A Healer’s Geste

Getting Things Done for Homemakers & Homeschoolers: Setting Up Containers

Getting Things Done for Homemakers & Homeschoolers

This post one of a series: Getting Things Done for Homemakers & Homeschoolers

Setting Up Containers: Tools for Success

Now that you’ve at least begun to collect at least a majority of the open loops on your mind, you must first set up the proper containers and structures before you can begin to process and organize what you have captured.

Inboxes

This is where stuff or notes go before you can process them. Ideally, your inbox(es) are empty at least once a day or every other day. Ha. I know. This is a temporary holding spot, not a storage container. Your email inbox is one inbox. You also need one or two physical inboxes for stuff like church bulletins with dates or info you need, your notes, bills to pay, etc. My inboxes include my email inbox, which I try to keep less than 10 emails in — only emails requiring action stay in the inbox; a magazine file in my cupboard by the computer to hold papers until they can be processes, and my purse is my on-the-go inbox to hold papers until they can be processed. I am still not good about cleaning out my purse, but at least that’s only two places notes to myself or other papers I need might be.

Workstation | Control Center | Command Central | Cockpit | Home Base

This isn’t your basement office that collects junk and keeps seldom-used craft supplies. This is your hot-spot base of operations. This is where your phone, contact list, phone book, calendar, list collection, and inbox belong. Obviously, it needs to have room to serve as a writing surface in addition to corralling these things. If you have a kitchen computer or laptop, this is where it would be. This would be a good place to keep homes of some sort for your often-used management tools: clipboards, pens, timers, apron, iPod — whatever you use.

Typically, the mother-at-home homemaker’s office space is going to be most functional if it is in or near the kitchen — the very heart of the home. Mine is at the corner of my kitchen bar. I can turn the computer and sit and type at the bar, or I can stand within the kitchen and read or refer to an online recipe. The cupboard above my computer is my “inbox cupboard” where I keep the church directory, phone book, a slot for bills to pay and envelopes and stamps and checkbook, jars for pens and pencils and permanent markers, and a little container for random things like tape and paper clips.

A functional workspace is critical. If you don’t already have a dedicated work space and in-basket, get them now. That goes for students, homemakers, and retirees, too. [...] One couple even decided to set up an additional mini-workstation on the ktichen for the stay-at-home mom so she could process work while keeping an eye on their infant in the family room.

See, even Allen isn’t focussed solely on executives.

Everyone must have a physical locus of control from which to deal with everything else. [...] You’ll find that a weekend spent setting up a home workstation can make a revolutionary change in your ability to organize your life.

What do you use to make your menu plan? Gather that stuff together and keep it here or close at hand. If it involves too many books or too much stuff, you might want to think about how you can pare it down; if, that is, this is a simplifying season of life, as I have decided it is for me. As for school stuff, I cleaned out and made space in our basement “junk collecting” office for school planning & administrating, so that is a separate office space and not part of my home base. You, however, might want everything all centralized in one spot. The key is to think through all the management tasks you have and gather all the stuff you need to do them in one area.

Launchpad

I learned this concept from organizedhome.com many years ago when it was an active, useful site. Really, it’s a magnified outbox. It is some sort of container or shelf near where you leave the house that you keep stuff that needs to leave the house: a bag of stuff to take to Goodwill, a bag of books to return to the library, a bag of hand-me-downs to give to a friend, your purse, etc. Allen mentions having an “in front of the door” trick — putting in front of the door anything you need to take with you the next day. Setting up a launchpad is a more tidy and potentially baby-proofed version of his trick that still works well even if you don’t leave the house every day. I have a cheap, short, three-shelf bookshelf in our mudroom next to the garage door that usually has my purse & everyday outing stuff, a picnic/park bag, a church bag, a Goodwill bag, and a library bag. If I want to take something to the park or church or library, I can just put it directly into the bag that will be going there. It doesn’t always work, but it works more often than if I just tried to remember before leaving the house. It already takes me over 30 minutes to leave the house on most occasions; the times I have had to gather stuff from all around the house to take along (Where is that library book? Oh! Right! A burp cloth. Oh! My nursing cover! Drat, where are my keys and sunglasses?!) it has taken nearly an hour from “Get your shoes on and get in the car” to turning the key in the ignition.

Open Loop Collectors

Somehow, figure out the best ways for you to collect thoughts as they occur to you, something that can be a mostly-constant companion. You’ll probably keep several, depending on the context you are in. A notepad in your purse, by your bed? Remember a pen! A clipboard, binder, or notebook that goes with you and stays near at hand? A fancy-pants phone? A laptop? Choose one program for note-taking! Maybe send yourself emails? Hey, even the good-old trick of writing on your hand or arm to keep a note until you can get it into your system will work! Anything will work — if you do — so pick what most appeals to you and run with it.

