What is the thing you hate most about maintaining your home? What’s the most annoying thing that happens in your family when its time to get ready to go somewhere? Using these two questions, we’ve developed a few routines that help things run more smoothly around our house.

I recently read the book “The Lazy Genius Way” by Kendra Adachi. One of my favorite things about it was the encouragement to ditch the “experts” and to use what works best for your family. She explained how all the “experts'” routines can leave us frustrated when we try to implement them, so we should use our unique “pain points” to create systems that work best for us.

I’ll start by sharing four of my biggest stressors, and share our routines that help those things stay under control. Then, I’ll share a couple of random tools we use to make other things a little easier in our home.

Laundry

Biggest Pain Point: Just ALL OF IT. The kids knocked over my clean folded stacks. I had to sort things into a bunch of rooms and carry it up and down stairs. Some things could only hang up to dry, or were dry clean only, and on and on it goes.

Solutions: We have simplified a lot in this area over the last few years. First, we have gotten rid of a TON of things we owned, both clothing and otherwise. Less clothing = less laundry. Secondly, I only looked for homes that had second floor laundry when we bought our house because this was so important to me. 98% of our laundry never leaves the upstairs.

Obviously that isn’t a practical tip for most people, but there are other things that I think could be easy for everyone. One important note: my husband handles his own laundry on the weekends. The following system is for one adult, three kids, and linens & towels.

1. I don’t sort clothing. Everything belonging to one person gets washed all together.
2. I don’t buy things that need to be dry cleaned, ironed, or can’t go in the dryer.
3. Every person has their own laundry day, so clothes don’t get mixed in or need to be sorted.
4. I don’t fold my kids’ pants, underwear or pajamas. Shirts and dresses get hung…I thought this sounded crazy the first time I heard it. Now I’m a believer!

Here’s our weekly system: The kids each have their own laundry day. (Oldest-Monday, Middle-Tuesday, Little-Wednesday). On the night before, they bring their hampers to the laundry room and put all their clothes in the washer. I put in the soap and coach them through pressing the buttons. We use the “delay wash” button to have the laundry start around 6:00 am. When they get up at 7:00, their laundry is all done. They move it to the dryer, and it is dry before rest time.

The oldest child (6) puts all of his clothing away during Monday rest time. On Tuesdays, I help our middle daughter (4) sort her laundry so that she can put it away more easily. She does that during rest time. On Wednesday evenings while kids are getting ready for bed, I quickly sort our two year old’s laundry. She can put her pants and pajamas away, and I hang the shirts and dresses.

My personal laundry day is Thursday, leaving Fridays for things like bedding and towels. This also frees up our machines in the afternoons, so if we play in the pool or get super dirty doing an outside activity, I will throw everyone’s messy stuff in when we come inside, and have it in the dryer by the time the kids are ready to put in their clothes at night.

We have been using this system for over a year now, and it is BY FAR the one routine that has made the biggest difference in feeling like I’ve got something “together”.

Dishes

Biggest Pain Point: Not feeling like I had a good chunk of time to unload or reload the dishwasher all at once. If I tried to do it while the kids were awake, the baby was literally climbing inside the dishwasher and pulling the dirty dishes back out as I loaded them.

Solution: Andrew works 2nd shift, so this is something that’s unique to our schedule, but I throw dishes in the dishwasher in between meals. When the older kids head upstairs to get ready for bed, I finish loading the remaining few and start the dishes (around 6:00-6:30 pm). They are done by the time Andrew gets home from work, and he unloads them and puts them away. Then we start the morning with a totally empty dishwasher and can throw things in as we go. This is another system that has made my life 10,000 times easier.

Shoes

Biggest pain point: having to go back upstairs to get shoes and socks for our kids when it was time to leave the house or play outside

Solution: We bought a cute storage bench to go in our foyer. It’s about 5 years old and has been tattooed by two Housand children, but I’m not replacing it until everyone can keep their crayons on paper! We keep all of the children’s shoes and socks in the bench. I also have a cheap pair of flip flops in there as well. A bonus use of the bench is that the kids each have a “square” on top to sit on when they’re ready and waiting to leave the house.

