Do you ever feel like you just can’t get ahead in your home?
You need to take a moment to learn the art of easy home management. It’s not entirely difficult. Sometimes, it’s a bit illogical… because trying to run your home (and your life) without learning the basics of home management is a bit like sending your glue eating preschooler into calculus and being surprised when they don’t get it.
The good news? If you suck at running your home now… it’s not you.
It’s because no one ever taught you how.
Update: 4/5/20 You asked for it and I’m delivering! Starting NOW, you can grab the Trashed to Total Home Transformation Survival Guide (Pandemic Edition) For FREE!
It teaches you step by step how to work with your personality to not only set up home routines that will work (no matter how many times you’ve failed in the past), but that you’ll stick to… long after the pandemic is over.
We’ve taught hundreds of thousands of people how to use bare minimum consistent effort to completely transform their home (and life!). You’re up next.
You can get your Survival Guide here for FREE…
The bad news? If you don’t take the time to learn home management now, it’s just going to get worse as you get older (not better as most people tend to think).
So, let’s get you caught up!
(Hint: Want to take the short cut? Grab the FREE Trashed to Total Home Transformation and I’ll walk you through the system for free).
What Exactly is Home Management?
The boring answer is that home management is the systems and processes that you use to effectively run your household.
The more accurate answer is that home management is what gives you time off. Time to do what you really want to do in the world (assuming that you have interests other than dishes, laundry, and cooking?)
A good home management system is completely customizable to your personality and your needs. Everyone needs something just a little bit different.
The home management program of a retired couple living in a small house would be vastly different from a dual-income family where mom and dad both work and have 7 school-aged kids, one of whom has special needs.
What is There to Really Know? Isn’t This Kind of Basic?
Most likely, you spent at least 12 years in school learning Math, Science, and English…
And then maybe you went to college, or maybe you got a job and did a ton of on the job training, or maybe you even did both.
Regardless of all of that schooling/training, it’s unlikely that you ever took more than one class that taught you how to manage your home.
And managing your home is really more about managing your life… It’s what drives the other 128 hours a week that you aren’t working (or more if you stay home or work a reduced schedule).
This is totally backwards.
You’ve spent years of your life being trained to master the work you do for 40 hours a week and at best, you’ve taken one class to manage the other 3/4th’s of your life. (Side note: No offense to Home Economics class, but the knowledge of how to write a check really hasn’t helped me much in a world that now has online bill pay and Paypal).
You need to learn basic home management because it can remove the majority of your stress, teach you to manage your money more efficiently and improve (all) of your relationships.
Benefits of Home Management. (i.e. Why Should I Prioritize This?)
You should prioritize this because becoming really proficient at managing your home and your life, regardless of how messy and unorganized you are, is one of the BEST things you can do for yourself.
Here are just a few of the benefits to home management.
- Reduced stress in almost every area of your life.
- It’s easier to spend less and save more because you’ll have time to budget (and do the things that support your ability to stay on budget, like meal planning).
- Less fighting with your spouse about chores and money.
- You’ll have more time to go after goals and what you really want to do in this world.
- You get to raise kids who know this stuff naturally from watching you and won’t have to learn the hard way as an adult.
- Better friendships that come from entertaining more, more free time and encouraging unexpected company.
- Free time to spend by yourself. Not just time for the kids or your spouse, time to do what you want to do whether that be reading books in a hammock or binge-watching Bachelor in Paradise (assuming you have the same bad taste in TV as I do).
- Having your house run itself in the background opens up a ton of opportunities. From last-minute vacations, hobbies, deals, to even starting your own business.
Is it Just Me? Why Can’t I Keep Up With My House?
Before you start learning about easy home management, you have to understand why what you’re doing now isn’t working.
Almost everything is stacked against you right now.
In generations past, men earned the money while women kept the home and raised the babies. Sexist or not, everyone knew what their role was with clearly defined lines. Mothers raised daughters to keep the home when they grew up and they raised sons to work and take care of their family financially.
Don’t get me wrong, feminism rocks! We can be anything we want to be now and the opportunities are endless.
But being only two generations into these changes has made our roles a little murky. Women are often now expected to have full-time jobs and help the family financially, while also raising kids and keeping the house.
In a perfect world, this would be a delicate balance with both spouses helping equally to get things done.
