How is your new year going? Are you sticking with all your new commitments? Or are you struggling? If you are anything like me and enjoy a quieter start to the year, where you slowly start to focus on things that have a cumulative effect throughout the year then read on for a few of the tips that I have accumulated over time to help me maximize some of my time and streamline some of the more mundane tasks.
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What Should We Have for Dinner?
If you aren’t someone who loves to cook, or doesn’t have much time in the evening to cook, then this can be the most dreaded question of them all! I am a huge fan of meal planning and prepping ahead. (Check out my Meal Prep post here.) Preparing meals ahead of time for the coming week or next few days is a huge timesaver, but even that can be daunting. Where to start?
A lot of people find it helpful to have a meal prep matrix, where you always have a taco Tuesday for example, or soup on Sunday. This gives you a rough outline to follow every week. If you like to cook but can become easily bored with the recipes in your normal rotation, try dedicating one day a week in which you find yourself with a little more time to try a new recipe. Or go to a local farmers market or specialty food store and pick up a new food item that you’ve never used before. Then look that ingredient up on Pinterest for ideas of how to use it!
Even if you have no desire to prepare a week’s worth of meals, try doing a little bit of prep ahead on the weekends. Wash all your veggies when you come home from the store. Cut up veggies a head of time so that they are easier to grab to munch on when you are hungry—having a healthy snack ready a head of time can save you from grabbing a less healthy option later.
Laundry
I hear so many people bemoan the never ending mountain of laundry and I have to say—I don’t get it. I’m sorry but I don’t! Maybe it’s because we don’t have kids yet so we don’t produce quite as much but I don’t think that is the case.
What I have found that works well for me is to only do laundry once a week. Time management experts and studies have shown that while throwing in a small load of laundry everyday can make you feel like you are staying on top it, actually ends up taking more of your time each week than biting the bullet and doing all the laundry at once. I do laundry on Friday and Saturday. I only have one rule and that is all of the laundry has to be dried and put away before we go to bed on Sunday—otherwise it will be sitting there all week!
Another thing people often do that makes laundry take longer is breaking their loads into smaller portions than they actually need to. They have whites, lights, bright colors, dark colors, delicates, heavily soiled items, towels, and sheets. No wonder they dread laundry day! Yes, like colors should be washed with like colors but your white shirts and whites towels? They can be friends; wash them together! Do your sheets and any colored towels in one load. Heavily soiled rags and work clothes can often be washed together too. And what about the socks that go missing and never seems to have a pair even though a pair went into the washer? Try washing the socks all together in a mesh bag. This is especially helpful if you have little kids with little socks. You can even attach a Command hook to the inside of the closet or to the side of your laundry basket to hold the mesh bag and then every time you have dirty socks to dispose of, place them in the mesh bag so you don’t have one more thing to sort when laundry time comes.
If you produce a lot of whites and colors, try having two laundry baskets so clothing gets sorted as it is worn. As far as the actual wash and rinse cycle, my husband and I find that throwing in a load or two before work on Friday, and then switching out loads as much as we can Friday night into Saturday really helps. Unless your water has a really unpleasant odor and a really, really heavy amount of metal in the water, most of your items will be fine to sit for six hours overnight if you throw in a load before bed. It will finish while you are in bed and be ready for you in the morning. Try it!
The biggest pain point with us is clothes that aren’t quite dirty. They’re too dirty to go back into the drawer but not dirty enough to go into the hamper. Ever had that problem? We were able to greatly mitigate this dilemma by using command hooks. We put a few command hooks on the inside of our closet and that is where “almost” dirty clothes go!
Tidy Up
One of the things that I think makes the biggest difference in keeping a tidy home is to do a nightly tidy-up. In her book, A Simplified Life, Emily Ley talks about how at the end of each evening she grabs a laundry basket and goes around and gathers up all the miscellaneous stuff that has been sprinkled throughout the house. Her family all gathers around as she dumps the contents on to the floor and then everyone is responsible to put their items away. When you do a nightly tidy up like this, your house doesn’t have the chance to get too out of hand. It makes it easier to run the vacuum or do some touch up cleaning that might come up.
Cleaning
Speaking of cleaning, I approach cleaning the same way I approach laundry—once a week! This isn’t necessarily true of a few things, i.e., wiping the counters and running the vacuum, but for the most part, I do my cleaning weekly. I like my house to be pretty clean; I really notice when it is not, but the other advantage of cleaning weekly is that it doesn’t get the chance to get super dirty which means it cleans easily and more quickly than if I waited longer in between cleanings. For an in depth discussion of how to establish a cleaning routine that fits your life and schedule, check out my post, How To Get into A Cleaning Routine.
Buy the stuff
Have you had the thought at all while reading this, “Oh that reminds me I need to buy…?” I do this. A lot. I just bought a runner for in front of our sink that I’ve been wanting to buy for over a year and just never sat down and did. There are lots of little things like this. Projects are the same way—sometimes we have big project we want to tackle. Sometimes we have lot of little projects we want to do, such as cleaning out a closet. We put things off thinking when we have time we’ll do it and then we never have time.
Often instead of needing a huge chunk of time to do some of these things, what we really need is to make use of a few little pockets of time. In her book, Better Than Before, author Gretchen Rubin talks about how she established a power hour to tackle some of the tasks weekly that she always found herself putting off. If you have several little chores you want to tackle, or things you want to buy, make a list and then the next time you find yourself with 20 minutes and are debating what to get into next, pull out the list and get busy!
Your Schedule
Are you happy with how your new year has started? Are you feeling bogged down already? Take a good hard look at your schedule and ask what really has to be there—not what always has been there, but what really has to be there. I’m guessing work, maybe a religious commitment, and possibly one or two family commitments are all things that have to be on the schedule. Double check yourself before another year goes by of you doing things you don’t really want to be doing while you delay starting the things that you really want to do.
In her book, 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do, Amy Morin talks about the power of alone time and journaling. We get so crazy, so used to the constant influx of noise and content flooding our consciousness that we never take time to quiet our souls and decompress. Try taking 15 minutes to write down what you did in a day and to list one to three of the most important things that you have to do the next day and see if you don’t feel more at peace than you were with all of it floating around in your mind.
It is always my hope that these tips will help to serve you and bless you. I certainly don’t have it all figured out but these are all things that have helped us to simply and streamline our lives so we are better able to focus on what matters to us. I hope it will do the same for you! Here’s to a great 2022 for you!