Running a home can be hard work. And, if you’re like most people, you don’t have the time to dedicate to home management that it deserves.

But there are many things you can do to make your home more manageable and keep up with all of your tasks!

The following tips will help you take control of your home management skills, whether that means developing them or simply improving what you already know how to do.

Need more ideas? Check out: How to Organize Your Home: A Coprehensive Checklist or How to Organize Drawers: Organization Tips for Every Room

Tips for Home Management

Managing a home is difficult for several reasons. First, your home is supposed to be the place you come to relax. After a long day, most of us just want to sit back, put our feet up, and enjoy a good book or our favorite TV show.

And, while relaxing is important, sometimes that means we forgo some of the important details. After a busy day of errands, work, and overall chaos, we don’t really want to spend our evenings or weekends doing even more work, do we?

So those home projects are left unfinished and the disorganization in our home is left unchanged.

But don’t worry! Home organization is not as hard as it sounds!

Even if you have no previous knowledge of home management, by using checklists, routines, and schedules, you can easily get your home under control and effectively manage it in the future.

And trust me when I say that when your home life is taken care of, the rest of your life will be much easier. Another way to maintain this is having the best home warranty plan to help you cover the cost of repair of major systems of your home.

Here are 5 tips to help your home management process go smoothly.

1. Checklists for Room Organization

A big part of successful home management is keeping your home organized and clean.

I don’t mean having a spotless home, but by using and implementing cleaning checklists, you can make sure a room is picked up regularly and cleaned often.

For example, I have a home management checklist that includes weekly tasks for each room in my home. And once the task is done, I make sure to check it off! That way I know what needs to be cleaned and when – which makes home organization much easier.

You can search for cleaning checklists online or on Pinterest, or you can make your own! When you have a checklist to follow, maintenance becomes easier and you’ll find there’s a lot less mess in your home.

What to Look for in a Cleaning Checklist

Whether you’re downloading and printing a cleaning checklist you found online or you’re making your own, there are a few things that make up a good cleaning checklist.

A good cleaning checklist should be made up of lists that include daily, weekly, and monthly tasks for each room in home.

The main purpose of using a checklist like this is to keep your house clean while saving time. So the tasks on the list should be easy to do and not take too long so you can stay consistent with your cleaning schedule.

For example, if a task includes completely cleaning the entire house from top to bottom every other week, it might seem like a lot of work at once and it would be a difficult routine to maintain.

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Break Things Down

Break the tasks down and decide what needs to be done regularly, and what only needs to be cleaned every so often.

Picking up the floor is something that should be done each night (especially if you have children). No one wants to step on a Lego in the middle of the night!

But vacuuming probably only needs to be done once a week! And deep cleaning baseboards or fans can be done once a month (or more or less often depending on how much dust accumulates in your home).

You can also have things on the checklist like how often to do laundry, how often you have any services for maintenance or repairs… anything that helps you with home management.

Create a checklist and system that you can maintain and that consists of small, easily achievable tasks.

2. Budgeting

Keeping your finances organized is just as important (actually probably more important) as anything else on this list!

Budgeting helps you keep control over your finances by giving you a sense of what money is coming in and going out, as well as creating monthly goals for yourself.

Make sure to track all your spending throughout the month so that you don’t overspend on things like groceries or home goods so you have enough for unchanging costs like rent.

Budgeting can take some time at first, but once it becomes a habit, it will be a total lifesaver for you in the long run.

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How to Start Budgeting

If you’ve never made a budget before, or have no practical knowledge of them, it can be overwhelming to know where to start.

To make a budget, just follow these simple steps:

• List all of your monthly bills, including home goods like groceries and cleaning, utilities (i.e., water bill), credit cards with monthly payments, etc.
• Then list how much money you make in a month. (If you don’t know any of these numbers off the top of your head, look at pay stubs, receipts, cost, and bills. You want to make sure you’re getting your budget as accurate as possible.)
• Allot a certain amount of money to each of the different areas that you need to spend (bills, groceries, rent, car payments, etc.).

Then if you have an amount leftover, you’ll know how much you can save, and even give yourself an allowance for fun items you want to purchase.

If you don’t have anything left over, then you can work on trying to cut costs in the sections where you may be overspending.

Money management is so important and can really help you feel in control of your life.

Other Ways to Manage Finances

If you want to keep track of your household spending and finances, I’d also suggest setting up auto-pay for certain things and linking it to your bank account.

Through your bank, there should be a lot of different systems in place that you can use to save on any spending stress.

You can have a certain amount immediately transfer to a savings account, or immediately go into an account where any auto-pay for utilities, rent, etc. can be pulled from.

Setting up systems like this will help make your life so much easier.

When you’re not worried about forgetting important things, you and your household will run more smoothly.

3. Meal Planning

Meal planning is a huge part of the home management process. When you don’t have a schedule for what you or your family is eating for the week, it’s sure to cause some stress.

