As a parent, you may feel like your days are already packed and organization is just one more thing that you don’t have time for. However, once you are better organized, you will actually save a great deal of time. Being disorganized means you spend a lot of time backtracking, looking for things and fixing errors that wouldn’t have happened if things were running more smoothly in the first place. You don’t have to be a super-mom or super-dad to become an organized parent, but you will feel like one once you’ve gotten the different areas of your life below in order.
Schedule
Between work, family and other obligations, you may feel as though you are on the run from the time you get up in the morning until your head hits the pillow at the end of the day. If you attempt to do some scheduling, you might actually find that there are small pockets of free time you can claim for yourself. One of the best places to start is to look at what you do each day and each week and figure out which things are non-negotiable and which ones can be dropped. Is there a volunteer gig that feels more like an obligation? Are there chores that you could probably ignore, delegate to your family or hire someone else to do? Once you’ve managed to drop some unnecessary tasks, rearrange your schedule to give yourself some breathing room.
Finances
You should try to streamline your finances as much as possible. This means setting up automatic payments where you can. Consider getting an app that will track your spending for you to make budgeting almost painless. You should also review your debt and your savings plans. You might want to consider taking a step such as refinancing your student loans with a private lender. This can leave you with just one lower monthly payment to make and save on costly interest charges. You should also check your retirement withholding and consider whether you want to increase your contributions.
Home
You will probably need to get the whole family to participate in this, although what your children are able to do will vary a lot depending on their age. The main object is to try to find a place for everything that you use regularly and ensure they actually end up there. This will prevent your own last-minute scramble for car keys as well as your children’s frantic searches for shoes, clothes or book bags before school in the morning. The trick here is to make it easy to put things away. This can mean buying storage bins that things get tossed into at the front door or as people go into rooms. Your other big task is decluttering. This can be overwhelming if tackled all at once, so try to do it in short blocks of ten or fifteen minutes and be sure to keep it from piling up again. It takes just a minute to sort and discard junk mail, for example, so make it a habit to do this daily instead of throwing it all into a pile that becomes a big task later.