Evening Tidy

Biggest Pain Point: After my kids go to bed, I want to flop somewhere and not move. Am I the only one? I hated coming back downstairs from bedtime and finding a huge disaster that I needed to clean up.

Solution: After dinner, we each have an area we are responsible to clean. Our oldest (6) quickly tidies the foyer which is usually just throwing shoes back in the bench. He then moves on to the homeschool room. Our middle (4) is responsible for tidying the family room. She then joins our oldest in the homeschool room to help him finish up. Our 2 year old sometimes helps her preferred person of the day, or follows me around while I do my jobs, which are clearing the table and vacuuming underneath. Once I’m finished, I join the kids in the homeschool room if needed.

We usually listen to music while cleaning which makes it fun, and often we’ll have time to do an episode of Cosmic Kids Yoga or play a game afterward, which motivates everyone to work hard.

After this, the older two head up to get ready for bed while I lay out the morning work and start the dishes. The toddler’s special job is shutting the dishwasher to make it start. She gets GREAT excitement from her job. Now I get to end the day with an empty sink, a clean first floor, and begin the day in calm instead of chaos tomorrow!

Tools that we use to keep things running:

1. Alexa

We have Amazon devices all over the house and use them for everything:

• Daily reminders: give medication, have snack time, rest time for the kids
• Weekly reminders: Put in a grocery order. Set out the crockpot. Start the crockpot to make Andrew’s dinners for work.
• Monthly reminders: Get new toothbrushes. A particular random payment is due.
• Other: Cancel a free trial before getting billed. Change air filters every three months (a 2 pack arrives every 6 months). Budget for certain items in a future month.

“She” can pretty much do anything. The kids use their own devices to play music in their rooms at rest time, I set up playlists for frequent songs we use during homeschool, and she can play games with the kids. We love “animal workout” and “Blues Clues and You”.

2. Waking Up Early

I know, I know. Some people are just wired for this. But, hear me out, because I am not one of those people. I do my best work from 11pm on. However, waking up to my kids (often screaming or fighting) at 7 am was NOT working for me. I woke up in a bad mood, I felt like I scrambled around getting things ready for the day, and starting off the morning like that was not conducive to me being the kind of mom & homeschool teacher I wanted to be.

SO, a couple of months ago, I made the decision to start setting an alarm for 6 am. I’m able to drink my coffee and get some work done in silence. I am not consistently doing this every single day. Some nights we have a lot of wake-ups because of teething or diabetes. And those mornings I try to get up just 5 minutes before them, with my 6:55 alarm. It has made a world of difference in the way our mornings go, and I hope that I’m able to eventually get enough deep, consistent sleep that I can do it every day.

3. Whose Day to Pick?

When I was growing up, my brother and I alternated odd and even days to choose things, but that doesn’t exactly work with three. So, on Mondays and Fridays, our oldest gets to choose, Tuesdays and Saturdays are our middle’s days, and the baby gets Wednesdays and Sundays. They can choose things like what we listen to during clean up time, which couch to sit on for tv (because they constantly fight over spots) and what we listen to in the car. They also get to be first down the stairs on “their” days because, believe it or not, they compete for this, too! Thursdays are mine, since the big two are with their grandparents most of that day.

4. Walmart App for Groceries

The final tool we use that’s really helpful for keeping things running smoothly in our home is the “list” feature in the Walmart app. I keep a list called “Weekly Groceries”. It has 117 items on it, which are the products that we consistently buy. We don’t need all those items every week, but even items like laundry detergent and each person’s preferred toiletries are on here. On Fridays, I run down the list really quickly and add the things we are out of to my cart.

This method saves SO much time over the way we used to do things, which was writing a list (which always was 90% the same every time anyways) and then transferring everything into the app one by one. I check the calendar on the fridge, which has a place to keep a grocery list, for any non-usual things we need, and then I place my order for Saturday at rest time. On Saturdays, I have a lovely, quiet ride to the store to pick up the goods by myself.

I would love to know your most genius family routines! Please share in the comments!