But each of us brings in any preconceived notions we may have about men and women’s roles in the relationship. If you (or your spouse) grew up with a mom that primarily took care of the house and raised the babies, then whether you mean to or not, that sets the expectations for yourself.
The #1 Reason You’ve Failed in The Past
To be perfectly frank. You can’t do it all. It’s not possible to have a Pinterest perfect house, well-adjusted kids and a high flying career unless you have a team of people helping you (and you have the people/management skills to lead that team!)
You have to prioritize what matters and learn to let the rest go. That doesn’t mean that you’re going to have an amazing career and live in an unkempt house (or vice versa).
It means that you have to find ways to automate the things that you aren’t as focused on so it can run in the background with little involvement from you.
If you’ve never taken the time to learn how to automate with a home management system that works, then you’ve likely struggled with feeling overwhelmed with all of the expectations that fall on you.
From Hot Mess to Home Success…
A few years ago, I spent the majority of my time trying to catch up. Every single day was an endless repeat of going to work, picking up the kids, doing a mad dash to make dinner, get the kids to bed, doing chores and collapsing exhausted into bed (usually too late) just to wake up early the next day and start all over again.
I can remember thinking that it would get better next week after I got a chance to get caught up.
But next week came and I never got caught up. Weeks turned into months and then into years, and I almost always had…
- a gigantic pile of laundry to do.
- a sink full of dirty dishes (now with food cemented on).
- stuff piled on every usable surface of the house.
I was late to almost everything, even to work. And I would watch other people show up on time, with perfectly curated outfits and a calm disposition and get so frustrated with myself.
Why Can’t I Get My Act Together?!?!?
I’d commit to doing a new system or a new program and swear that this time would be different. I would start meal planning, budgeting, or start a new cleaning system. And, I’d go out and buy planners, organizing containers, notebooks and everything I needed to get “fixed.”
And then, I never actually stuck with any of it.
Within a few weeks (usually a few days), I was back to living in the chaos and the mess.
It finally hit me that I was making this harder than it needed to be. I can’t stick with any of these systems because I don’t have the time to learn something new when I’m drowning. And I don’t have the willpower to stick with it when I’m exhausted and overwhelmed.
I decided from that day forward that I’d focus on building a system that works WITH my personality instead of against it.
I would…
- Automate as much as possible to free up the time to learn the life skills I needed
- Isolate the chores and tasks that REALLY matter and then let the rest go.
- Set up a bare minimum easy home management system so that the essentials are always running flawlessly, but that I could expand when I’m motivated and I have time.
Years later… I still do the same system and its changed every aspect of my life.
- Not only do I not panic when people drop by, but I have people over frequently.
- Now, I love every aspect of my house and that it feels like mine.
- We never really fight about chores anymore. And things get handled without a lot of input from us.
- The best parts though are that I stress so much less and have so much extra free time! More than I ever thought was possible with two young kids.
Building Your Customized Home Management System
If you’re looking to build your own home management system. Let me walk you through what you need. Prefer video? Got you covered… If you’d rather read, just scroll down.
Home Management Step #1: Automation
You need to remove yourself from doing anything that can be done without you. We do this first because you need time. Time to learn the rest of the system, but you also just need some room to breathe. You’ve been running at full speed for a while and I need you to see what “free time” feels like.
We live in a really good time for home automation. There are dozens of ways to automate cheaply and effectively, but I’ll hit the three with the biggest impact here.
Grocery Delivery or Pick-Up
Almost every town has options for grocery delivery (like Shipt or Instacart) or pick up (and if you don’t now, you can bet it’s coming quickly). This can save you a ton of time, but also surprisingly a ton of money since you save on impulse purchases and have the time to compare your list and look for cheaper options in the comfort of your home (perhaps while you’re watching Netflix?).
Roomba: Automatic Vacuuming
Upgrading to a Roomba means no more vacuuming. 🙂 Or at least, it means YOU don’t vacuum any more… You can find them used on the Facebook Marketplace for as low as $50 and they are a game-changer.
Teach Kids (and Spouses) Home Management
Unless you live alone, you have people that you can assign work to. Kids are free (or cheap) labor and you’re teaching them essential life skills that will last their whole lives. It’s a lot of work to teach chores to kids in the beginning, but it pays off tenfold over the years once they learn.
