Repetition does not make your life boring; repetition makes your life simpler. Conscious repetition helps you to accomplish the necessary and be freed up for the fun stuff.

Your Household Is Your Business

Think of your household like a business organization; how can you run a successful business if only the CEO knows the correct way to do things? That business is going to be extremely limited because there is no method to the daily work. No one can be trained or taught, nothing can be delegated, and even the daily, mundane tasks become a hassle because there’s no structure, no organization, no routine.

Sound like your house in the morning? Or the evening? Or anytime? (Except when you and the husband and the kids are all out of the house, right? Then it’s pretty peaceful…unless the dog gets loose… Oh, nevermind.)

Use Conscious Repetition

You know a morning routine makes your mornings easier. You know a daily minimum (which is also a routine) makes keeping the house clean a lot easier. Both routines are simply methods of conscious repetition.

Become conscious. You repeat things whether you’re aware of it or not. You shower, dress, eat, drive, email, hug, talk, sleep… repeatedly. Running your household requires infinite repetition; that’s one reason it’s so easy to get frustrated with the home and the family. It’s never done, complete, finished.

You never get to walk away from the laundry room, rubbing your hands together, and say, “Well, now that’s done for good I can move on to something more interesting.” Oh, no. The laundry will be back, again (and with a vengeance). The floor will get dirty, again. The kids will get hungry, again (what is with them?). You get the point.

So, your choice is to 1) waste time making the same decisions and fumbling your way through the endlessly repetitive and, let’s face it, boring daily tasks of modern home making or 2) create streamlined, custom methods to get the items accomplished quickly, efficiently, and as best suits you and the household.

Oh, hmmm, which sounds better?

Open Door #2! You win the prize: a simpler life, a smoothly running household, and more mental freedom and time to do… well, whatever you want.

Here’s How

Start writing things down. Notice what you already do and how you do it. Maybe set aside a little notebook or just jot things down in your journal or on your computer. What you want to pay attention to is the repetitive stuff.

Find a time to spend about an hour on creating some policies and procedures. This is the easiest and best way to get conscious repetition working for you.

A policy and procedure manual is a book (or books) that businesses use to set standards and define methods for their employees. It makes training easy and create common standards and methods that everybody in the company learns and uses.

A policy tells you what and why. A procedure tells you how.

Here’s an example from business.

Policy: An employee identification card is required for all employees in order to gain access to offices and facilities.

Procedure: Upon employment, the employee obtains the form from the Department of BlahBlahBlah, fills out, turns it in, and picks up ID card from the Office of ID Cards one week later.

Here’s an example from a household.

Policy: In order to be healthier, we eat smoothies for breakfast during warm weather seasons.

Procedure:

Annie purchases fresh fruit and frozen yogurt every week when grocery shopping.

Annie washes and prepares fruit to some extent when putting away groceries.

Annie puts some of the fruit in the refrigerator and some in the freezer so that there is always a frozen supply.

Annie processes any fruit that is about to spoil and puts it in the freezer.

Joe makes the morning smoothie by using fresh and frozen fruit, frozen yogurt, and juice.

Joe washes the blender and leaves it on the counter to dry.

Joe wipes off the counters.

Joe puts any fruit residue in the compost bucket.

Annie puts the blender away later in the day when cleaning the kitchen.

Mara takes the compost bucket out later in the day when playing outside.

Why Details Matter

Now you’re thinking, “Sheesh, that’s a lot of detail just to get a smoothie made.” Yes. It is. But it ensures that the smoothie gets made and the area gets cleaned up and it defines who is in charge of what.

It eliminates the decision-making process and the guess work: “Should I have a smoothie? Do we have any fruit? Is there any frozen yogurt? Did Joe clean the blender up? Should I make the smoothie today or will Joe do it?”

Can you switch it up? Sure! It’s your policy and procedure manual; you can do anything you want, including change it, ignore it, or light it up and watch it burn. It’s more useful, however, if you leave the matches alone and go ahead and get detailed enough to create some policies and procedures, then start using them.

If you’re the only one involved, you’ve just defined and streamlined your routine so it will go faster and you will be more efficient. If there are others involved, then you’ve made it easy for them to know what’s expected. That’s a relief for you and for them.

Image courtesy of D Sharon Pruitt.

The idea comes from, well, who knows, originally, but I picked it up from a great book called Totally Organized by Bonnie McCullough. This is a great book, by the way, look for a review of it soon.

