If so, you are in the right place, as I will be sharing tips to make your home easier to manage.

I had never been brilliant with housework, but when my daughter was born the overwhelm hit another level. Suddenly even the most basic tasks like taking a shower, preparing a meal or putting away laundry became an overwhelming challenge.

Later I had bouts of fatigue which made it hard to get off the couch, let alone do any housework.

A diagnosis of ADHD went a long way to explaining my challenges. But there are many reasons that can make maintaining a house overwhelming.

So if you are struggling with your home you are not alone.

Here I will share the systems I use to make my home easier to manage and avoid the stress and overwhelm.

A lot of problems can be avoided with a little careful planning and the right systems.

So for every household task you need to do, ask yourself the question:
“How can I make this easier?“

Once you get creative about making things easy, you’ll be amazed by how much you can reduce your workload.

Here Are a Few Ideas That have Worked For Me, And May Work For You Too:

1. Declutter

Clutter not only looks messy, it makes everything you do in the home more difficult. 

• If your cupboards are full you can’t put stuff away. 
• If things are mixed up it’s hard to find what you need
• When things are buried you loose time pulling them out
• Seeing clutter can distract your focus from what you should be doing

What you can declutter to make your home easier to manage:

• Check in with your values. How do you want your home to look, feel and function? Declutter whatever doesn’t support that vision.
• Declutter duplicates for the same task. Keep the best, donate the rest.
• Streamline the extras. Keeping lots of sets takes up space and effort. For example, keep just 2 sets of linen for each bed. One on, and one to wash.
• Declutter items that take a lot of effort to look after. There is more to life than dry-cleaning fancy napkins.

2. Be a Savvy Shopper

Managing your home starts with the things that you bring into it. Make sure you bring things in that will make your life easier and not add to your workload.

• Avoid single task items. If an item only does a single job, it doesn’t really save you time. Searching for that heated butter knife, animal waffle maker or cheese melt pan only adds to your workload, not reduces it.
• Avoid seasonal items that will be clutter for the other 11 months of the year. Yes, by all means keep some holiday decorations, but don’t feel obliged to go all-in for every holiday. your family can live without heart bunting for Valentines Day or an Easter Egg door wreath.
• Stick to one colour scheme for dishes, linens and towels. If they are white, even better as it will be easy to replace missing or broken ones when needed.
• Avoid age, gender or person specific items. Make it easy to mix and match.

3. Design for Ease

Where you keep things in your home will make the difference between a frantic search and a speedy exit.

• Store things near their point of use – Like dishes within reach of the dishwasher, your keys, purse and phone in a landing zone near the door, jackets and shoes by the door.
• Keep like with like. Avoid storing the same type of item in multiple locations, keep them together.
• Use labels. They remind you where things should go, and help your family get on board too.
• See more tips in Hack Your Habits for a Clutter Free Home.

4. Eliminate Unnecessary Tasks

The most impactful thing you can do to make your home easier to manage is to reduce the number of things that need to be done. Here are a few ideas:

• Don’t over-launder. If you are washing every item after wearing once then you could be making unnecessary work for yourself.
• Outsource what you don’t like to do. Cleaners, gardeners and nannies can be a great investment in your mental health.
• Declutter to reduce the amount of things you need to deal with.
• Go with systems that work for you. Don’t enjoy folding clothes? Keep them in storage bins. Don’t like ironing? Buy clothes and linens that don’t need to be ironed.
• Do grocery shopping online to save the time and effort of going to the store.
• Sign up for a meal plan delivery service.

5. Reduce the Amount That Comes Into Your House

Every item you have in your home needs your attention. You will store, clean, maintain or make decisions about these items, so reduce your workload by reducing what comes in.

• Say no to freebies
• Plan your purchases
• Shop from a list
• Ask for gift experiences rather than things
• Go paperless for all your accounts

6. Have a System For Getting Things Out of Your House

Advertising, media and even well-meaning friends and family tell us what we should bring INTO our homes. But there is very little support for getting it back out.

• Link donating to a task you already do, like dropping off donations on your way to do the weekly shop
• Set a reminder and search your home for rubbish, recycling and donations before bin day
• Join local free cycle groups and post any unwanted items on them
• Have a “one in, one out” rule, or if you still have clutter, one in, two out till your home is at a manageable level
• Set reminders to regularly go though categories in your home, particularly for things like kids clothes, toys and paperwork, which build up fast.

