Simple Home Management Skills that will Make your Life Better

Managing a household and a family is no joke. Sometimes, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all of the chores – the cooking, the cleaning, the dishes…the list goes on. Not to mention actually working yourself and during these present times, home/virtual schooling. However, with the help of a few handy home management skills, you can make the process of managing as well as living in your home, simpler, easier and better.

Simple Home Management Skills that will Make your Life Better

With these 10 tips, you can upgrade your home life and make it less chaotic.

1. Organization

The first thing that jumps to mind when we hear home management, is definitely organizing everything in your home so that things are in their correct places. A cluttered home means a cluttered life.

Of course, if you have kids in the house, the tasks increase tenfold. But, by being strict with your family members, and decluttering the house every once in a while, you can manage to keep your home organized and tidy. You can either clean one room at a time, or you can do a massive weekend decluttering.

2. Meal Planning

“What’s for dinner?” The answer to this question should be ready in your mind when you wake up in

the morning. You cannot just grab whatever you can from the refrigerator and throw them together in a pot. Every meal of the day should be planned according to the likes and needs of the family members, to ensure that they get their nutrition while savoring a dish. Variety is the spice of life so a varied diet each day is important to satisfy those hunger pangs.

Sometimes I’m really great at meal planning while other times, I grab whatever is in the fridge/freezer and make something up. With the pandemic, we were lucky enough to stock up on groceries. So we have quite a bit of stock to choose from. Lately, I’ve been putting everything in my Instant Pot, which also doubles as an AirFryer, so that makes dinnertime easy.

3. Laundry

No one really likes doing laundry, but the more you procrastinate, the more dirty clothes pile up until you are out of clothes. What a nightmare! Do not let this happen to you. Form a new habit, a habit of doing a load of laundry every day. Clothes need to be sorted into different washing categories, and then you can just shove them in the machine. However, you do have to have space cleared out separately for dirty laundry and fresh laundry.

We have a cleaning crew that comes 1-2 times a week, and they take care of laundry on those days. However, with 4 people in our home, and working out daily and swimming quite often, we still have a bit of laundry that piles up. I find it easiest to get a load going in the morning and then switch halfway through the day. I’m not the best at hanging or putting away, but everyone knows where the clean laundry is. We also installed a washer/dryer in Steve’s closet, so he does his own laundry throughout the week right in his closet, because he always wears the same things. Even with a closet full, he claims to never have clothes!

4. Finances

Taking care of the budget and finances is one of the most important skills of home management. You

need to fix a budget and chalk out how you will spend your money to pay the bills, to buy essentials such as food and clothing, recreation, and more.

I will admit, we don’t have much of a budget, but we do look at finances to figure out when we can take a vacation, or when we can book flights to travel to see family. For our businesses, finances and budgets are a bigger deal.

5. Baskets

Bins and baskets are a neat little way of storing supplies in every room. You can store essential supplies

in these baskets and put labels on them so that everyone in the family knows where the dirty laundry goes and where the toiletries are.

This isn’t something we utilize too much in our home aside from the containers the girls have for their toys. We do use these for our short term rental properties and it seems to work quite well and is a nice decorative touch.

6. You’ve Got Mail

Important mail like bills and payments need to be dealt with as soon as they arrive, while some others can be stored away for later. Figure out a system that works for you about how you handle mail when it arrives, how you sort it out, and how you separate the important ones from the less urgent ones.

I personally pick out a day or two during the month, one at the beginning and one in the middle, to do all of the bills that need paid. I typically do online payments, so this is a simple task for me to knock out quickly.

7. Labels

Labels are quite a nifty way to give silent directions to your family members about what goes where. If you have kids in the house, then this is especially helpful for them to always remember where to put their toys and where to put their homework. Implementing the label system in your organizational skills will only lead to smoother operations.

We have friends who use labels for everything, and quite honestly, it was overwhelming for me and makes me shy away from them. However, it would be much easier now that both girls can read, to keep things better organized and picked up.

8. Garden and Yard

You need to assign who gets to do this part of the job. Garden work can be pushed further down the list

of priorities. But it’s important to have your yard just as neat and tidy as your house because it makes sense to have a proper usable space outside of the house.

In our home, we do have a landscaper. But my husband LOVES to cut the grass and do yard work. He typically takes care of the landscaping on Saturday or Sunday. We do share the load with ensuring all the rubber mulch (best decision ever) is put back into the border when we are out with the kids or the dogs.

9. To Do Lists and Schedules

It’s essential for you to make to-do lists, checklists, and schedules for yourself in order to get more work done in an efficient manner. With routines, you set up goals for yourself. Which makes it easier for you to get the chores done.

For me, I like to set a weekly plan, instead of a daily list. As it helps me to be flexible with my days while being able to check a few more things off on days that are lighter. Or days where my girls don’t need me as much for virtual school.

10. Grocery Shopping

Once again, you need to assign who buys the groceries in day-to-day life. And your work will be smoothed out for you if you make it a habit to make a list of things you need to shop for. I use apps that deliver the groceries to my front door, without me having to be home.

My favorite is Instacart, but there are several grocers now who have their own app or website where you click the items you want to buy. Then a worker ‘shops’ them and when you or they are ready, you pick them up curbside or in the store. This saves you time and you can add things to your ‘cart’ as you run out and then checkout when you are ready instead of having to remember or write on 10 different paper lists to get everything. Only to end up forgetting things as well, like I do.

With these simple but efficient home management skills, you will find more work getting done in your house in an organized manner, without feeling stressed out all the time.