Here’s what McCullough says about what she calls…

“…MM (minimum maintenance) can set you free by 9:30 in the morning or have you ready to leave for work on time-and that means with breakfast wiped away, children dressed, dinner planned, and the clutter cleared.”

Oh beautiful for spacious skies. I want to be set free by 9:30 in the morning, don’t you?

Let’s continue with Ms. McCullough:

“The MM system is easy to use. It calls for daily, organized house “keeping” rather than weekly or seasonal house-cleaning ordeals.”

I like avoiding anything that can be referred to as an “ordeal” because, well, that’s just not my cup o’ tea. However, even with daily minimums, I still have a need for a slightly lengthier weekly cleaning time. But when I’m faithful with that daily deal, my weekly cleaning is quick and easy; and if I have a week where I simply can’t get to it, the house is still presentable, just not quite as clean as I’d like it to be.

We’ll return to a bit more advice from McCullough momentarily. For now, I’d like to walk you through my version of a Daily Minimum.

My Best Days

My best days are those when I rise early, follow my morning routine, and dive into my Daily Minimum as soon as the kids and I finish eating. Some days I dawdle, and drink another cup of coffee, and give orders to my imaginary maid; those days I don’t get through my minimum by 9:30. Some days I get sidetracked and decide to clean out Mara’s closet halfway through the minimum; those days I don’t get through by 12:30. Some days I go with the urge to flee the house rather than clean it, and load up my pajama-clad children so we can “take breakfast to Daddy,” which is really a great excuse to buy myself a latte; those days I don’t even remember what minimum means until bedtime, when I rediscover its importance. But all failures aside, the DM or MM or whatever you want to call it is a great tool for keeping a house running without hours of effort. A good routine to add to your arsenal.

My Daily Minimum

(I begin directly after breakfast; I put the breakfast dishes in the sink as I’ll return to the kitchen at the end of the routine.)

Kids: send Mara to go potty and get dressed; take Zeke and Robbie with me and change diapers and dress them when I get to their room.

Laundry: start one load.

Bathroom: Hang towels, clear out laundry, swipe counter/sink/toilet with peppermint cleaner, shake out rug, sweep.

Master bedroom: Straighten, put away clothes/shoes/Joe’s random stuff/my books, make bed

Kids’ bedrooms: Pick up clothes, make beds, straighten, put away toys/books/etc.

Entry/living room: Straighten, return toys to appropriate spots, sweep.

Dining room: Clear off and wipe down bench and table, sweep, mop.

Kitchen: Empty drainboard, empty dishwasher, clean breakfast dishes, get dinner started (I try to get as much done as I can so evenings are easier).

Laundry: Switch load to dryer.

Done.

The Professional Method

Now to return to the professional. McCullough says to “give each room five minutes before leaving for work or starting any major project of the day. You put away, straighten up, and wipe off.” That’s basically what I do with each room of the house.

McCullough recommends starting with the entry, but since my entry way consists of a 2 by 6 foot space with nothing in it, I don’t work that way. I start at the messiest point in the morning – bathroom – and work my way back around to the kitchen, so when I start working on dinner, I already have my cleaning done.

Determine Your Daily Needs

So how do you determine your daily minimum? Experiment. Watch yourself. What actions are you repeating anyway? What part of your house needs attention on a daily basis? If you have kids, and they spread their toys around, you’ll have more to deal with and you need to remember that a daily minimum doesn’t mean a picture-perfect house all day long. You do have to live there, and so do your kids.

A few more pointers from McCullough:

• Don’t get distracted by deep cleaning projects.
• Make the dinner decision early (even if you don’t start on your prepping early, as I do).
• And this advice is my favorite: “Don’t let the needs of others control your life. …Don’t just drop your world. Do the maintenance first. …Learn to reward yourself after, rather than before, your MM is finished.”

Remember, too, that there is flexibility here. As McCullough points out, a working (outside the home) person could half of the DM before work and half upon arriving home in the evening. Since I work from home, I like to get it all done so I can relax and eat chocolate while ordering my kids around relax and focus on writing and playing with my kids for the rest of the day.

Get started

You can be as simple as you want about this. Make a list on a piece of paper or an index card, post it somewhere obvious (bathroom mirror? kitchen cabinet?) and just be sure you complete everything on it sometime by the end of the day. The sooner, the better. This and your morning routine are your new best friends.