7. Reduce Decision Making

Every decision you make, from what to wear to what to make for dinner takes mental energy. Make your life easier by reducing decision making.

• Have a daily uniform or capsule wardrobe
• Rotate a list of dinner options and have theme days
• Save a grocery list of basics to copy and paste

8. Enlist Your Family

Everyone over the age of 2 in your household should be contributing to looking after the house. Make sure you are not carrying the burden alone.

• Even young children can be given tasks to do to help around the house. By starting young they will build good habits and can make a significant contribution to reducing your workload as they grow up.
• Give responsibility for a given task to the person that cares most about it being done. 

Over To You – What Will You do to Make Your Home Easier to Manage?

This is by no means a finished list of all the ways you can make your home easier to manage. I’m sure that you can think of many more.

Some will be useful to you, others may not be. Regardless of how many of these you can implement, I encourage you to really look at the tasks you do in the home and keep asking yourself “How can I make this easier or eliminate it entirely?”.

By focussing on ease you should quickly get to having a home that is much easier to manage.

You may also enjoy 12 Ways To Start Decluttering When You Are Feeling Overwhelmed.

Make sure you sign up for my newsletter for more practical tips and a weekly declutter challenge.

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The post 8 Ways to Make Your Home Easier to Manage appeared first on Go Win at Life.

In this post, you’ll see the top 7 New Year’s resolutions made last year and find out how your home environment can help you keep these resolutions.

Why do so many of us set out with great intentions, only to fall off the wagon shortly afterwards?

Whether it is keeping fit, eating well or decluttering our homes, our resolutions can be long forgotten come February.

So I am going to show you how you can set your home up to help you succeed in keeping these top 7 New Year’s resolutions.

Set Your Home up for Success. 

“…motivation (and even talent) is often overvalued. In many cases, the environment matters more.”

James Clear

If you’ve been relying on motivation to achieve your New Year’s resolutions, you may be setting yourself up for failure. Instead, you should be looking at the design of your home environment and how that can help your success.

7 Most Popular New Year’s Resolutions and How to Set Your Home up to Keep Them

1. Exercise More and Improve Fitness

Who doesn’t want to be fitter? But although this is the most popular New Year’s resolution, it may also be the hardest to keep. And that’s probably why it keeps coming back in at the number one spot. So how can your home help you with this one?

If exercise is your goal, but you have to spend time looking for your exercise clothes or equipment, it’s not going to happen. So make space and make it obvious. Here are some ideas:

• If you plan to run in the morning you can keep your running shoes near the door and put them on the doormat the night before. 
• You can keep your workout gear next to the bed so you can put it on first thing.
• You can keep a yoga mat right where you plan to use it. And make sure you have a clean, clear space to use it in.
• Set up one dedicated drawer for your workout gear so you always know where it is and don’t need to spend time looking for it.
• You can keep your workout outfit in your gym bag. Put it straight in there when it comes out of the wash.
• Keep your TV remote upstairs and your TV downstairs so you get a workout to turn on the TV!
• Declutter and clean your house. This is physical work and can be a great workout!
• Sell your car and ride a bike instead

2. Lose Weight

All the points in the exercise and healthy eating categories will apply here as well. But did you know that a cluttered home can contribute to you gaining weight too? That’s the theory put forward by Peter Walsh, in his book “Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight: The Six-Week Total-Life Slim Down.” Why is that? Well, studies have shown a clear link between clutter and stress levels. “Once the stress increases, hormone levels increase. Now, the result of that is that you start to overeat,” Walsh said.

Another effective strategy is to switch out your current plates for smaller plates. This might sound bizzare, but has been shown by a Cornell University study to be a surprisingly effective way of feeling full while eating less.

Set up your home to help you lose weight:

• Reduce your stress levels by decluttering your home.
• Get rid of most processed foods and store any remaining in hard to reach places.
• Keep only the items that make you feel great and add value to your life.
• Use smaller plates.
• Get rid of clothing that doesn’t fit you. Your goal is not to keep old clothes that taunt you by being too small. Your goal is to reward yourself with new, well fitting clothes as and when your body shape changes.
• Focus on having clear, open spaces on your floors, storage and walls. This makes for a less stressful environment.
• Be mindful in your purchasing habits. Plan your purchases ahead of time to avoid bringing in new clutter or unhealthy food.

