Our Fortress is Stress Free: A Plan

Welcome to my 31 Days to Create Purpose in your home!  During the month of October, I am posting every day about creating purpose in your home and joining all of these bloggers who are also posting for 31 days on a topic of their choice.  I would love for you to follow me, and check out all of the other posts in the series and the introduction to it here.

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This is a hard post to write as plans are challenging for me to make, however this is one of the most critical pieces to having purpose in your home.  You can have all the goals in the world, but if you don't figure out how you can make them come together it is for nothing.  I hate the mad dash to clean our house when company is heading over.  It is stressful!  I hate trying to figure out dinner at 5pm on my way home from work.  It again creates stress.  Having plans for these things help create a stress free home.


1. Look ahead
The last thing you want to do, is remember just before you go to bed that you are responsible for brining snacks to the staff meeting tomorrow, and you promised your famous home baked coffee cake.  If you look at all of your obligations for the week, and then plan when you are going to get those thing done, you will avoid this issue.

2. Draft a flexible plan
Once you look ahead you can figure out what your week looks like.  I personally like to plan a week at a time.  I try and make the plan so that I have some wiggle room.  Things happen, kids get sick, you end up with a last minute meeting.  Make sure to allow time in your plans for these occurrences.

3. Plan your meals
When my husband and I were working on taming our grocery bill, I started planing our meals, so we wouldn't buy frivolous things.  I personally found meal planing to challenging, especially when I was pregnant.  It almost never failed that on the night we were supposed to have taco's I wanted pasta, or the night we were supposed to have pizza I really wanted rice.  So I just started planing 6 different meals per week, shopped for those meals, and choose which one to make the morning of.  This has worked out wonderful for our family.  No last minutes broken, managing our grocery bill, knowing what we are going to eat and flexibility.  If you prefer knowing laying out the whole week, then do that, just plan ahead so that at 4 or 5pm you aren't scrambling to come up with dinner.

4. Plan for the maintenance of your home
There are things that need to happen in your house daily (dishes), things that happen on a regular basis (floors, windows, etc) and things that happen on a less regular basis (air filters).  I will speak to creating a routine for these things later, but you must create a plan to get them done and allow yourself the time for them to get accomplished.  Allow space in your day for the little tasks, if you book yourself from waking moment until when you go to sleep your home will not be maintained.

5. Go to bed on time
I have been the worst at this lately.  Staying up way past my bed time in order to finish posting here, and I need to fix it.  Getting a good night sleep so that you can get up early, and be well rested will do wonders for your stress levels.

The take away here, is to make figure out a way to prevent any type of stressful scrambling.  It is a stress that can be prevented by the simple step of planing ahead.  Taking a short time to plan can save you time in the long run, and help you live a less stressful life.  This in turn will help you live a less stressed life, and not allow the stress to rub off onto your family.  How do you make plans?

Cheers!

Ashley