You can also download a couple of printables here to help. They’re all in one downloadable file: one is a daily minimum routine check list you fill in yourself, and there’s also a partially filled-in version; the other is a daily minimum check list that’s already filled in, you just have to check it off as you go.

I’ve made them weekly so you don’t need a separate sheet of paper for each day. Also, if you see you missed an item on Monday, say, you can be sure you get it completed on Tuesday.

Click here to download Printable Daily Minimum Check Lists.

Image credit: moonsheep on flickr.

Benefits of a Morning Routine

What you do with your morning effects your entire day. Energy begets energy. Order begets order. I don’t always enjoy getting out of bed, but I enjoy what the rest of my day is like when I get out of bed on time and make myself go through my routine.
One morning not long ago, after a week of great consistency on my early rising and morning routine, I decided to try just going with the flow... ignoring routine, just doing what I felt like doing, taking it easy, rolling from one thing to the next ‘as the spirit moved me.’
I decided that wasn’t the right spirit for me. It’s fine sometimes, for holidays and weekends, but the normal day of work requires order, energy, and a good dose of knowing who’s in charge. When I just wander around, it’s clear that I’m not in charge. I don’t know who is, whether it’s the kids, the phone, or the dirty dishes, but I found out that I like being in charge. Call me a control freak. I’d rather be up and doing, taking names and taking charge, than stumbling out into a world that’s already set a course for the day without consulting me.

Having a clear morning routine and following it faithfully tells the world (in my case, that consists of me, my house, and my children) this: “Hey, I’m in charge here. Don’t mess with me.” I wonder how many disastrous days have been turned ’round simply by the act of going through a morning routine?

• Following a morning routine sets a successful tone for your day.
• Following a morning routine gives you time to make a plan.
• Following a morning routine enables you to get the big rocks done by 11 a.m.
• Following a morning routine helps you meet your goals.
• Following a morning routine allows you to maintain an orderly home.
• Following a morning routine frees you up for fun stuff later in the day.
• Following a morning routine gives you time for guilt-free afternoon naps.
• Following a morning routine creates quiet time for yourself.

Elements of a Morning Routine

1. Consistent rise time: whenever you choose to get up, do it. Be in charge. Don’t fall prey to the snooze button. Think about how much time you need in the morning, decide when you want to get up, set your alarm, and get up at that time.
2. Earlier-than-the-family rise time: this is essential for the modern home makers, whether you are a stay-at-home mom, a work-at-home mom, or a work-out-of-the-home mom. You need enough time in the morning before the kids get up to get yourself dressed, minimum. It’s even better if you have time to get a few other things in order, too.
3. Specific goals: see below.
4. Specific tasks: my tasks include the basics of getting up and dressed, plus whatever I need to do to meet my goals. What tasks do you need to accomplish to meet your morning goal?
5. Specific order: start at a logical point and progress from there. Get yourself ready to go first, then take care of the most important tasks.
6. Consistent follow-through: your morning routine is no good if you don’t do it!

Goals of a Morning Routine for Modern Home Makers

The morning routine should accomplish five things:

1. getting you dressed and physically ready for the day
2. getting you inwardly ready for the day
3. getting breakfast and lunch taken care of
4. getting the right people, with the right stuff, out the door at the right time
5. setting the tone and establishing what’s next for the rest of the day.

Your goals may differ slightly. The idea is to get you ready and your day started in an orderly way, instead of last-minute rushing, and to prepare you for the rest of the day.

A Note on Getting Up Early

There are infinite articles on this topic. I don’t want to add to the clutter, but I do want to encourage early rising. It is the single most effective habit I have for building a better life. Certainly there are successful people who don’t rise early. But a trademark of a vast majority of energetic, productive, happy people is a consistent, early rise time. If you’re a night person, maybe early rising won’t work for you. I think you should try it, though, for at least a month. Give it a fair test run. If you find that staying up late and sleeping late helps you accomplish more and be happier doing it, then stick to that. Just don’t write off early rising until you’ve made it a consistent habit and seen its effects for more than a few days at a time.

More…

• Steve Pavlina’s article on How to Become an Early Riser
• Lifehack: How to Start Your Day at 5 a.m.
• ZenHabits: My Morning Routine
• eHow: How To Streamline Your Morning Routine
• Flylady’s Morning Routine
• 43things: Develop a Daily Morning Routine
• Blisstree: Tips for the Morning Routine with Kids
• Making Your Home a Haven: 5-Item Morning Routine
• Heart of Wisdom: Homeschool Organization – Morning Routine
• Jamie Morgan: Setting a Morning Routine

Image courtesy of Arc-light.

