Get yourself organized

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​Reader, planning your week ahead makes your life easier.

But what to plan and where to start?
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Here are a few options to think about:

Planning the meals

I’m a fan of meal prepping, but more in the meaning of ingredient prepping. I find it too restrictive to plan whole meals for we change our minds with dinners throughout the week. And to be a realist we cook many times what comes into mind, but we guide our decisions by stocking the fridge and pantry with healthy and wholesome options.

But things like boiling eggs or making lingonberry semolina porridge for the fridge. Roasting almonds or cashews for easy snacks makes life easier. As well as making bigger batches of simple oven bakes like waffles, pancakes or flatbread and freezing them all or half of them will make everyday life simpler.

When you feel overwhelmed, make a homemaking plan to make a structure, and create better habits and routines to get back on track. Once your daily life feels smooth it means you have already learned your new schedule and you can ditch your paper plan and live with the learned plan in your head.

Better cleaning plan

Another repetitive task in homemaking is cleaning.

​Plan weekly some main focus areas to clean to move the needle. Tidying up small things every day, like wiping surfaces, keeping the sink empty, or making a load of laundry every few days, will prevent the overwhelm.

​I used to make cleaning lists for restaurants and cafés I worked for. The biggest effect was always with the micro-cleaning tasks that repeatedly got done. It takes less time to clean a bit repeatedly - clean the sink when brushing teeth, wash the dishes when preparing food - than allocate a separate time for it, that time just will never come...

If you want to keep yourself accountable (or just remember what you did clean in January) an annual cleaning checklist might be your friend to help with the seasonal changes in the wardrobe and cleaning tasks.

Truth about checklists

Use lists and guides as your helper and not your boss. It is easy to get overwhelmed by the list that is telling you what you should have done already and stressed by all the uncrossed boxes.

The best way is to think of your cleaning list as a "Did I do it?-list" to take off the pressure.

As we talked already, cleaning is about repetition.

But the truth is - you do not need to get EVERYTHING done EVERY SINGLE WEEK or day.

You just need to know what has been done to focus next week or the next time on those things that have received less attention.

Simple, repetitive actions bring you forward.

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Every day makes a difference. ♡

Sonja

P.S. Check out my Natural deep cleaning guide below if you are like me and you want to have the whole house on one list, as well as every single room on its own list too!

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Blue Tea Tile

​blueteatile.com​

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$14.99 Natural Deep Cleaning Guidebook & Deep Cleaning Checklists Clean your home and be organized using the Natural Deep Cleaning checklists and natural products. This 20-pager... Read more Get it now!

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