Our four year old and seven year old are a HUGE help around the house (also hugely destructive to be fair), but they handle taking the trash out, washing and drying the clothes, taking care of the dogs, and helping me do a 15-minute whole house clean up every day.
When you break chores down for them into steps and then incentivize them (with an allowance or extra privileges), you’re laying the foundation of less work for you, grateful kids, and future independent adults.
In theory, kids can start chores as early as 2 (but that’s usually a ton of extra work for you as they “help you”), by 4-5 they can do things independently with varied results, and by 7, you’ll start seeing them as a huge help around the house.
Home Management Step #2: Foundation
After you get some basic automation out of the way, the next thing you need to understand is that there are three daily tasks that are the foundation of everything else you do in your home.
When you put an emphasis on doing these three things consistently, you start to quickly see a change in both your stress level, the state of your house, and your budget.
Foundation #1: One load of dishes every day.
Dishes never end. You can’t really ever catch up because they’re going to be created as fast as you clean them. Do one load a day, fitting as many smaller things into the dishwasher as possible, and then hand wash the few remaining larger items. (No dishwasher or not sure how to hand wash? You can get hand washing instructions here).
Your goal is to end every night with a clear sink and an empty dishwasher, then just fill as you go the next day.
Foundation #2: One load of laundry a day.
Like dishes, laundry never ends. If you skip just one day, you get behind and it’s hard to catch up. When you do catch up (usually after a sacrificial laundry day), you take a few days off because you deserve a break and then you’re right back where you started.
Like dishes, your goal is to complete one load a day. That means putting the load in, switching it to the dryer, folding it and even (gasp!) putting it away. While that likely seems pretty overwhelming…
In actuality, you’re really only ever washing the clothes your family wore yesterday. For us, that’s 2 adult pants, 2 kids pants, 2 adult tops, two kids shirts, underwear, and a bra. That’s less than a half a load of laundry on its own. Towels and sheets fit in with those easily if you wash them once a week.
Even if you’re really behind, you’ll catch up slowly over time. The only way to get ahead of the laundry, it to stop trying to do a ton of loads at once, and only do one load a day catching up slowly as you go.
Big family? Special situation? Not sure that this will work for you? This will walk you step by step through your specific laundry situation.
Foundation #3 Schedule book (or calendar, or planner depending on where you live).
You’re likely always late and always forgetting appointments. Because all of the things that you need to know are swimming around in your head. You make appointments and don’t write them down anywhere. When you get a new planner, you excitedly spend 4 hours setting it up with stickers and colored pens and then abandon it within a few weeks (more likely days).
Don’t overthink it. Make this easy. Usually, people who struggle with disorganization thrive with paper planners over digital (like a paper planner instead of using a google calendar or your iPhone).
There’s less distractions when you try to use it, and you have a visual cue to check it. Keep your planner open to today’s date, in the most central spot in your home. For most families that’s a corner of the kitchen counter.
Your planner lives there, always. You can take a snapshot of your calendar at the start of the week to have access to your planner when you’re out, and there should be a sticky note pack in your planner so you can write yourself notes to take to work or out and about.
When you get an appointment or set a date, text it to yourself. If you have an iPhone, you can even have Siri do this for you by saving “Siri, text (your name) that you’re meeting Amanda at Central Park this Wednesday at 3 pm)
Every night, glance at your planner and add anything from your texts into it.
To-do list
Keep a running list of things you want to do in your planner. This can be goal-oriented things like cleaning out the kitchen cabinets (or whatever floats your boat) or fun things like taking the kids to the zoo. If it’s a fun local thing, also include a price for the trip if you know it (that makes it easy to keep to your budget as you plan out your week).
As you look at your week, grab one or two things you want to accomplish this week and add it to your planner. Don’t pack in a ton of stuff that you think you’ll find time to do. Choose just one or two. Then when you get those done and you’re still motivated, you may find yourself going back to your master list to get something else.
Set yourself Up to Win.