3. Eat More Healthily

Your kitchen is the key to your diet and healthy eating resolutions. No one is motivated to cook in a messy kitchen. If your counters are cluttered, cupboards are overloaded and the fridge is full it’s going to be far easier to reach for a takeout menu than to cook a healthy meal from scratch. So ironically, having too much food in the kitchen can be a barrier to healthy eating.

• Keep things in view that remind you too eat healthily. You can keep a fruit bowl on the counter or images of healthy fruit and veg framed on the wall.
• Put all temptation out of sight. If you have sweets on the counter, guess what you are going to be reaching for? Yep, sweets. Store them out of sight, ideally on a high shelf that requires a step stool. The harder they are to get to, the easier you make it to resist temptation.
• Declutter your pantry. Throw out all expired food. 
• Declutter your fridge. 
• Menu plan. This helps you shop smart and make good food choices.
• Declutter rarely used kitchen gadgets. You may thing that they help you cook, but actually having too many gadgets can create a barrier to cooking.

4. Save Money

Saving money works really well alongside decluttering your home. First of all, by decluttering items you no longer need you will directly confront past buying decisions. This can help you shop more mindfully in the future.

Decluttering will also help you identify what brings joy to you now so you don’t waste money on things that don’t serve you. You are likely to also find items that you had forgotten about, saving you from buying them again. For more on decluttering you may like Need to Declutter Fast? Try This. And for more on saving read 21 Things to Stop Buying to Save Money Fast.

The more intentional you get with your spending, the more you will save. And the more intentional you get with your spending, the less clutter you will bring into the home.

• Declutter your home
• When you want something new, put it on a list first. Wait at least 24 hours before buying from your list.
• Organise your bills and set up auto-pay. Setting up good systems for bills and paperwork will prevent overdue fines
• Declutter unused subscriptions
• Dedicate a time and a space to reviewing your finances. Make your files easy to find, whether they are paper or digital.

5. Pursue a Career Ambition

With more of us than ever before working from home, it stands to reason that a tidy home and workspace will help you be productive in your work, or even support you in starting a side hustle or career switch. But working from home can also mean a lot of distractions.

• Set up a dedicated room, desk or area solely for work
• Remove all non-work related distractions from this area
• If you can, dedicate your computer to work tasks only. Use a separate phone, tablet or laptop for Social Media and browsing.
• Create a vision board and hang it where you see it daily.
• Have a clean, tidy restful oasis that you can relax in when you are not in work mode.

6. Improve Social Connections/Spending Time with Family

How comfortable do you feel inviting someone into your home? If the answer is not very, and the reason is a mess, then decluttering is going to be great for social connections. Your home should be a restful oasis for you, and somewhere you can feel proud and comfortable to invite people to. If it’s not, you may find yourself losing touch out of the fear of having someone over.

• Declutter the items that do not add value to your life.
• Implement a cleaning schedule and/or get a cleaner to help out.
• Take care of any outstanding maintenance or home decorating tasks.
• Make sure the furniture you have works for the amount of people you like to have over.
• If you have a guest room, clear it out and set it up ready for guests.
• Get professional help.

7. Take up a Hobby

Hobbies require stuff and space. Make it easy to do your new hobby and you’ll be more likely to succeed at it. Dedicate space for your hobby. It doesn’t have to be much, but it has to be easy to access. Your hobby gear should be as close as possible to where you want to use it. So if you are starting knitting, and you knit on the couch, keep a basket with your knitting supplies by the couch.

Also, be mindful of not keeping stuff from hobbies that you don’t do anymore. That may get in the way of what you are doing now. Having to dig through clutter before you start a project is going to detail you from even starting.

• Set up a dedicated area for your hobby. This can be as large as a whole room or as small as a basket to keep supplies in.
• Keep your hobby supplies as close as possible to where you will use them.
• Declutter any hobby supplies you no longer need.
• Don’t keep other items on top of your hobby supplies (looking at you, clothes horse/treadmill!)
• Focus on just one hobby at a time.

Your Home Can Help Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

In summary, setting up your home right can make you much more likely to succeed in your New Year’s resolutions. Consider what it is that you really want to achieve and make sure that your home is set up to make it as easy as possible.

Need help with decluttering? Make sure you are signed up for my weekly newsletter. And for more support, check out coaching services here.

The post 7 Ways Your Home Can Help Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions appeared first on Go Win at Life.

Have you ever made a New Year’s resolution, set about it with enthusiasm, only for it to be a distant memory by February? Yeah, me too.

