Are you new to homemaking or have gotten into a funk? Do you feel overwhelmed? Do the hours slip away, while you don’t feel like you’re making any meaningful progress and the simpler life you are supposed to live is anything but simple? Fear not, there’s hope for you still with these great homemaking tips.
Have you ever felt like there was so much to do and you had no clue where to begin?
I’ve been there, more than I care to admit. When I was faced with finally being a homemaker, my big dream coming true, I suddenly felt almost paralysed. I had more plans, more work than there were hours in the day. Add to that a body that’s not always up to the job and I felt lost in so many ways.
I’m working on getting found again and you can too. It’s not a quick fix. I can’t give you one hack that will solve all your issues and make the overwhelm go away but I can offer you a series of actions that will guide you in the right direction. These work for pretty much any field you’re overwhelmed in but I’m focusing on homemaking in this post.
Homemaking tip #1) Deal with the Overwhelm
If you are overwhelmed, you first need to adress that feeling. We dealt with this from a Christian perspective in this podcast episode.
What is a Homemaker?
The second step to getting out of the overwhelm and begin living a joyful life is to take stock. What does a homemaker do? Or more accurately, what do you need and want to do as a homemaker?
I believe, the primary focus of a Christian homemaker is her home and family.
The biggest asset of a homemaker is usually her time. As such, she needs to guard it.
A homemaker can step in at a time and do things when others are at work. Some people will take advantage of that, it’s not like you have anything to do all day at home, right?!
You do have a lot to do and what I discovered is that – surprise, surprise – homemaking is a full-time occupation. You already knew that. I’m probably the only one who thought I’d have more hours in the day once I was staying at home.
Make a list
Now, it’s time to make a list. It’s okay to make it really long. In fact, I encourage you to jot down everything you can think of, from daily chores to even the smallest of tasks that you do infrequently. The more you can jot down now, the easier it will be for you in your next assignment.
Don’t worry about grouping things right now and writing them down in any kind of order. Just jot down all the homemaking tasks that come to mind. However, do keep the list to recurring tasks. You probably have one-off things in your head that’s driving you cuckoo, jot those down on a separate list.
What does a Homemaker do?
Here are some that I have on my list, please add more in the comments:
- Meal planning
- Grocery shopping
- Running errands
- Cooking from scratch
- Baking
- Preserving food
- Dishes, there are always dishes to be cleaned
- Cleaning: dusting, vacuuming, mopping, kitchen, bathroom, windows
- Tidying, making the house a home
- Decluttering
- Making the beds
- Shop sales when something is needed and saving money by preventing buyer’s remorse
- Do the laundry
- Mending clothes
- Clothes shopping for herself and children especially
- Keep the budget, find ways to make the family income stretch
- Pay bills
- Tend to children
- Be a chauffeur
- Planning events and holidays
- Being in charge of appointments
- Caring for the sick
- Planning hospitality
- Taking care of projects, such as creating a toy library
- Growing a garden, even if it’s only in the windowsills
- Work on some kind of income generation
Homemaking tip #2) Give Yourself a Three Month Trial as a Homemaker
For the first couple of weeks, try to approach your homemaking from the sense that you are learning how to do a new job – without a supervisor close by to guide you. Experiment with when you do things and how you do them.
If you have been a homemaker for a while and are in a funk, imagine being hired for the same position as you currently have but in a different firm. They all have their quirks and while you are good at your job, you have to look at everything again and relearn the tasks. Some things you’ll get down quickly, others will take longer.
If this is a job you will be paid for, you aren’t expected to do it all perfectly from the get-go. You will be introduced to the core tasks, and as the days and weeks progressed, you will get more and more responsibility and you will find your stride. By the time your three-month trial is up, it’s clear if you are suited for the job or not.
There’s a reason it’s a three-month and not a three-day or even three-week trial period. So give yourself a trial period.
Homemaking tip #3) Choose One Area
Look at the long list of homemaker jobs you made before. You made one, right?! If not, copy mine and add the things that are specific to your life, like walking the dogs or washing the car.