Overwhelm happens when we can’t win. When you lower your expectations and you give yourself a realistic chance to win, then you’re creating a motivating environment where you get results. If you set the goal and feel like you have no shot of actually doing it, then you create a stressful environment where you’re constantly playing catch up knowing that you’ll likely never succeed. If you want a perfect example of this mentality, look at what happens when people raise their grocery budget instead of lowering it when they want to save money. (Spoiler: higher set grocery budgets mean they spend less)
Home Management Step #3: Meal Planning
The goal here is to avoid complicated meal plans with recipes that you’re not really sure how to make. That’s super overwhelming. When you get overwhelmed, you let the $300 worth of groceries rot in the fridge while you eat Chick-fil-A or order Papa Johns every night. Life is busy and unpredictable. A good beginner meal plan has to work around that. (Side note: Who in the world is excited by cooking something when you’re starving after a long day? Plus Chick-fil-A now has Mac N Cheese… which is hardly playing fair).
15 Minute Meals
Start off by discovering 15-minute meals. These are ridiculously simple meals that save you from fast food or delivery. They can be whipped up in a few minutes, they require no recipe (you can figure out how to cook most of them just by the name!) and they’ll taste similar to your beloved fast food… Except that they’re a lot cheaper, a bit healthier, and you’re getting into the habit of cooking and eating at home.
That lets you transition into a healthier way of eating long term.
15 Minute Meal examples:
-
- Tex Mex Chicken Wraps
- Pizza Bagels
- BLT Pasta Salad
- Burgers
- Sloppy Joes
- Broiled Steaks
- Tacos
You can find more of our 15 minute meals here…
Meal Preparation
Whenever you find the time to work ahead, you’re reducing the amount of stress that comes from trying to prepare something last minute.
Taking a few minutes ahead of time for meal preparation can make dinner stress a thing of the past. Freezer meals are a huge help for lazy days. Having two lasagnas in the freezer, or some dump and freeze meals that can be thawed and directly poured into a slow cooker will make your day a lot smoother! (We use Freezeasy for this so we don’t have to plan these- Freezeasy is cheap and does all of the work for you).
Likewise, setting up lunches the night before, or even for a few days in a row, makes your mornings run smoother and your stress level go down.
Back up meals
Back up meals are shelf (or freezer) stable meals that can sit unused for several months until you need them. A back up meal should be something you love eating that is absolutely brainless to make or reheat. You’ll use back up meals when the menu plan fails and you feel like you need to hit the drive-thru or order pizza.
My favorite back up meals are spaghetti and meatballs and cowboy burgers (cooked and frozen right with the bun! Just microwave to reheat).
Home Management Step #4: Budgeting
Ah, everyone hates the budget, eh? I think we can change that. Almost everyone knows how to set a budget. And they know that you’re supposed to plan how you’ll spend that money for the month based on different categories like “food” or “rent”.
That’s not the problem.
The problem is …
- No one can find the time to actually sit down and set the budget.
- Even when it’s set, no one can actually stick to the budget they set.
Of course, a good home management routine needs to be able to fix that. Because your budget is one of the most important factors in running a smooth home.
Budget Meetings
Set up weekly budget meetings, where you and your partner look at your spending for the past week, assign action items to make progress (like checking for better rates on car insurance, or disputing a credit error) and make a plan for this week.
Limit Your Budget Categories
You can have as many categories as you want, but overspending usually happens in the categories that relate to food and entertainment.
When you limit your tracking to just 5 categories then it makes it easier to track AND to make progress in reducing your spending in each category.
- Food: anything you eat.
- Set Expenses: anything reoccurring that’s the same every month. We also add vehicle fuel and medical payments into this category since they’re rarely something that people choose to overspend in.
- Stockroom: things you need to run your house, including everything from toilet paper to dishwashing liquid.
- Net Worth: anything that increases your net worth like car payments, mortgages, debt payments, investments, retirement, and savings. This is the category where it’s AWESOME to spend more in! 🙂
- Discretionary (or random): includes everything else.
- Haircuts
- Personal spending money
- Vacations
- Trips to the zoo
- Hobbies
Incentivize Everything
We make this work by incentivizing you to save. With a normal budget, everyone blows extra money on food (or Target where at least you can claim it was food) because that’s a “safe” thing to spend on. I mean everyone needs to eat right?
With this, you get to keep 20% of whatever you reduce your spending in for any category (other than net worth). If last month, you spent $1,200 on food to feed your family, and this month you spent $600, then $120 (which is 20%) goes to you, for whatever you want to spend it on. No limits. The other 80% of that savings goes to your Net Worth category, for paying off debt, increasing savings, or investing.