Having 3 kids under 3 forces you into being a simplicity guru. It’s not a matter of preference but survival. As I burp my one-month-old and browse for writing jobs with my free hand, I realize something that is, for me, profound: having too many goals is just as deadly as having no goals at all.

Goals should bring freedom.

In order to make progress, you must define and limit your goals. Your goals should free you to pursue what matters and to happily ignore what doesn’t. That will only happen as you consciously decide what matters right now and what can (or must) be ignored.  If you want to be successful in modern homemaking, mothering, working, entrepreneur-ing (how’s that for coining a word?), then you have to limit your efforts in order to succeed.

We have an unfinished basement, some major landscaping needs in the backyard, and about 4 rooms that really need to be repainted in our home. I would prefer to get all those projects completed, but neither my time nor my money allows it. My time is spent caring for our children and for myself, writing, and keeping the household afloat. My money may one day be in excess to simply hire someone to do the things I don’t have time for, but that day has not yet come. In the meantime, repainting my bedroom would be nice, but it’s not important. If I have a free afternoon one weekend, I might tackle it; but I’m not going to interrupt the important day-to-day stuff just to change wall colors.

Now. Fast forward ten years or so in my life and things might be different. Our kids will be older, in school, much more independent. I will have either reached some major milestones in my writing, enabling me to slow down, or put it aside, or switched to a different business focus. I might want to entertain more, have more overnight guests, spend more time with friends and family in our home. Painting, redecorating, landscaping, finishing house projects might become more important as other things become less important.

You can only pursue a few goals at a time.

Well, that’s not entirely true. You can pursue lots of goals at once, but you won’t make much progress on any of them. I am always seeking to become a better person and build a better life; however, I can’t conquer every area at once. If I set goals to run 3 miles a day, read a book a week, cook gourmet meals for dinner, and spend time playing with my kids, something must collapse. (It will probably be me.) Priorities. I simply cannot spend all the time required on all those personal goals and still have time to sleep at night. I must choose one.

Do you understand your work?

Work encompasses more than you think. It’s not just your 9-to-5 or your freelance career or your side business. Life is work; this is not a bad thing, and the sooner you realize how much work is involved in life, the sooner you can start building more efficiency and enjoyment into it. Sort your areas of work out, but don’t get complicated. 4 or 5 at the most. Here are mine:

1. Personal
2. Household
3. Business
4. Community

Those are mine, and those are their order of priority in my life. Yes, I put “me first.” More on that in another post.

Overlook these at your peril.

Treating one area of your work (a.k.a. your life) as unimportant leads to problems in all areas. You are only one person. You cannot ignore your personal needs and still function well on business matters. The creativity and intelligence you nurture by taking care of yourself are what make you able to be great at your business. This concept flows from all areas. There is no real division; we categorize only for the sake of identifying problems and solutions.

Separate the infinite from the finite.

A to-do list is infinite; your current goals should be finite, reachable, measurable. The ideas and visions you have for your life are infinite; your time is finite. Once you’ve sorted out your areas of work, set one specific, current goal for each. These are your working goals. You must choose to quit being manipulated by a never-ending list and start making real progress toward a few goals.

As you progress toward your working goals, you build habits. Once you reach your goals and set new ones, those habits you established can remain. Some, of course, may end with the accomplishment. But many will have become positive habits that can remain in your life, even if they are modified or downsized to accomodate your new working goals. Your decision to limit your working goals to only a few ends up having a positive, cumulative effect on the quality of your life. The more goals you reach, the more good habits you have established.

You will reach more goals by limiting your efforts and focusing your diligence.

]]> http://sisterwisdom.com/blog/2009/05/18/making-progress-with-specific-work-goals/feed/ 1 http://sisterwisdom.com/blog/2009/05/16/getting-started-how-to-make-changes-that-stick/ http://sisterwisdom.com/blog/2009/05/16/getting-started-how-to-make-changes-that-stick/#comments Sat, 16 May 2009 13:04:43 +0000 Annie http://sisterwisdom.com/blog/?p=1011 Part 1 of the series: “The Get Your Life Together Plan”

Image courtesy of alicepopkorn.

Find out why it matters.

When I need help being consistent, say, with exercise or cutting out soda or eating more salads, I do research. I hope from site to site, reading up on fitness routines, muscle tone, great-looking salad ideas.

