Four tips for calming down a chaotic family life

If your family is anything like mine its chaotic and oftentimes just a frenzied mess most days. However, this past year, after a family meeting, my family and I decided to wage a cease fire on our disorganized lifestyles. Going forward, we promised each other organization, calm, and the tools to make it all happen.

Lucky for me, my husband and I don’t sit on our haunches when we want something done. So we devised a plan—complete with apps to help us stay scheduled and make it to appointments on time, and we even bought and installed a glass whiteboard on the wall of our kitchen so that everyone can see the days or weeks events and know what’s going on.

Now that we are more organized, I can honestly say that things are a lot less stressful. Here are the tips we used to keep our family organized…

Lucky for me, my husband and I don’t sit on our haunches when we want something done. So we devised a plan—complete with apps to help us stay scheduled and make it to appointments on time, and we even bought and installed a glass whiteboard on the wall of our kitchen so that everyone can see the days or weeks events and know what’s going on.

Now that we are more organized, I can honestly say that things are a lot less stressful. Here are the tips we used to keep our family organized…

1. De-clutter your calendar

The main reason why my family was so disorganized was because we were so overscheduled. It’s true: we had hockey, soccer, play dates, PTA meetings, work obligations, social lives, and still hoped there was time to spend with each other. Instead of continuing like this, we decided to pare down our extracurricular activities. Now our kids have only one team or school club. And my husband and I each volunteer for every something—be it at work, a school committee, or a passion.

2. De-clutter your home

It’s tough to be organized in a disorganized home. What did we do? Every family member was assigned a room (the kids each got their own bedrooms) and we drastically reduced the clutter and stuff that we didn’t need. We also bought a few storage systems to tuck away random objects that we still use—like storage shelves, a wall unit, or sortable bins and baskets for the kids’ rooms that could be tucked under beds.

3. Creation of a family schedule

This is what we use the glass whiteboard for. We installed in our kitchen because it was a location where everyone enters first thing in the morning. On it we have the weekly calendar by day of the week. And my husband and I assign things like chores—taking out the garbage, dishes, sorting the mail, picking up toys, making dinner, etc., but also scheduled events—so sports practice, kids events, work events, social events, errands, family nights, etc. If something new comes up, we add it to the schedule, but the idea is that everyone sees the calendar and plans ahead if they know something is going on that day that concerns them (chores or whatever). Once we broke down all the daily duties into this calendar view, things didn’t seem so daunting and disorganized. As long as everyone sticks to their responsibilities, the chaos stays organized.

4. Depend on the right tools

For my family, we desperately needed some easy-to-use tools to help keep us in line. One of those tools is Remember the Milk, an app that both my husband and I downloaded to our iPhones. This app lets us to take our to-do lists with them everywhere and anywhere we go by automatically synching up our to-do list with your Outlook or Google Calendar so we can complete tasks on the go and check them off as they are completed. We organize all of your responsibilities by priority—but you can also prioritize by location, due date, according to hash tags, and then search them the same way. We’ve never gotten things completed quite so quickly and conveniently.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bio: Rachel Barnard is a self-confessed shopaholic and contributing writer for Style Cynics, a fashion and celebrity gossip site that features the latest buzz and the hottest styles.