You can do this in every category (except Net Worth) and when you do it in the Set Expenses category, you get to keep 20% of that amount EVERY SINGLE MONTH recurring.
Important note: The person doing the spending needs to be the one that keeps the 20% and decides how to spend it. If one partner isn’t a fan of that, an easy solution is to have them take over reducing the monthly bills (where your incentive is reoccurring) while you take over monthly spending.
Snowball debt
When you’re throwing that extra money at your debt, pay the extra to the smallest balances first and then snowball those extra payments to the larger debts as you go. It’s extremely motivating to watch those debts get knocked out one by one.
Home Management Step #5 Cleaning
Usually this is where people try to start when they think they’re disorganized. Getting organized to them means going around and cleaning up. I’ll explain why that won’t actually work below (short answer, you have to master simple routines before complex routines) but for now, let’s break down the most important aspects of cleaning in your home management routine.
Organization
You can’t organize clutter. I promise you that you have way too much stuff, and most of it, isn’t stuff that you care about.
Decluttering has two major benefits…
- It makes it easier to keep the area clean.
- It helps you make smarter choices of what to buy in the future
As reader Julia explained, “There was a moment where I was in the middle of Target about to buy something and I could see myself decluttering it in a month. I put it back and saved that money for something I actually want.”
Spend 15 minutes a day decluttering. This doesn’t mean straightening up, this means throwing out or selling everything that you won’t actually use in the next year. Organizing what’s left is easy when you reduce the amount of stuff in your house to the things that will actually be used.
Basket and Bins
It’s so tempting to grab baskets and bins as you work through decluttering to set up and organize an area. What happens though, is that usually people are more excited about the basket and bins than the work of decluttering. Hold off on baskets and bins until the entire space is decluttered.
Grab a paper and jot down exactly what you need as you go along (including dimensions and colors) so that when the decluttering is completely done you can celebrate by getting your boxes and bins.
Hint: Things are a lot easier to put away when you have a place to put them. That’s why decluttering must always come first.
Labels
Labels not only help you remember where things are, but they help other people find where to put things back. While labels are awesome, decluttering comes first. If you have a coat closet stuffed full of sports equipment, old toys, coats, winter gear, and home decor cast-offs, it’s not actually going to help you to label spaces for each of those if it’s still overstuffed.
Declutter first, then label.
Cleaning checklist
Most cleaning checklists have way too many things on it. The amount time it would take to detail clean every little part of your home on a super consistent basis would likely be better spent elsewhere.
Every chore in your home is not weighted equally. What chores ACTUALLY need to be done in your home for it to feel comfortable and for you not to freak out when someone visits? Those are the things that should go on the list. Nothing else.
If you need a cleaning checklist- this is the only one I recommend (it’s free).
15 minute pick up
Every day, spend 15 minutes straightening the most used rooms of your house (usually this is the living room, dining room, kitchen, main bathroom, and a bedroom). We’re not scrubbing or cleaning, we’re picking up any trash and clutter, giving it a quick wipe down if needed and restoring it to “normal”.
Chores
Talk to your spouse about anything else that you want to have done routinely in your house.
Maybe you’re the type of person who never washes their sheets or maybe you’re the girl that detail cleans on top of the fridge every month . There’s no wrong answer and no judging.
I strongly suggest that this list has the bare minimum of chores on it that you want done for the next month.
A good basic list would look like this: (assuming you have a Roomba and are doing the decluttering, laundry, dishes, and general pick up above).
- Meal planning
- Clean toilets
- Wipe down surfaces
- Extra load of laundry for sheets and towels.
- Change bed linens. (Unless you’re the girl that never washes her sheets… no judging here!)
Once you have your list made, factor in a day of the week to get that chore done. It has to be able to be done within 15 minutes. If it can’t be, then the chore needs to be split up into multiple days.
Limit Your Time Spent on Home Management
If you add up everything we’ve talked about, that’s one hour a day of scheduled chores to manage your home.
- 15 minute declutter
- 5 minute pick up
- 15 minutes for dishes, laundry, and the schedule book
- 15 minutes for the chore block
Then you have to stop. No matter what. Whatever isn’t done gets left for another day. That’s your incentive for actually doing the work. There has to be an end. Get in there, get it done and then get back to your life.