And nothing changes.

Then, as I walk the mall, dodging weed-thin teenagers and power-walking Mommies in velour sweats, I catch my own reflection. Sharp gasp (my own). Look of horror (my own). That’s not me: that’s some 30-ish woman who has a mummy tummy and flabby arms and doesn’t make that cute shirt look so cute.

I dump my soda in the nearest trash can, go home, and have a big salad for dinner. The next day I take a three-mile walk.

Change comes when it matters to me.

Image courtesy of apesura.

Call me shallow, but abstract health claims don’t grab my attention the way a glimpse of my own cellulite does. When it comes to making healthy lifestyle changes, my own image is my sticking point.

Should doesn’t matter.

Maybe I should be concerned about heart disease, diabetes, healthy muscles, strong bones. What actually does concern me is much simpler: having a double chin. Being able to button my pants. Having energy. When I get unmotivated, health research doesn’t help. A long look in the mirror does.

Put aside your idea of what you should motivate you. Motivation doesn’t matter unless it connects to your heart. If you don’t know why getting your life together matters, you won’t continue the process. Following any regime for the sake of regime alone is demoralizing and, ultimately, unproductive.

Find your sticking point.

So you probably already know what frustrates you most about your home, daily work, family, and lifestyle. Maybe it’s the clutter. The paperwork. The lack of communication. The lack of sleep. Let that sit for a minute and focus on something else:

What is the ideal?

Image courtesy of geishaboy500.

Picture an ideal space at home. Just one. The perfect, clean kitchen? The perfect work area? An ideal corner of the bedroom?
Picture an ideal moment from your workday or weekend. The moment you snuggle into bed for the night? The cuddles with your children? A hug from your spouse? A quiet moment with a cup of coffee?

Those pictures could be real or existing only in your imagination. Move through several mental pictures until your soup jumps a little at the idea of one particular, serene place or moment. Hold that.

What if you could create and multiply that feeling every day?

Changes that stick come around when you find something worth changing for. Frustration isn’t enough. You need an ideal.

When I try on clothes that don’t fit, frustration is only one half of the experience. The other half is the mental image I have of how good I could look. If I didn’t have the ideal, then the reality wouldn’t frustrate me so. There would be no disparity between what I have (or am) and what I want (or want to be). It’s the disparity that displeases.

Focus on the ideal.

Quit focusing on the negative side of that disparity and hold onto the ideal. Write it, draw it, collage it, meditate on it, blog about it, picture it. Let the images saturate your mind, and you’ll not only see clearly what you must change, you’ll also find the energy to make the changes, and make them last.

We might welcome change, but it always causes a setback in terms of knowing how to deal with the new day-to-day. Sometimes the setback is small and you adjust without really thinking about it. Sometimes it takes a few weeks before you realize that what did work isn’t working any longer. And sometimes it isn’t easy to figure out what will work now – new routine? New schedule? Drop something? Add something? More restriction? More freedom?

Whatever the change you’re dealing with, there’s a way to start getting back in control instead of scurrying through your day confused and overwhelmed. This series will walk you through the 8 essential steps of dealing with your life, figuring out what works, and making it happen. Go through the steps one at a time; you may have the initial enthusiasm to take them all on, but that will quickly become overwhelm and fatigue. I’ll give you recommended starting spots, and you can adjust to match your own priorities.

The articles will be appearing over the next week in the order listed below; once they’re all live, however, feel free to choose the one that makes most sense for you. What area frustrates you the most right now? Pick the step that deals with that area and make that change first, give yourself a few days, and then tackle the next. You’ll find as you go that you gain momentum, so though you may need a few days or even a week between steps 1 and 2, by steps 5 and 6 you will have gained more enthusiasm and energy, and you’ll progress through each step faster.

The first article is a primer on how to apply these changes so they make a real difference; the last article is the final step – an overview of how to successfully establish a habit – as well as tips, ideas, and reminders to help you succeed in these changes you’ve just made.

• Getting Started: How to Make Changes that Stick
• Regaining Control with a Morning Routine
• Making Progress with Specific Work Goals
• Keeping House with a Daily Minimum
• Simplifying Food, Chores, and More with Repetition
• Getting Things Done with Designated Days
• Making Life Fun by Incorporating the Extras
• Ensuring Success with a Nightly Routine
• Following the Plan: Turning Steps Into Habits

Image courtesy of Crystian Cruz.