There are so many different elements involved in family and home life.

From laundry, cooking, cleaning, school and after school commitments, clutter management, appointments, paperwork, and so much more, life can very quickly feel overwhelming and stressful.

However, there are some ways to make your family more organised, so everything runs smoother.

If like me you’re looking for some ways to make your family more organised, then here are 11 things that you can try.

The best thing about these ideas is that if something isn’t suitable for the current age of your family members, then you can try them at a later stage.

MAKE MORNINGS EASIER

One of the really helpful ways to make your family more organised and get everyone in the right headspace to tackle what needs to be done throughout the day, is to make mornings easier.

In my household if things don’t go to plan in the morning and we start to run late, I get really stressed and angry, which makes everyone less likely to organise themselves to get out of the door.

If your morning’s sound like this as well, then making mornings easier for yourself is a great way to get everyone on track to start their day in the right way.

Some ways that you can make mornings easier are:

• Wake up before your children, even just 30 minutes earlier, purely to get ready. Once you’re ready you can spend the rest of the morning focussed on getting everyone else ready and out the door.
• Get anything ready that you can the night before. For example, pack school bags and leave them at the door, make lunches and store them in their lunchboxes in the fridge, place uniforms next to your children’s beds.
• Make older children responsible for getting themselves dressed and teeth brushed.

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TRY MEAL PLANNING

Meal planning is one of the main ways to make your family more organised, and it’s something that I do weekly.

To begin with it feels like meal planning takes a lot of time, but the time you spend doing it in one session is definitely less time than what you’d spend doing it every day.

Some of the benefits of meal planning include:

• You only visit the grocery store once.
• You save money by buying only the ingredients you need.
• You don’t have to think of something to eat just before a meal is due.
• You can try a greater variety of ingredients.
• You waste less food because you’re using all the ingredients that you have.

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WRITE A GROCERY LIST

Having a grocery list that you record groceries that you’ve run out of, or that you remember you need to get when you’re next in the grocery store, is a great family organisation idea.

Doing this means that you’ll always have the ingredients you need for your next meal, and you won’t forget anything when it’s time to do your grocery shopping.

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CREATE A FAMILY COMMAND CENTRE

A family command centre is an area of your home where you display certain aspects of family life such as what’s for dinner, a family calendar with everyone’s comings and goings on it, and any other organisational tool that helps to notify everyone in the family what’s happening on any particular day.

It can help everyone not to forget important things, not to double book themselves, and parent’s can work out in advance who is able to do school pickup, drop offs, or drive to after school commitments.

FIND SOLUTIONS FOR TROUBLE SPOTS

Finding solutions to areas of your home that cause stress is another of the ways to make your family more organised.

This involves thinking about any areas of your home that if improved will make your family more organised, and even create less stress for you on a daily basis.

For example, an area of my home that causes a lot of stress is toy clutter. It doesn’t matter how often I reorganise my children’s toys, or how much I declutter them, I can never seem to minimise the mess that they cause.

As soon I realised that this was a trouble spot, I started rotating the toys, which meant that my children had less toys to play with at a particular time, which decreased the amount of toys laying around in our living area, reducing the stress that they caused.

If there are any areas of your home that are troublesome to you, and create stress, think about what you can do to improve the situation.

It might be changing the way you store paperwork, decreasing the amount of times you clean per week, storing your children’s school supplies differently, or anything else that you can do so your family is more organised and your home feels less chaotic.

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IMPLEMENT HOUSE RULES

Implementing some house rules can greatly assist in keeping your trouble spots under control.

Using my toy clutter example, to work on toy clutter even further, a house rule that I can set is that only two different types of toys can be played with at one time.

So if my children want to play with a new toy but they already have two different toys out, then one toy has to be put away before the new toy is played with.

Implementing house rules means everyone understands how certain things have to run, or where certain things go, so things are more organised and trouble spots remain trouble free.

DELEGATE TASKS TO YOUR CHILDREN

I feel like this is one of the trickier ways to make your family more organised, as sometimes it’s quicker to do something yourself rather than have your children do it, but getting your children to help where they can teaches them some independence, responsibility and makes things easier for you in the long run.

Having everyone in the family help allows everyone to see just how much goes into managing a family, and may make them appreciate even the smallest things a bit more.

You can start small with this step and even get younger children to start doing things. For example, I’ve started getting my five year old to take his own plate to the kitchen when he’s finished a meal, and clearing up arts and crafts at the end of the night.

As time goes on I’ll get him to take anything out of a room that shouldn’t be there, and take it to where it belongs.

You can delegate harder tasks as your children get older, and if your child responds to rewards then having a reward chart may be a great motivator for them, and even encourage them to take on more tasks.

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PRIORITISE YOUR TO DO LIST

It’s very easy to list as much as we can on our to do lists, but the more items we place on them, the harder it is to get everything done, and when we don’t get everything done on our to do list we feel unproductive and miserable at the end of the day.

Prioritising our to do lists and taking the time to list down the absolute priorities for a day ensures that we stay focused, accomplish what we need to, and gives us some breathing space, so we feel better about the ways we’ve spent our time.

It also makes for happier family life as we’re not packing too much in, and it ensures that we can dedicate time to things that matter.

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SOME THINGS ARE BETTER LEFT UNTIL THE END OF THE DAY

There are just some things that are better left to the end of the day, no matter how overwhelmed they may make you feel during the day.

Since having children I’ve really had to learn how to relax about the state of my living area, and not get angry anytime I see something left on the floor.

I used to tidy my living room throughout the day, but quickly realised that I was wasting my time and energy as having young children means there’s constantly things to pick up.

Now I spend 10 minutes every night picking up their toys and putting them back where they belong, instead of doing it multiple times a day, and it has saved me a lot of time, energy and anger at having to continually do the same thing with no result.

Of course seeing toys on the floor still triggers me, but when it does I just remember that once my children are asleep I’ll clean up and the area will be back to my quiet, tidy stress free state.

HAVE A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING

I know this is one of the more obvious ways to make your family more organised, but it’s my favourite.

Having a place for everything and making sure everyone in your family knows where things belong is one of the best ways to keep your family organised, purely because things can go back to their places when they are no longer needed.

Make sure everyone in your family knows where things go, and if you have younger children who can’t understand this yet, have a basket in the corner of your main living area so they can put things in it when they’re finished with them. You can then put these things away later.

If you have a multi story home, a stair basket is fantastic at letting you place anything in it that goes upstairs, and whenever someone is going upstairs they can take it with them and put the items inside it away.

GO THROUGH PAPERWORK EACH NIGHT

Even though a lot of correspondence is electronic, a fair amount of paperwork can still find its way into your home, especially if you have school aged children.

Having a paperwork storage system in place and going through your paperwork at the end of the day is a great way to stay on top of this area.

You can do this by placing all paperwork in a tray in your kitchen, then every night going through it and recycling what you don’t need, making notes of bill due dates and then filing the bills away, and signing anything that needs to be signed and putting it in your children’s school bag.

I hope you’ve found these ways to make your family more organised interesting, and that you’re excited to try some in your own home.

How do you keep your family organised?
I’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.