If we don’t make a hard and fast limit on housekeeping for the day, then we spend our lives procrastinating chores that we don’t want to do (ahem.. scrolling Facebook and Instagram for hours on end) knowing that the things to-do list is endless.
Home Management Tips For Housewives or Stay at Home Moms
Take into consideration your kids routine when you build a home management system. I struggled big time with bedtime routines and having the kids get ready for school, but having their own routine chart helped a lot and making it part of my routine meant that I was calmer during those times and not stressed by the additional things I needed to do.
If you stay home and don’t have children, understand that there’s a false sense of endless time that can lure you into wasting time pointlessly. Figure out what you want to do in the world, get your home management system up and running, and go do all of the things that you’ve wanted to.
Home Management Tips for Working Moms
Two salaries are awesome! But, it puts a ton of extra pressure on you. If possible, consider outsourcing some of the home tasks that you don’t really want to do. I’ve had success hiring local college kids to help me clean for only $15 a hour.
Experience isn’t usually necessary unless you’re super detail-oriented. The best thing about getting someone I trust to help is that they can usually help with childcare, driving etc. as well, instead of just the one thing.
Home Management Tips for Single Moms
I completely realize that there is a lot riding on your shoulders and you have a ton of stress. Don’t give up on this though. You more than anyone need a simple home management system so you can run your household on autopilot.
Everything we teach assumes that you are the only one managing your home. Because we have single mom readers, or readers with deployed spouses or even spouses that refuse to help in the beginning. So don’t think for one second that this won’t work for you. You can absolutely do this.
Why is This Home Management System Different?
We hear this a lot, “This all sounds great, but every time I try to change, I end up right back here. I’ve tried dozens of systems and nothing ever sticks.” I get it it. I really do. I thought the same way. But this is different because it’s tailored to you and your situation. There’s three major reasons why I know this will work for you.
If you’ve read this far, you’re likely somewhat chronically disorganized. Which means that a lot of what I’m saying is resonating with you.
(Important note: You can still be chronically disorganized if you love organizing.)
We Work With Your Personality
Willpower is usually not a thing for us. It’s one thing to get out a fancy new planner and write down “All. Of. The. Things.” It’s another to find the motivation to cook dinner and do the dishes after a long day when all you want to do is watch Bachelor in Paradise in bed. (Awkward. Is that just me?)
We Incentivize Results
This system already has incentives built-in. Instead of your reward coming from procrastinating chores (like aimlessly scrolling Facebook or playing Candy Crush), your reward comes from getting things done quickly, then going on beach trips, reading in the hammock, or watching Bachelor in Paradise on endless rerun.
You have to understand with perfect clarity that there IS NO DONE. Your home will never be finished. It’s reset every day. There will always be more to clean, more to organize, more to get.
You could work every moment for the rest of your life on your house and it would never be “finished”.
You need to set consistent short times to spend on managing your home and then walk away and live your life. Managing your home is not your life. 🙂 It’s the system that you set your home to run on so you can actually have a life. 🙂
We incentivize your budget too… You’re incentivized to save instead of spend because you get to blow money on things you really want instead of halfheartedly spending on things you care less about. You get more of what you actually want this way, spend less, and pay off debt or buff up savings.
We Only Do Things That Matter
We’re realistic about what you’ll actually do. When we put things on to-do lists that we don’t really care about, we skip it anyway. So with this system, we choose to just skip that in the beginning.
If you’re the girl that doesn’t wash her sheets, let’s just go ahead and accept that. A home management system needs to be completely custom to you and your life. What are the things that affect your life? We deal with just that. Not everything.
A Good Home Management System Should Teach You:
The right order to implement new routines. You have to understand simple versus complex skills. It matters (big time!) the order in which you learn these skills.
Skills are broken up into two kinds: simple skills and complex skills.
-
-
- Simple skills don’t rely on other skills to get done. Like laundry. Without training or anything else needing to be done, you can probably figure out how to put your clothes in the washing machine and get them clean and dry without issue.
- Complex skills, like meal planning, require a whole bunch of other skills that you’ll need to have already mastered in order to be successful. Before you can successfully meal plan, you’ll need:
- To know how to cook (at least basics).
- To think about what time you’ll be home that day and what you’ll have time to make.
