How To Help Your Family Get More Organised

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No matter how big or small your family is, life can get pretty busy. When you’re trying to keep everyone’s schedules in order and make sure everyone is fed and clean, it’s easy for things to get a little crazy. That’s why it’s important to know how to keep your family organised. 

When you have work, chores, sports practices and games for the kids, homework, appointments, and a million other things, it might seem impossible to keep your life in order. There are a lot of tips and tricks for being organised that can help you keep your home and family organised; read on to find out what some of them are. 

Photo by Tatiana Syrikova

Schedule Family Meetings 

Regular meetings are essential to the smooth operation of any household (or business, for that matter). Keep everyone in the family in the loop by discussing impending plans, reviewing timetables, and ensuring everyone is up-to-date on their chores. Find a time that works for everyone in your household, whether it’s right after breakfast, a few nights a week, twice a month, or once a month, and use that time to plan out the week and the month ahead. 

Remember, although you might want everyone to just get organised, the family meeting is the ideal time for anyone with an issue to speak up. So make sure you leave time for this, rather than just gathering everyone together to tell them what they have to do next. Everything will run much more smoothly if each family member knows they can speak up when they need to. It might mean that plans have to change, but knowing in advance and being able to help with any issues is preferable to being kept in the dark. 

Have A Family Calendar

If you really want to get organised, one of the simplest yet most effective ways to do so is to have a calendar for everyone to use. This calendar will be full of the various appointments and after school clubs people are signed up for, but you can also include days out and other fun events. Some people like to use a digital calendar for this that everyone can log into and check, and this can certainly work, but if you want to stay as organised as possible, it’s actually often better to have a physical calendar to work from. 

When you have a physical calendar, you can hang it in a place where everyone is going to be able to see it easily. You can also colour code each individual, so they’ll immediately know where they are meant to be and when. Not only is a physical calendar better, especially when you have younger children who won’t be able to use a digital version, but personalised calendars make great gifts, so you can buy one for your family each Christmas and use it throughout the year to great effect. 

Declutter The Toys

Something that can make a house appear much more chaotic than it needs to be is the amount of toys and games around. Children will generally have a lot of ‘things’, and sometimes those things get left out even after they have finished playing with them. If you – or rather, they (but perhaps with your help) – take the time to tidy those toys away, your home will feel much calmer and feel more organised. 

If your kids are old enough, ask them to go through their toys and make piles of the ones they always play with, the ones they sometimes play with, and the ones they never play with. Explain why it’s good to donate things they no longer want or need to others who can make use of them, and not only will you be clearing your home, but you’ll be teaching your children an important life lesson as well. 

As for the toys you intend to keep, make sure there is enough storage and that that storage is at a child’s height. In this way, your kids will be able to tidy up after themselves when they are finished playing; this is a habit they’ll need to learn, so be patient, especially if they’ve never had to do it before. 

Make A Bathroom Schedule 

This might not work for every family, and you might not even need to worry about it if you have a lot of bathrooms. But if you have a big family and not much room in the bathroom, you might want to use a shower schedule to keep things running smoothly.

Setting up a bathroom schedule for your kids can help them learn how to manage their time and take care of themselves. If everyone in the family knows when it’s their turn to take a shower based on when they have to leave for school or go to bed, it will help keep everyone organised and hopefully cut down on bathroom fights.

You don’t have to be too strict about the time or track it to the minute. Just make sure that when you talk about what your kids have going on that week, you talk about what time each child should be ready by and help them make a schedule for their shower time.

Meal Plan

What comes to mind when you think about making a meal plan? Because there are so many different ideas, it might be hard to figure out what a meal plan is. It’s not about making a menu that will take you hours each day to prepare unless you want to and have the time to do that. It’s more about looking at what you have planned and deciding what you will make for you and your family to eat each day. 

You might be sceptical and think this won’t work for you, but planning meals does work, and having one set up for your family makes life so much easier. Firstly, if you – and everyone else – knows what’s for dinner, you won’t have to spend any time trying to decide on the night. Plus, you can ensure there are quick and easy meals (perhaps reheated frozen batch meals) on nights when everyone is busy, and on nights when everyone is home, you can prepare something more in-depth. 

Meal planning also helps you with your supermarket shopping as you’re less likely to forget something, plus you’ll save money by only buying what you really need.