I open the door to my pantry, and the light automatically turns on, showing me just how cluttered and disastrous it is in there. Didn’t I just clean and organize this? Some quick math tells me that, indeed, I had it only four months ago. I pulled it all out, cleaned it all, and put it back in, and it didn’t even last four months?!
It felt like I was in a constant state of organizing and reorganizing?
“How do people keep things so organized all the time?”
I blamed it on the kids…they are always the first ones I blame in cases like these. 😉
But other people had kids, and their pantries stayed organized, so maybe it wasn’t their fault after all. What was I missing?
I started obsessing over other’s pantries on Pinterest and watched dozens of YouTube pantry organization hacks, and it finally dawned on me. All those cute baskets and containers were more than just making it beautiful in there, but it gave everything a specific place. {Cue lightbulb moment}
How had I missed that?
I never wanted to invest in the $ to buy all those cute things. Nobody sees the pantry but me. But I thought of all the time I took reorganizing it over and over again, and I decided to give it a try.
I bought all the things. Baskets, clear containers, crates, boxes, lazy susans, jars. ALL. THE. THINGS. And it looked so beautiful! Even better than that, though? It has stayed organized! It’s been almost a year and still looks so good!
Yes, it took some time and some investment, but in the long run, it saved me SO much time and money.
No more organizing over and over again, no more expired food that had gotten lost in the back, now everything had a place, and I could see and get at everything — nothing hiding.
Wait, I thought this was supposed to be about scheduling. IT IS!
Scheduling time is just like organizing your closets!
First: Pull everything out, out of your brain, that is. Do a to-do list dump. What are all the things you want to get done, all of it! Why do we do this when we are organizing? To see everything that we are dealing with, and so we can clean out the space.
Second: Get rid of everything that you don’t want or need. Evaluate where you want to spend your time and how. Get rid of all the stuff that others could do and let them do it, hire it out, delegate, or just throw it out altogether.
Third: Put everything else back & make sure there is a specific space for everything. Be intentional. Give it a specific spot in your calendar. A day, a time, and a time limit.
Just like organizing your closets with all those cute baskets and containers, you need to make sure that things make sense in your schedule, too, and that there is a specific place for everything.
Give everything a time slot and a time limit.
Just like that baskets were a game-changer for my pantry, this will be a game-changer for your schedule.
It’s funny how I always think I don’t have time to schedule it all out. I need to get busy doing all the things. But in reality, if I take the time to go through these steps properly, I end up having so much more time on my hands and getting so much more done.
GIVE IT A TRY!
Additional tips:
Schedule self-care FIRST! Don’t try and squeeze it in after; it rarely will fit if you do it that way.
When you’ve got kids home with you double the time you think something will take you to make room for helping those little ones.
Group like things together as much as possible. Brains hate transitions, like when you go from cleaning to taking care of kids or working on your business to making dinner, every time we transition, it throws our brain off.
