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Home Management Notebooks are a great idea.

Tsh — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:00:13 +0000

Home Management Notebooks absolutely work for me.

Here’s are quick links to my Home Management Notebook series:

Having a Home Management Notebook is good.
Identity and target your Most Important Tasks.
Consider using a Daily Docket.
Use a Weekly Checklist as your main reference point.
Brainstorm ideas for what else you might need in your Notebook.

I hope you found this series useful. Using a Home Management Notebook isn’t a new idea – chances are, many of you already use one. But if this is new to you and trying one is uncharted territory, here are a few pointers:

• The point of a notebook is to have all your management tools in one place. Include what you need, leave out what you don’t.

• Do what works for you. If you prefer to scribble in pencil on a Moleskine Notebook, then by all means, do that! You could even have it all online using your favorite tools in one location. I’ve thought about doing that myself, but I just can’t handcuff myself to the laptop – I share it with my hubby, and I’m up and around too much during the day. Maybe one day, though.

• It helps me if my notebook looks pretty – know I use it more when I like to look at it. I use scrapbook paper, magazine clippings, and whatever else strikes my fancy to personalize my baby and make it mine.

• If it doesn’t work at first, don’t throw in the towel! Give it more time, or change it up, or take a short break and think about what might work better for you. We all manage our households differently – the point is to do it well, simply, and stress-free.

~~As promised, here is a FREE PDF download of my Daily Docket and Weekly Checklist.~~ Update: All the downloads can be found on the downloads page. I’ve made them a bit more generic, so maybe you’ll find them useful. In fact, I’ve included two Daily Dockets – one is identical to the one I use; the other has two areas with blank titles for you to fill in, in case mine aren’t something you need. You’ll see what I mean when you download it.

And finally, here’s a little more inspiration juice to get you going on a notebook that works for you:

Here’s a basic list of more ideas on what to include.
Organized Home has a few downloads you might like.
DIY Planner has some good ideas using the Getting Things Done system.
And my favorite… a beautiful visual homemaking journal, courtesy of Ann at Holy Experience (follow other links for inspiration!)

CURRENT SPONSORS:

Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
The Justice Conference - Justice hangs by a thread.
Lil' Soak - Sewing hope with handmade goods.
Treed - A simple, flexible, effective project planning tool.

Home Management Notebooks are a great idea. is a post from Simple Mom

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Free Giveaway: The Total Money Makeover!

Tsh — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:43:53 +0000

This giveaway is now closed. Thanks for entering!

To those of you hopping over from Bloggy Giveaways – welcome to Simple Mom!

For this season’s Bloggy Giveaways, I’m giving away ONE reader one of my favorite books, The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. Since this blog is about simplifying the job of home management, I can’t help but recommend Dave’s financial philosophy, plan, and products. He can’t get much simpler when it comes to personal finance! I highly encourage you to follow his ideas for your family’s financial game plan.

Hence – I’m giving away the book.

The “fine print”:

• To enter, leave a comment at this post. In your comment, tell me your all-time favorite dessert. (And you’re crazy if it doesn’t involve chocolate.)

• Be sure your comment is linked to a valid e-mail address.

• To be entered twice, subscribe to my feed, then leave a second post telling me you’re a new subscriber.

• You have until Friday, April 25 at midnight Pacific Standard Time (U.S.) to enter.

• All entries worldwide are welcome! I’m willing to ship to my fellow non-U.S. residents.

• I’ll do a random drawing and announce the winner here on Simple Mom on Saturday morning, April 26.

If you’re new to Simple Mom, I encourage you to take a look around, contact me if you have any questions or thoughts, and subscribe via RSS or e-mail!

CURRENT SPONSORS:

Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
The Justice Conference - Justice hangs by a thread.
Lil' Soak - Sewing hope with handmade goods.
Treed - A simple, flexible, effective project planning tool.

Free Giveaway: The Total Money Makeover! is a post from Simple Mom

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Hooray for Coffee!

Tsh — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:10:29 +0000

Photo by Yes Becky

This is a great find from my all-time favorite household management tool – the internet. It’s a free Starbucks Recipe E-Book. Here’s to saving money by making overpriced-yet-scary-how-many-times-they’re-necessary espresso drinks at home! HT to Money Saving Mom.

CURRENT SPONSORS:

Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
The Justice Conference - Justice hangs by a thread.
Lil' Soak - Sewing hope with handmade goods.
Treed - A simple, flexible, effective project planning tool.

Hooray for Coffee! is a post from Simple Mom

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Toggl: a nifty time management tool for COOs of the Home

Tsh — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:57:23 +0000

I work at home as a part-time graphic designer, and I also manage a lot of my work as a stay-at-home mom on the computer. Combine that with using language learning software, writing two blogs, reading plenty more, and keeping up with friends and family far away, that can equal a lot of computer time.