Now try to order the list into areas or categories. It could look something like this:
Kitchen
- Meal planning
- Cooking from scratch
- Baking
- Preserving food
- Dishes, there are always dishes to be cleaned
Cleaning
- Do the laundry
- Cleaning: dusting, vacuuming, mopping, kitchen, bathroom, windows
- Tidying, making the house a home
- Decluttering
Financial
- Keep the budget, find ways to make the family income stretch
- Pay bills
- Work on some kind of income generation
Inside the Home
- Mending clothes
- Making the beds
- Tend to children
- Planning events and holidays
- Caring for the sick
- Planning hospitality
- Taking care of projects, such as creating a toy library
- Growing a garden, even if it’s only in the windowsills
Outside the Home
- Grocery shopping
- Running errands
- Shop sales when something is needed and preventing buyer’s remorse
- Clothes shopping for herself and children especially
- Be a chauffeur
- Being in charge of appointments
I had five overall categories: kitchen, cleaning, financial, inside the home, outside the home. Yours could look very different and you might group things differently. The important thing is to group everything on your list into a broader category.
From the profound knowledge that you cannot and should not try to go from 0 to 100 in a day, choose one area to focus on first. Ironically, I chose outside the home.
Figure out how many areas you have and divide them by 12 weeks. That’s the number of weeks in your three-month trial. I have five areas, so I decided to focus on each area for two weeks before adding a new area and then I reserved the final two weeks to see how it all functioned together and what tweaks need to be done.
Homemaking tip #4) Establish a Rythm
Now, with only that one area of focus, experiment with creating a rhythm to your day, week and month.
My first week’s focus was outside the home. I needed to tackle the grocery shopping. We used to do it all on one day and mostly in one store.
Now, we wanted to partake in a weekly food sharing event and had to do our groceries after that event. That meant I threw together some meals the first couple of days while waiting for the food sharing event on Wednesday and my planned grocery trip on Thursday.
I wouldn’t be able to make a meal plan or a grocery list before I knew what food I would come home with from the event.
Make a plan for each item in the category. When will you do it (remember this can be changed at any time) and how will you do it?
Homemaking tip #5) Evaluate your Work as a Homemaker
Keep a calendar so you can look back over your weeks. At the end of every week, sit down and evaluate what worked and what didn’t. Don’t consider something a failure. It’s all on trial and if it’s not optimal, you simply change it.
My biggest mistake as a new homemaker was trying to go from 0 to 100. I wanted to do ALL THE THINGS from the beginning. All the things I used to do before I had a child were back on my to-do list.
Making pasta, baking sourdough bread, spinning yarn at my spinning wheel, reading a couple of books per week as well as taking my blog and the podcast to a whole new level. All doable now and I had better do them! All! In the first week!
That did not work out so great. With every routine up in the air and all sense of rhythm gone from my days and weeks, I struggled to even get the things I used to do so well done.
Homemaking tip #6) Make your Tasks Visual
These next 12 weeks might be rough. They will become easier as you get more areas incorporated into your rhythm but prepare for messy meals and maybe even a messy home. It would be a great idea to share your approach with your husband and any older children. Let them know what area you are focussing on and when the others will be added.
Make a list for them to reference. There’s no need to argue over the dust bunny in the corner when cleaning is your focus from next week.
I’ve made a handy schedule for you to print out and fill in. When you first print one (or ten, you’ll probably need them as you change things up), only fill in your first focus area jobs. Then add the next tasks when you get to your next focus area. You may be on your fourth schedule already and that’s perfectly fine.
Once you’ve worked through all your focus areas, give yourself a couple of weeks to trial the full schedule. Tweak it as necessary and remember you will hardly ever have ‘a perfect week’ where you get everything done.
Homemaking tip #7) Give Yourself Grace
Through the entire three-month trial you will need to embrace grace, probably daily and if you are like me there will be days where you’ll need it many times a day. To learn more about how you can ‘give yourself grace’ in a Christian sense, then listen to this podcast episode about cheap versus expensive grace.
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