- Money to spend on food, and how long your food money needs to stretch.
- A fridge that has enough space to store new food.
- Enough time to get groceries before cooking.
- A sink that’s fairly empty (so at least you have a pot and dishes).
-
When you learn the simple skills before you attempt to meal plan, you’re much more likely to have success at these complex skills.
Example of Simple Skills: dishes, laundry, schedule book.
Example of Complex Skills: meal planning, budgeting, and cleaning.
Usually, when people want to change their lives, they start with the complex skills, like budgeting, not understanding that without the simple skills, they don’t have a shot. It’s important to implement and learn these skills in the right order so that by the time you get to the complex skills, you’ve already mastered the simple skills.
Hot Mess to Home Success: A Step By Step Home Management System that Anyone Can Stick To
If you really want to do this but you need help getting it up and running. There’s an easy and inexpensive solution.
Hot Mess to Home Success teaches you how to use bare minimum effort on a consistent basis to completely transform your home (and budget!) It specializes in the toughest cases of chronic disorganization and has a 100% money-back guarantee. It teaches you step-by-step (it basically says “Go do this and then come back to me.” “Did you do it? Awesome. Now go do this.”) so you never feel overwhelmed and it works with your unique personality so you don’t have to stay motivated in order to keep up with it.
You can learn more about Hot Mess to Home Success here…
Grab The Free Simple Home Management Cheat Sheet:
Your life is not neatly compartmentalized. It’s blended together like a crazy chocolate banana shake. When you screw up one area (like the budget) it affects many other areas (like meal planning, relationships and even your health). A home management system shouldn’t just be a guide to do your laundry and dishes and when to get the roof checked. It should encapsulate your entire life.
My goal for this system when I created it for myself was that nothing was left to chance, with the exception of my business (which has its own system), everything to run my home, my life and my family is included.
- Budget set up and maintenance
- Meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking
- Simplified cleaning and general pick up
- Routines like schedule, dishes, and laundry
- Household and clothing shopping
- How to automate (almost) everything in your home
You can learn more about the Hot Mess to Home Success Course…
You can also get instant access to the Simple Home Management Cheat Sheet to give you an easy reference guide of everything you learned today.
Because we’ve barely covered the surface of what can happen in your life when you start implementing this stuff.
“Okay, I’ve Got The Basics Now, What Else Can You Teach Me?”
So much more. We’ve barely covered the surface of making your life ridiculously easy. (Fire up that bubble bath… you’re going to need it). We teach the entire comprehensive system in Hot Mess to Home Success, but here’s a few more things I want you to think about once you get the basics down…
Unschedule: Do less. Way less.
Being busy won’t make you more fulfilled. You’ve been busy your entire life. You have to learn that saying “yes” to everything means saying “no” to things you’d likely want to do more. For the next month, learn the art of saying no to reclaim your life (and bubble baths… glorious bubble baths).
Home Base: Learn to love your home (base).
When we’re busy and we’re always running around everywhere, you’ll find that you’re never in your home. You’re constantly running from place to place, from thing to thing. But your home is meant to be your home base. Your favorite place in the world, the place that envelopes your entire family and fills them with memories.
You have to create this. As you take the month and start saying no to everything, start falling in love with your home all over again (or for the first time) because doing dishes and laundry in the house of your dreams is a lot more fun than doing dishes and laundry in a house that you hate.
Have family date nights, have cooking date nights in, take on a little upgrade project together or just start having a family meal together every day.
15 Minute Blocks: Working harder or longer doesn’t always get you better results, especially if you’re a procrastinator like me. Instead of wiring your brain to think you need a Herculean effort to make progress, set a timer for 15 minutes and do 15 minutes of ANY level of work.
15 minutes of “meh” effort done consistently every day will lead to inspiring results that can’t be compared to Herculean effort every once in a blue moon.
Get Hot Mess to Home Success (and get a free bonus!)
If you know what to do, but think you need the entire system laid out for you step by step, including cleaning, budgeting, meal planning, and well, your whole life…. You’ll want the full comprehensive course Hot Mess to Home Success.
It takes you in super simple baby steps and teaches you exactly what to do every day.
You can learn more about Hot Mess to Home Success here.
“What if I don’t have time for Hot Mess to Home Success?”
I know you don’t have time to take a course. If you did, then we wouldn’t even be here.
