Understanding Home Management
Your home is an organization. And a home can be a single family house, an apartment, condo, or caravan. Anyplace where you return to on a regular basis and pay some form of taxes and utilities. People and animals coming in, dwelling, leaving and repeating. With that, there is food coming in, being prepared, cleaned up and repeating. There are multiple departments within the home and they depend on one another: people, food, organizing, cleaning, paper, scheduling. It is all in constant motion and in constant need of attention. Home management streamlines what needs to be done and, best of all, minimizes your mental exhaustion!
Home management that is going smoothly is not noticed. When home management is non-existent, or is not working well, that is when it stands out with either piles or missing items. Piles of laundry, dishes, paper, recyclables, random assorted who-even-knows-what-is-in-there unnamable piles. And the missing items- where is the bill that is over due?! The book that I need to return? That birthday card? Any clean socks?! Didn’t we have a turtle at one point?
Think back to the generations that came before us and the structures that were in place to keep a home operating smoothly. Now think about our lives today, now, and how different our time and resources are. Home management, for the most part, is no longer a designated duty to one member of the house, but it is still a needed service to ensure smooth home operations.
In an ideal world, home management would be learned and implemented as a household is being set up. But, this is real life and now you are seeing all the piles as you are reading this and remembering you can’t find the left soccer cleat that your kid needs like yesterday- what now?!
First, appreciate that your home is an Organization that needs systems; shift your mindset. Second, see what is working well in your home. If you have a well oiled machine in terms of always getting the trash barrels out on trash day, celebrate that! Building off of wins, no matter how small, is what gets you to the next win. Lastly, start making note of what areas could use some help. Not in a catastrophe sense of ‘Aghh, there are always dirty dishes in the sink!!’. But in a ‘the dish system could use a different approach, I’ll make note of that’.
Now, stay tuned for the next article on home management. Or write to me with your own home management challenge. There are always solutions.
Originally published in Simply Saratoga Home & Garden Summer 2022
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