Tips to Organize and Automate life for a busy family

Let’s be upfront about something: if you dig in certain closets in our house, they will not be pristine; our kids’ plateware cabinet often looks like a wild jackrabbit was trapped inside it looking to escape; and our garage can sometimes be confused for a storage shed/workshop/pool toys dumping ground.

We are not perfect..

This does, however, make the point of this post in some capacity: without systems of organization, our busy family’s home, logistics, finances, childcare, and everything else can become very chaotic. It may be constantly trying to beat back the ocean, but we have found some patterns, tools, and habits to help us.Ultimately, this helps us make less mistakes, not forget where we are supposed to be, reduces stress, and helps us be more impactful. 

Let’s break it down into a few of the bigger categories and hit on some of what we do:

Personal Finance:

Lots of digital ink has been spilled on this topic all over the internet, but we’ll focus on what works for us practically in terms of tools and practices.

First, it’s been said over and over again, but the most important thing, that very few people do regularly, is make a monthly budget and track it! Starting there, if nothing else, forces you into better habits just via awareness, and it builds better understanding to make decisions in the moment. This sounds so basic, I know, but it was something we talked about for years and years and never did, and once we made the leap, it changed our financial trajectory forever. 

To help with a budget and tracking, we’ve used a personal financial aggregator for a long time. While it’s not perfect, and not every company is integrated with them, overall it’s good for setting budgets, tracking, and seeing trends. While you can technically use it on its own, we’ve found that a simple Excel model coupled with it that lets us better analyze how we did. Even if one parent does the overall budgeting and management, both need to follow along and at least be checking in on the numbers once in a while as well as doing a monthly quick review on the prior month and what’s coming next month. It’s worth taking fifteen minutes a month for this!

Childcare:

Second, we both work outside the home, and thus figuring out good childcare in some capacity has always been important for us. For a few years our youngest two were in day care, but we’ve shifted toward using part time nannies for the last five years. This also allowed us more bang for our buck than daycare, since one person can obviously watch four kids, and they can do it in our house rather than some other location. So essentially, we have always had someone hired to greet the kids when they get home off the bus, help them make lunches, get chores/homework done, and clean up the house. When done right, it helps amazingly with parent sanity, as coming home to all of those things completed where you can just be with your kids, rather than launch into chaos and task mode, is a game changer. Some nannies we have specifically used for meal preparation as well, depending on skill sets.

If you hire a nanny, a few pointers we have learned:
1. Higher wages matter, but only to a point. If you try to hire better quality talent by just paying more, you’ll likely just end up paying more without the incremental quality. Too far below the market, and you’ll likely not get the quality of childcare you need. Figure out the market and pay at or slightly above there, if you can.

2. Use a vetted service like care.com or sittercity.com (where we’ve had good luck over the years). Set up a good interview process, and be clear on what you are looking for

3. Remember, most people offering childcare services are doing it temporarily, not as a career, so turnover is inevitable. One of your main goals should be to minimize this through careful screening questions. 

4. Make sure to stay above board and avoid the IRS knocking on your door when it’s tax time. We’ve used a payroll service for years, and it’s been great. Simple to use, automatically takes out taxes and pays them, and provides 1099 filings and reporting at tax time.

5. Make chores part of the daily routine, and make sure your childcare provider sticks to it!

Household Management:

This is a broad category, but ultimately the idea is to keep your busy home efficient and organized. The biggest one we’d recommend: automate and outsource as much as your budget allows! The obvious one that we use constantly is keeping our Prime-enabled amazon.com app handy and ordering things as we think of them, rather than run to the store. Coupled with groceries it’s a game-changer for us in terms of time saved, buying mostly what we need rather than adding on things, having what we need on hand, and honestly just through saving brain space (less things to juggle in our heads and remember!)

Subscriptions are another obvious way we keep things on track. A loves candles, and so we have a subscription with Amber Vale Candles to make sure we have good scented candles on hand every month. We used an organic chicken subscription with Good Life Proteins that we love and explore further in our meal post here. Athletic Greens are cliche these days, but we use subscriptions for those and other supplements that we use daily. Home filter & maintenance services. We use a company called PreFix, who comes by several times a year for seasonal maintenance (filter changes, cleaning out ducts, etc) so that we don’t have to think about it and also don’t forget. Bottom line: find the stuff you use regularly, and get it on a subscription if you can. You’ll often save some coin too, as a bonus.

Get a maid service.

I know this is very budget-dependent, but honestly, even once-a-month can really help. The kids will mess it up within twenty four hours, of course, but for that first day when it’s clean, you’ll be on cloud nine.

Once your kids have cell phones (which we’ll dive into our approach in a separate post) we also have found an app called Life360 to be very useful in terms of cutting down on the “where are you?” “when are you coming?” “where is mom?” questions. It technically does a lot of tracking functions that other free services can do, but does it much better, and is worth the small investment for our family.

Lastly, we highly recommend, especially as your kids get older, setting up google calendars (or whatever online calendar you prefer) for each person. It really helps with organization and sharing, especially with childcare. For example, we have calendars for each of the kids, where our nanny can see where they need to be (soccer practice, NJHS, etc) so she knows how to handle pick up/drop off. That way we can manage our own personal and work calendars separately and control the access. It also helps with the kids, when they are ready, understanding their own schedules, what the family is up to, etc.

There’s obviously more categories we can go down here, but the bottom line is that staying organized with easy tools, habits, and systems helps out everyone, not just the parents’ sanity. Everyone’s budget and circumstances will differ, but even the tools above that cost some money we highly recommend in terms of keeping life on point and maximizing brain space!