Get Your Home in Shape with Flylady 31 Baby Steps
Day 23 – Start an Afternoon Routine
Which supplies did you end up getting yesterday for your home management binder?
Here are our daily habits! You’re doing great!
Morning Routine
- Make your bed
- Get dressed to shoes
- Check your daily routines in your home management binder
- Check your email for the next baby step – done!
- Become aware of a few of your negative thoughts and replace them with positive ones
- Hot Spot – set your timer for two minutes to tackle one hot spot
- Room Rescue – set your timer for five minutes to do a room rescue
- Clean – set your timer for 15 minutes and clean (or declutter) one area
- Start a load of laundry
Evening Routine
- Shine the kitchen sink
- Finish the load of laundry
- Plan your outfit for the next day at bedtime
- Set your timer for two minutes to tackle one hot spot
- Look at your home management binder checklists for tomorrow
- Go to bed at a good time!
Today you'll add a new page to your home management binder! A page for your new afternoon routine. This is the time of day when you either come home from work, or your kids come home from school, or after nap time.
What Would You Like to Accomplish Each Afternoon?
Begin thinking about what you'd like to accomplish in your afternoons so that your evening routine can go smoothly, and you can go to bed feeling good about your day. Which steps can help you reduce any stress that you might have at meal time and in the evenings? Add those to your afternoon routine.
I Help My Kids After They Come Home from School
For me, that's helping my kids get organized after they come home from school. They all take their water bottles and lunch boxes out of their book bags and put them in the kitchen so I can refill them later. I help make sure they do their homework and we look through any papers from their teachers in their book bags. Once their homework is done, I help them get their book bags and jackets or coats hung back up so they are ready for the next school day.
I Start Cooking Dinner
I also spend my afternoons starting my plan to cook dinner, which usually includes taking meat out of the freezer to defrost. Then I start cooking at about 4:30-4:45, so dinner is ready by 5:30. The kids start their bedtime routines at 6:00 pm, so eating dinner around 5:30 works perfectly for us!
If the boys have baseball games or other activities in the evenings, the afternoon routine is VERY important because it ensures that we aren't rushing home after a late game to clean up book bags and do homework. Also, it keeps me organized to make sure the kids have eaten their dinner before they go to their games or practices, or it helps me be ready to bring dinner with us.
See my entire meal planning routine here, which really saves me a lot of stress, time and money!
Super fly!
This is so cool.I have done this in the past. I dont remember this step, but its a good one.
Thank you Lori
Yeah it’s a really helpful step, isn’t it? Since we also have digital clutter.
Love the 2 minutes! I’m not much of a visual cluttered. I put everything in drawers! Haha. So I cleaned the 2 drawers of my China cabinet. 2 minutes each drawer. Just doing this everyday will help me get rid of a lot of junk!
That’s so awesome, Janet! Great job. And I’m the same – I like to have all of my things in cabinets and drawers.
This is so awesome! It’s definitely something I need to try.
Yeah it’s really helpful! I highly recommend her program.
Thanks so much for impacting us with your knowledge and time you spend to do research we appreciate.
After team driving with my husband and only being home 24 hours a week for 5yrs. Im finally home now with granddaughters… & the awful, chaotic, mess of a house. So very grateful to find your page. Im so overwhelmed and squirrel with a thousand other things i need to clean. I have true hope now to have a real organized & clean home to enjoy!
I have taken to replacing most of the shoulds with coulds . Ex: I should do the dishes/I could do the dishes. Thanks to my French friends for their inspiration! (Other Europeans as well.)
In addition to putting washcloths and dish towels into the laundry every day I also add pillowcases. Helps keep the sweat and whatever else emerges in the night off the face!
My grandmother and all her friends always dressed in the morning. Down to a nice necklace. Our Mom as well. No slobby sweatpants!