The very first thing we do, is I take your life and teach you how to automate a lot of the things that are filling up your time now, so you have time to work on the course, yes… but also just to breathe. You need to rest as much as you need training right now.
Once we have automated a lot of your time, we take some of that time to teach you how to manage your home (and your life) in less than one hour a day (and yes… by that time you’ll have more than one hour a day so you’ll have plenty of time).
Then we’ll bring you through and train you in each of the areas that will make your home run smoothly starting with the easy wins. Motivation is built right into the system, and we incentive everything naturally. So that the only way to get what you want is by doing the things that you need to do.
You can get Hot mess to Home Success here.
“Is Hot Mess to Home Success for working moms? Stay at home moms? Work from home moms?”
It’s for all the moms. 🙂 We teach slightly different systems depending on whether you stay home or work, but it’s customizable to your situation. I’ve done the system in all three situations… the hectic pace of a working mom, the false illusions of extra time as a work at home mom, and the constant distractions of a stay at home mom.
“I want to do this but no one helps me. I’m constantly yelled at for the state of the home, but I’m not the one destroying it! I just can’t keep up with them!”
Here’s the deal. You’re right. And you have every right to feel angry. But being angry won’t fix this. We teach the system in a way that you can do 100% of it yourself with no outside help at all. Because some students are single moms of super young kids and need that. But we also teach you how to get your (super resistant) husband and kids involved as well.
We teach you how to have them take ownership. It takes time for them to jump on board (that’s without a doubt the hardest part of the course) but even if you never bother and just do the system as it’s written, then you’ll still spend less time on your home than you do now. So that’s winning. 🙂
We have you master the basics first, then start teaching them slowly.
The best part?
This isn’t something you have to dedicate the rest of your life to. You were never properly trained to start with! We’re just catching you up and teaching you some insider tricks. Once you get a decent home management system in place, it’s pretty much there for life. (Minor changes for when we finally get Jane Jetson level cleaning robots of course- but you get lifetime access to the course including free updates so we’ve got you covered).
Ready to finally put home management on autopilot?
Join Hot Mess to Home Success here.
P.S. If you’re feeling like no matter what you do you can’t get your house under control (not to mention your budget!) we completely understand. If you are sick of spending all day “catching up”, only to have it completely trashed again in a few days, then you should check out our FREE training “Trashed to Total Home Transformation” which will walk you through how to break that cycle once and for all.
The training will walk you step by step through the three foundational routines that will help you manage all aspects of your home no matter how bad your situation is right now.
Implementing this core foundation allows you to work with your personality (and your specific situation) to create a custom plan to manage your dishes, laundry, schedule book, meal planning, budgeting, and a cleaning routine in less than one hour a day. You read that right, ONE HOUR A DAY.
If you want to take it a step further, we can teach you how to automate a ton of stuff in your home (without paying for it), giving you back HOURS of your life (yes, even your crazy life!). Then once you get the foundation set, we move on to more complex skills like meal planning, budgeting, and cleaning.
This is a proven system that’s been field-tested by thousands of people and teaches you how to manage your life, not just your house. People that have tried everything and could never keep their house clean or stick to a budget.
Like Jenn, who said “I used to struggle with absolutely everything. I married a man with 4 amazing kids and suddenly found myself drowning in dishes, laundry, and cleaning. There was NEVER enough money to cover everything and cooking meals that everyone would eat was impossible.”
“Then my dad got cancer and I also became his caregiver. The house and my stress level went from bad to worse overnight. I got the Hot Mess to Home Success course in desperation sitting in an ER waiting room at 3 am, thinking there was no way it could really help me since my situation was so unique with 4 step kids and being a caregiver for my Dad.”
“I had probably always been a hot mess, but this was a whole new low for me. Fast forward three months into the course and I meal plan regularly and stick to it (that’s never happened before), I use a planner every day, I have no dishes and laundry backed up (!) and I have significantly more time to do the things that matter (like helping my family battle cancer). You don’t even realize how much of a difference this stuff makes until it becomes your lifeline. I can’t imagine going back to how I used to live and I’m glad I never have to. I’m really grateful for that 3 am purchase!”
If you are ready to get started, you can sign up for the FREE one-hour training “Trashed to Total Home Transformation…”
Tell me what you think!