Here are the elements of my home managers notebook and why they are important for me:
1. Motivated Moms Planner- this is basically a cleaning schedule you can download from her website for $8. She breaks it down week-by-week, day-by-day giving you just a few tasks to do per day. Some are daily chores like make the bed, feed the pets, or load the dishwasher. Others are tasks that she assigns for certain days that need to be done weekly, monthly or even just once a year. To give you an example of what a typical day looks like, today I am supposed to:
Change dishcloth/towel
Change hand towels in bathrooms
Sweep Porch
Change sheets in children's rooms
Go through coupon, dispose of expired ones
Do a quick tidy/put away in each room of the house
Spend time on a craft or hobby
I like this plan because my to-do list for any given day is manageable, I can check the items off as I do them, and if I stick to the plan I will also get all those tasks that I forget about like cleaning the baseboards & light fixtures.
Go to Motivated Moms to download your planner.
2. Meal Planner- I found this meal planner from the Project Girl. I printed it on the back of all my cleaning schedule pages so that when my book is laying flat, I can see my meals and my to-do list for that week. The other great thing about this particular one is that it also has a grocery list on it that is organized by section of the store. When I am planning my meals, I write down the ingredients too and then take the whole thing to the store. I can't tell you how much time and money this has saved me.
3. Calendar- I went ahead and put my personal calendar in the front of my notebook, that way my whole life is scheduled in one place. I just makes life simpler for me. I will say that I tried to be clever this year and buy a spiral bound monthly planner, but when I took it to the Fedex store to be bound with my notebook they couldn't do it. Because I had started using the calendar already I let them talk me into scanning in all the pages and printing them out. It was an extra expense but at least it all there (when I left the store I realized that I could have just trimmed off the holes that were already there and had it bound with the rest).
4. Extras- The only other things that I keep in my notebook are an Emergency Contact page for babysitters, and a spreadsheet I made of our christmas card list, so I can have all those addresses on hand. But this is where you can get creative and find other forms that work from you. The Project Girl, Simple Mom, and Organize Your Way all have countless forms that would work great in organizing your life. Again, the idea of having a home manger notebook is to keep all the important things in one place.
5. Make It Pretty!- I won't lie, this may be the most important one for me. All of these things are printables and if I had just printed them out on plain white paper and stuck it in a 3 ring binder I would have been unmotivated to use it. Print it out on pretty paper, use a coordinating piece of cardstock for your cover and take it to the Fedex store and have it spiral bound... whatever it takes to make you love it will also help motivate you to use it.
Finally, We are going to do our first blog giveaway and give away one Home Managers Notebook to a lucky reader. For your chance to win leave a comment on the blog about how this system will help you. For additional chances to win, mention the giveaway on facebook or twitter then leave a separate comment saying you have done so. We will randomly select the winner. Deadline to enter is Friday, April 8, 2011 at 10pm central standard time. Good Luck!
