat
• Free time for kids, either outside or in-house
• During that is when I work on the blog, my husband’s business or a big task for the week
• Prep/make supper
• Eat 
• Reset my house
• Put younger kids to bed
• Finish cleaning
• Put older kids to bed
• Run dishwasher
• Run a load of laundry
• Unwind
• Go to bed

This is how my average day runs while at home. Weekends are different, of course, but not by much. When we follow this same habit every day, our family runs that much smoother. A flexible routine is important to the management of your home and family.

Section 7: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q. How can I create an efficient cleaning schedule?

1. Break down your chores into daily, weekly, and monthly tasks. Focus on high-traffic areas daily (Kitchen, bathroom, livingroom, etc). Less frequent tasks (deep cleaning carpets and cleaning closets) can be done weekly or monthly. Assign your high-traffic areas to specific days and have a day a week where you do one monthly task.

Q. How do I get my family on board with a home management system?

1. When it comes to young children, invite them to take part (in a way that tells them they must for the benefit of the family). With teens, present them with a list of tasks that must be completed and ask them to assign themselves to a set number of tasks. That will be their responsibility completely. If it is only you and your spouse, then sitting down and having a frank conversation and dividing the responsibilities is necessary.

Q. What are the best ways to stick to a household budget?

1. Track all household income and expenses using whatever method works for you (aps, programs, or a simple spreadsheet). Prioritize necessities (rent, utilities, groceries), set aside savings, and pay down debt. Review monthly to make sure you’re on track.

Q. How do I maintain my home appliances?

1. Clean any filters that you can find. Do a weekly or monthly wipe down and clean out, depending on the appliance. 

Q. How can I stay motivated to follow through with these strategies?

1. As ridiculous as this sounds, a sticker chart still works wonders for me. I enjoy seeing all the stickers. It’s like a pat on the back. Some people will use treats that they can have once they have accomplished a certain task or number of tasks. Others have friends and families that work with them. Find what works for you.

Q. My house is too overwhelming to deal with. How do I overcome that?

1. Do one thing. Only one. Make your bed. Then, do the next thing that your eyes look at. If that’s dishes, just do them. If that’s a dirty floor, sweep it up. If that’s a dust bunny, pick it up and throw it out. Focus on only one thing at a time and start your day by always making your bed.

Conclusion:

Your home is not going to upkeep itself but it will fall apart by itself. It is a necessary function in the home, regardless of whether or not you stay at home or go to work. The issue is that today’s world has undervalued the work that goes into this traditional role. As a result, we have whole generations who do not know how to run a home. This results in fights, depression, anxiety, panic, obesity, and debt. We need to reawaken the desire to not just make our homes pretty but make them truly functional.

I have had a blast with you and I hope you have been able to take away something from this. I dare you to start today. Pretty soon, you won’t know how you functioned without your functional home.