This is post no. 2 in our series on being “seriously” organized as the mom of 15.
We have 11 daughters, and all of them love thrifting, and they love doing it together. It’s like a safari for treasure, and they come away feeling giddy.
Once, when the older ones were still young and naive, they convinced their eldest brother that the Goodwill was the best place to purchase himself a new wardrobe.
So, they drove him to the store and couldn’t wait to work through all the aisles and the racks of clothes and shoes with him.
To their shock and dismay, he took two steps into the store, looked around for a brief second, and exclaimed, “There is nothing here that I want,” and promptly walked out and back to the car.
Why this reaction?
Because he could not make sense of all the chaos. To him, the entire store was a mess of items without any order, and he did not have the emotional energy to tackle it.
This is true of my entire life.
As I have discussed before in the introduction to this series on being seriously organized:
I am the wife of one energetic, but retired, man; the mother of 15 children, the mother-in-law of eight spouses, and the grandmother of 20 grandchildren.
All of these people need me in one way or another, even if only via concern and prayer, in different ways and at different times.
Almost none of their needs are consistent or predictable. Their schedules are mostly erratic, and their needs vary according to age, availability, proximity, etc. And none of these variables are within my control.
To sum things up: I rarely have an uneventful day.
My life is like a flowing log drive; I am simply being carried along with the current, jumping from one log to another.
However, there are areas which God has helped me build plans and routines, and I am sharing a few of them with you today.
Also, as I stated before:
I don’t share these things without a caveat.
The caveat is this: These are the routines God has helped me create for my specific life situation.
I suggest you take them more as an example or an inspiration, but never as direct application. If you do, you will end up a nail-biter, because you will have skipped the most vital part; relationship with Jesus.
Walking with God, no matter how crazy that my look, is the fastest way to efficiency on our mission to love others and bring His Kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven.
Any other way may bring about some worldly goal, but that goal may in turn lead people to hell. (The concentration camps in Nazi Germany were a model of efficiency.)
Thank God, I’ll never be that successful at organizing my life.
And with that, let’s cover today’s ways that I am seriously organized:
- I categorize.
- I delegate.
- I wash and fold laundry daily.
First, for the categorizing, which is the why of the story with which we began this podcast.
To illustrate, let’s use the thrift store model.
Thrift stores are blessed with car loads of donations every day. People give them old bread makers, end tables, abandoned sewing projects, clothing, books, and on and on.
These stores take the donated items and categorize them into departments, such as women’s clothing, books, and hardlines, and then further categorize them within these departments.
This way, when items come in, they can be directed into the different departments, where they are further sorted into more specific categories.
This helps with tracking inventory and aiding in stock rotation, as well as creating a better shopping environment for customers (although it is still not organized enough for some shoppers such as our son).
This is how I look at my life.
Each day I split a portion of my planner page into three columns with the headers of Family, House, and Other.
The “family” category includes any calls, errands, appointments, etc. for persons in our close family circle.
The “house” category includes any physical household chores, such as cleaning out the refrigerator or sweeping the front porch.
The “Other” category includes tending to my online ministry and business activities, as well as meeting with friends, etc.
This is generally how I keep myself from feeling overwhelmed by too many demands. I generally only write down three or four bullet items in each column, because, realistically, that’s the max I’m going to have time for, anyway.
Even within the above categories, I can refine my focus.
For instance, I may want to take a calendar and go over a particular month, noting the times when I will me more busy doing things for my family members than others. Or it might be that there is a particular project I am working on, such as teaching one of the children to drive, and I want to have a plan in place for that.
Within the house category, fall may be a time when we are winterizing the yard and getting out heavier blankets and winter clothing.
Within the “other” category, I may need to make time for research, or building a presence on Substack, or development new products.
Then, as unforeseen demands crop up, I can place them under their specific heading, then break each up into smaller tasks which I can tackle in little bits when I don’t have large swathes of time available.
Next, there is delegating.
Delegating has been my friend for a long, long time.
There is a part of me that likes to get things done in a certain way. I would like to see the can opener wiped off before it is put in the drawer. I would like to have our socks matched and folded together, and I wish people would fold each load as it came out of the dryer.
And so, I could attempt to do it myself—all of the dishes, the laundry, the floors, and everything else.
This would mean a spotlessly neat and clean house, until I had a physical breakdown and couldn’t move due to exhaustion. Then the house would be in shambles because no one would have a clue how to get things done.
Instead, I have opted to have my children help.
From the time they are able to walk, they are given little things to do. They might fold dishcloths, make their bed, pick up their toys, etc.
As they grow, their responsibilities get bigger. By the time they are teens they are given the responsibility of governing certain zones in our home on their own (we’ll discuss this one later) and these areas are rotated so that everyone has a chance to learn them.
Eventually, the chores include running to the store or taking a sibling to work, etc.
Of course, delegating has its drawbacks.
This means the can opener may have tomato sauce on it before it’s put away. Also, the socks may not be matched and there may be baskets full of unfolded clean laundry in the laundry room.
But, at least the can opener is in the drawer and the dishes and counters are clean. At least the socks are laundered and in the right drawer in the closet. At least the laundry is washed and dried.
And if, God forbid, I find myself unable to do housework because I am ill or out of town, I know my family will be able to carry on because they have all been trained to pitch in.
(When my husband and I had to go out of state for a funeral we had no worries, and we returned to an acceptably tidy domicile).
In the past I have actually created charts and systems for all of this delegating, but in recent years it has not been needed, as our children are almost all adult-aged, and often they will do chores around the house without being asked, or with very little persuasion on my part.
Then there is the question of keeping up on the laundry.
I try and have an assigned day each week for putting laundry away, but I wash and fold daily.
Why?
Well, there are currently seven adultish people living here, and in the past we have had as many as 15 living under one roof at one time (all 17 of us have never lived together at once—this is because when the youngest was born, the oldest was 26—I’ll let you do the math).
If each person used one towel, one pair of underwear, one pair of pants, and one shirt daily, that would be 28 clothing items that would need washing, not counting the dishtowels, hand towels and other items needing to be cleaned.
Multiply that number by the seven days in each week, and you have, let’s see…a bunch of laundry loads! (try at least 14).
Since we own only one washer and one dryer, doing all of that laundry in one day would be impossible, even if the machines were running continuously for 24 hours straight.
However, if I do two loads daily, there is no problem. I simply work sorting, switching, and folding into my routine, usually tending to the laundry during meal times.
Then, on Thursday or Friday, I take the sorted, folded laundry and put it away all over the house (all of this with help from others, of course).
As you can see, I do have general plans for these different parts of my life, but they are adaptable as I look to God to direct me.
Remember our guiding verse?
A man’s heart plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps.
Proverbs 16:9
If you just stumbled upon this podcast, I hope you will take the time to watch the foundational recording which explains the scope and purpose of this series. You will find it linked in the description.
In the future we will be covering even more portions of how I organized in a serious way, including “chalkboarding,” personal care, and zoning.
If you are interested, I have produced a planner which includes places for just about everything a large family mom would need. It is undated, which means it won’t be wasted even if you get off track for a while.
You can purchase this planner pre-printed on Amazon as well.
Of course, there are lots of other things you can purchase which I have produced on Amazon which are helpful and, hopefully pretty as well. Some of them are linked on the Shop page on this webpage.
You can listen to this post as a podcast by clicking below:
Seriously Organized, part 2, podcast on Substack