What about launching into a new diet or exercise programme that quickly gets abandoned? Or a new cleaning routine, savings plan or morning routine?

But what if there was a method that made it easy to stick to new habits? Well, actually there is, and that is habit stacking.

So what is habit stacking and how can it help you reach your goals?

The key to habit stacking is to take a behaviour you already do, and add on (stack) a behaviour you want to be doing.

This is explained in a lot of detail by James Clear in his brilliant book “Atomic Habits”. Well worth a read if you want to transform your own habits.

I wanted to make writing a daily habit. I struggled during the day as there were so many other things demanding my attention. By the evening I found my motivation was low and it was way easier to collapse on the couch and scroll social media. But I found a way of getting this done through habit stacking.

I have a young daughter and I always read her a story before bed. Her bedroom is next to my home office. Now, instead of heading downstairs after putting her to bed I step into my office.

Once I am at my desk most of the barriers to writing have been removed. The simple stack of: “After I put my daughter to bed I… step into my office” makes the goal of writing much easier to achieve.

The key to making habit stacking work is not to try to take on too much at once. That will be setting yourself up for failure.

Why? Because large changes in behaviour require a lot of motivation and willpower. This is fine when we are full of enthusiasm at the start of a new year, new diet, new job or whatever. The problem comes that when the enthusiasm wears off and the changes seem overwhelming, too hard or just not exciting enough to stick to any more.

Willpower doesn’t work as a habit building tool.

By using the actions you already do to trigger a behaviour you want to introduce, you have a far greater chance of making it happen. Then once the new habit becomes routine, you can build another one onto the sequence, and so on.

You can also help yourself succeed in your new habit by setting up your environment to make the habit easier.

Say you want to drink more water. You can put a glass of water by your bed at night so its the first thing you see when you turn off your alarm in the morning.

Then the habit stack becomes: When I turn off the alarm I… drink water. 
You can leave your water bottle by the sink at night. So the next habit stack becomes: When I wash up after breakfast I… fill my water bottle.

You’ll also find that good habits can automatically lead to adding on other healthy habits. 
Like a habit stack of: “After I get up I… make my bed” can give you a feeling of accomplishment at the start of the day. If you start your day on positive note you may feel more positive and be more productive.

So how can habit stacking help you achieve your goals?

First of all think of a goal you’d like to achieve. Then think about the actions that will help you get there.

For example if your goal is to have a clean house the actions you need to take are to work a cleaning routine into your day.

So your habit stack might look something like this:

When I get up in the morning (existing behaviour) I… make my bed (desired habit)

Once this becomes routine you could add another habit to the stack:

When I get up in the morning I make my bed and… put away clean laundry

It’s best not to make the habit stack too long. A longer chain can become overwhelming. However you can then stack habits to meet the same goal onto different actions. So continuing with the clean house goal your next habit stack might look like this:

After I take a shower I… spray and wipe the shower. Once this becomes routine you might build up to:

After I take a shower I spray and wipe the shower and gather up dirty laundry. Then:

After I take a shower I spray and wipe the shower, gather up dirty laundry and put on a wash.

I’m sure you get the picture. 

Say your goal is to save more money.

Habits that support this goal are setting a budget, planning your spending and making food at home instead of getting take aways.

So here are some habit stacks that could support the goal of saving money:

• When I want to buy something I… put it on a list.
• When I open my computer I… check my budgeting app.
• Before I do my food shop I… plan my meals for the week.
• After I eat breakfast I… wash up. After I wash up I… put dinner in the slow cooker.

For more money saving tips you could use in a habit stack check out this post.

Beware too of habit stacks that work against you.

It’s very easy to subconsciously pick up bad habit stacks. Do you ever find yourself mindlessly scrolling Social Media, eating unhealthy snacks or binge watching Netflix? Chances are that you’ve picked up a negative habit stack.

I drink a lot of tea. I like to have a biscuit with my tea. So drinking tea has become a negative habit stack trigger. I have subconsciously formed habit stack which has me eating lots of biscuits.

I can turn this habit stack around by substituting tea for something else. I don’t associate biscuits with drinking water. So by switching some of the tea I drink during the day for water I can reduce the amount of biscuits I eat.

Are there any negative habit stacks you have picked up? See if you can switch your trigger to eliminate the negative habit.

Ready to reach your goals with habit stacking? Grab my free workbook now and transform your habits!

The post How To Reach Your Goals Faster With Habit Stacking appeared first on Go Win at Life.