If I’m not careful, I can end up spending all day on the computer. My kids could become Computer Orphans if I don’t make time management a priority.

I’ve recently found a tool that can really help a mom manage her computer time. Toggl is a free service that monitors your computer time. It’s nothing more than a time logger, but it watches the clock so you don’t have to.

Let me show you how it works for me.

When I log into my Toggl account, I click on “new project.”
I create a project name – something obvious like “Balance Checkbook.”
It requires that you have a client’s name attached to a project, so for this project I’d use “Family.”
I decide how many hours I WANT to spend on this task – let’s say 2.
Whenever I’m ready to start that task, I click the start button next to that project. It immediately starts tracking my alloted time.

I’ve attached a screenshot of what my Toggl page looks like:

You can see that Toggl is actually created for tracking billable hours, like for folks who are self-employed or who telecommute from home. It’d be nice if moms COULD bill their hours, but since we can’t, just ignore this feature. (Or you could give your kids an invoice on Friday, letting them you know can accept straight up cash or whine-free dinnertimes as forms of payment.)

Even though this obviously works best for your computer time, you can also use it for whatever project on your to-do list. If you need to sort through your kiddo’s outgrown clothes, you could add that, and just start the timer on the computer when you start. I can see it working well for getting ready for a garage sale, planning a birthday party, or tracking your child’s homework time. Anything on which you want to spend time wisely.

When you finish your project, you simply click on “task completed.” If you want to see how you’ve managed your time so far, click on “see report,” and it will itemize each task and your time spent on each.

This works very well for me. I’m a list maker, I’m task-oriented, and it helps when I have a reachable goal for my many unseen mom jobs – I’m working to beat the clock, in other words. I also need accountability sometimes! This provides me with a time card for my full-time job of Mom, COO of the Household. And it encourages me to get things done and stay on task.

Another feature that’s great for moms of preschoolers is that you can start and stop your Toggl timer all day. So when you sit down to reply to emails, get the “Dear Mom, Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you” written, then have to stop to fish a Nemo toy out of the toilet, you can pause the timer at the click of a button. Then you can start it up again. And of course, stop it again when your baby’s diaper is now emitting its contents up his back.

At the end of the week – or month, or day, or whenever, I can look at my hours logged, and look at my time management technique square in the face. Did I mean to spend only three hours this week reading blogs, and ended up devoting eight? Did I stay on task for four hours this week writing blog posts, or researching money market accounts, or planning Suzy’s homeschool curriculum – or whatever you need that smidge of accountability for?

With Toggl, I can create my own timesheet. Mom’s the COO, but sometimes it helps to also be the boss.
Photo by Jana Christy

CURRENT SPONSORS:

Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
The Justice Conference - Justice hangs by a thread.
Lil' Soak - Sewing hope with handmade goods.
Treed - A simple, flexible, effective project planning tool.

Toggl: a nifty time management tool for COOs of the Home is a post from Simple Mom

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Adding Background Music at Home for Free

Tsh — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:57:14 +0000

I love music, and I love to have it playing all day at home. It adds to the mood and the ambiance of our environment – when I clean, I have more energy and a better attitude if I’m listening to this song; I love reading and writing with anything by this guy in the background, and who wouldn’t love to eat dinner to this? (Or your husband, who shall go unnamed, can make fun of you for liking this song.)

Photo by Arlo J

But I digress. The point is, I love music, but I’m not made of money. We keep iTunes up most of the day, but after awhile, you can get tired of the same tracks, especially if you play them as much as we do.

I know this isn’t new to the internet, but it’s new to our home. At playlist, you can create a free playlist using mp3s from around the internet, and you can play it directly from the website. The tracks aren’t yours to keep; in a way, they’re sort-of borrowed from cyberspace. Playlist encourages you to buy the track if you like it.

But the great thing from my perspective is, free background music at home! You can play a playlist up to 100 songs, which will last you quite a while. Here’s a playlist I made recently, entitled “Lazy Afternoon Music – background music for reading, cleaning, cooking, vegging”:

On a side note – you can indeed add playlists to your blog or site. May I make a request of you, though? Please don’t have them play automatically. It’s kind-of a pet peeve of mine when a website automatically plays music. That’s just me, though.Another side note – the first song, Gravel Lines by Amy Seeley, is my current favorite song. Don’t you just love her voice? Sigh.So there you go – playlist definitely works for me.

CURRENT SPONSORS:

Plan to Eat - meal planning made simple.
The Justice Conference - Justice hangs by a thread.
Lil' Soak - Sewing hope with handmade goods.
Treed - A simple, flexible, effective project planning tool.

Adding Background Music at Home for Free is a post from Simple Mom

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