No one likes the feeling of needing to search through your cabinets or fridge at the last minute, trying to find something to eat!

By planning ahead, grocery shopping will be a lot more efficient and streamlined, since you’ll know exactly what you need to purchase.

And, if you’re buying things based on your plan, you should have a good idea of what your total will be when you check out, which means no surprises in your budget!

Plan out your meals to ensure you’re not wasting food or spending tons of excess money by going out to eat.

When you’re only buying things that you need for your meal plan (and some extra snacks), you’ll be able to make sure that nothing goes bad in your fridge before it’s used up!

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How to Create a Meal Plan

Creating meal plans isn’t too difficult.

Here’s a good way to do it: every Sunday night, sit down with a pen and paper or open up a document on your computer. Make a list of the meals you want to cook each night for the next week (or the next two weeks if you don’t like shopping super often – I know I don’t!).

If you usually have lots of leftovers, plan on that in your meal schedule! Keep one dinner free for leftovers, or you can eat them at lunchtime.

Once you have your lunches and dinners decided on, write down the ingredients you know you need for each meal. Double-check your fridge, pantry, and cupboards to make sure you don’t already have some of these items.

Then, when you’re at the store, you have your list of the exact items you need for your meals!

Meal Prep

Along with meal planning, meal prep is a great way to keep your home running smoothly.

Meal prep is beneficial because it keeps you organized in the kitchen, and it can help save time during your home’s busiest hours.

Whether you’re prepping certain ingredients that you’ll use later (like chopping all your veggies right when you get home from the store and freezing them until you need them) or prepping lunches, meal prep saves so much time.

Pick an evening when you have time each week, and get most of your cooking out of the way. Then, on days when someone might be working late or you have children going to different events and practices, you can just pull out your meal and heat it up.

Meal prepping is one way of taking care of your family and making sure everyone is eating properly even on the busiest nights.

4. Get a Big Calendar

This might sound like a small thing, but it’s one of my favorite tips.

Getting a big calendar for your home is a simple way to keep track of everything.

When you have a home, there are so many things to remember and schedule – doctor’s appointments for the kids, work meetings or events that need planning around, schedules for your pets, and anything else.

To make things easier, and to keep track of all the things you have to do that month, get a big calendar and put it somewhere in your home that everyone can easily access.

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What to Put on the Calendar

So you have a big calendar, now what do you write on it?

Everything! (And I truly mean everything.)

If a family member has an activity or event – write that down. If rent is due on a certain day – write that down. If someone is coming for any general maintenance or to fix something in your home – write that down too.

Keeping track of all of the events, activities, and services that your family has going on is a home management skill that is vital to making sure you always have an organized home and don’t slip up on any important tasks.

If you feel like you’re losing control of your schedule or not getting enough sleep because you’re up all night going over the things you have to do tomorrow, a calendar can really help.

It’s important to put it somewhere the whole family can access it too.

You want your family members to see what is going on! Your child should also be able to see when you have things going on or what day is free.

Plus, when they see great home management skills, they are more likely to replicate them in their lives as they get older.

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Using a Planner

Using a planner can be just as good as using a big calendar, though sometimes it’s not as easy for families to see what is happening for the entire month when they have to flip through a smaller planner.

However, if you like to break your day down into smaller tasks, then a planner is a good idea for you!

Managing your time is of the utmost importance when it comes to home management.

If you’re not able to manage your time well, then home management can seem harder than it actually is and you can end up feeling like your life is out of control.

So, whether it’s a planner or a wall calendar (or both), use whatever helps you and your family stay organized.

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5. Get into the Routine

As with everything in life, home management can feel super overwhelming at first, but you really just have to get into a routine!

Create a home management system that works for you and your family and follow it! Maintenance is key!

There’s no point in spending all of this time trying to manage all these areas of your life when you’re not going to maintain them in the future.

So get in the habit of home management by using both digital and physical tools to help organize your home.

Use lists that you write by hand, on your notes app, or on other list apps (you can find many for free!) to keep track of your daily, weekly, and monthly tasks.

Once you get into the routine, home management will be a breeze. And the more time spent maintaining it in the future, the less overwhelming life will feel!

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Home Management is Key to a Stress-Free Future

Home management might not make family life perfect, but it will definitely make things easier for you, especially when considering independent living for a loved one, implementing effective home management strategies can significantly ease the transition and ensure the loved one’s living environment is conducive to their comfort and well-being

When you and your family have a system laid out in the home, it’s easy to follow a plan and know just want to do to make sure your house is clean.

And, when your home is clean and your life is organized, it can drastically improve your mental and emotional well-being.

Remember, you don’t have to do this alone! Tons of other people have gone through the nerve-wracking process of learning how about home management.

Research what tools can help you with management, contact friends and family to see what they do, and take the aspects of what you’ve learned that apply to your home and your lifestyle.

Home management doesn’t have to be hard. It might take time – don’t try to do it all in one day – but with slow, productive changes, you can make a huge difference to your home and your happiness!