Calendar

Your calendar is not a place to keep to-do lists or notes. Your calendar space should be guarded, honored space. Only add to your calendar what truly is reserved for what must happen that day or day and time: the doctor’s appointment, the birthday party, and other such commitments. Your calendar should show you the “hard lines” of your day, around which you can fit in items from your task list and handle things as they arise. I keep a Google calendar with several different calendars on one so I can see things in different colors. One color is my appointments & activities. One color is Matt’s appointments & activities (he uses Google calendar at work). One color is my menu plan; after all, these people insist on eating three times a day — I’d call that a hard line! You can also use the calendar as an after-the-fact sort of journal tool: record your exercise time or your school hours or anything else that encourages you to see recorded.

I have to give credit where credit is due. David Allen certainly did not suggest keeping a menu plan on your calendar, though he did recommend only keeping one calendar if possible. My friend Kirsti has been keeping her menu plan on her Google calendar for a couple years now, and she changes the entry to reflect what they actually ate if it was different from the plan. Thus, she not only has a plan where it is easy to drag-and-drop a dinner plan to make adjustments, but she also has 2 years of records of what they actually ate. Now she can click back and see what they ate in August last year and the year before, when soup season generally begins and ends, what dessert she took to the last shower, etc. I have just hit the one year mark myself of using Google Calendar for my menu plan, and I am hooked. Keeping a calendar for exercise time logged and school days to count was also Kirsti’s idea, although my pastor also has used his calendar as his journal for at least 15 years.

Lists

Allen writes that a list could look line one of three things: 1) a file folder with separate paper notes for the items within the category; 2) an actual list on a titled piece of paper; or 3) an inventory in a software program or a digital assistant. Yes, this book is now a little dated. What they used to call PDAs, we now call iphones.

So where will you make and keep lists? Lists of items needed, items to think about, thoughts about projects, notes about recipes or education, etc. etc. This isn’t the same as collection places, but this is where will your lists, thoughts, bits of information be kept so that they can be useful to you? This includes your contacts lists, your master grocery list, and to-do lists. A clipboard, a stack of index cards with a binder clip, a binder, a few file folders, a tabbed notebook, email, online or software-based programs, anything can work so long as you keep it consistent. Personally, I use Remember the Milk for my tasks (everything from “make a dentist appointment” to “load and run the dishwasher.” I can enter a task and tell it to pop up a month or a year from now, and I can make tasks like washing the dishes repeatable. I can even set it to repeat a specific amount of time after I’ve completed it. So, for example, I have set myself the task of checking my library account online every three days. Once I have done it, I check it done, and it sets itself to show up again in three days. For lists of reference material (movies people suggest, freezer inventory, ideas, blog post lines I think up) I keep a bajillion lists and a handful of blog post drafts in Simplenote. I’m still working out the habits of checking and working off these two places, but they have options for integrating pretty well into a Google homepage (iGoogle), the gmail homepage, your browser, or even your computer. I am just tired of bent, wet, torn, and lost papers. Plus, I have found myself much more likely to jot a note in Simplenotes than I would have been to jot a note on a piece of paper because it doesn’t take up any more physical space, it doesn’t become one more thing to have around and keep track of, and if I want the information a quick search on the search function pulls up anything relevant.

Of course, I have a kitchen computer, so it’s always pretty handy to type something up. Also, I guess this is the place and time to admit it, I bought myself an iPod touch off Craigslist a couple months ago. Both RTM and Simplenote sync onto it, so when I grab it, I grab my calendar (gmail & Google Calendar is synced), my notes and lists, my to-do lists, and my contacts. It’s also a clock, timer, and MP3 player all in one. I bought it off Craigslist, knowing I could try it out and resell it for the same price if it didn’t work for me, but it is really working for me even better than the clipboards. The only catch is that I feel silly and self-conscious when I pull it out to refer to or jot a note.

To-Read Stack

You need some easy-to-grab place to store things you need to read. This is where you dump magazines, catalogs, your current book, printed out articles, and such. The thing you must remember is to keep it culled frequently. This isn’t your “I should read, but I probably won’t and don’t really want to” pile. This is your “I need to” or “I want to” read as soon as possible stack. If anything in it becomes “Someday maybe I’ll read it” it needs to go elsewhere. It is also helpful to keep paper and a pencil and maybe post-its in the stack, too, so you can take any notes you might want to while reading.

Reference

The last thing you need is a place or two to keep reference material. Since we homemakers work within our whole house, I think any space within the house we can claim will work; Allen suggests keeping the reference system within arm’s reach from your office desk, but we are not so space-confined. The trick is to actually put things there and not in stacks “waiting to be filed.” So the place and the system has to be accessible enough to overcome that “just do it” mental hurdle.

Allen has pages of very opinionated suggestions for making your reference system work handily, but I think just having a place to keep things you want to keep so that you can file them easily and find them easily is all you need, and that can work however you want. The system he suggests (strict alphabetical) would bug me. I prefer like items to be together, and since I don’t really have all that much stuff in reference anyway (I keep one drawer in a file cabinet in the office for my stuff, plus a drawer for records and a drawer for appliance manuals), so any tidy arrangement would work. Some of the files I have in my drawer include “crochet patterns,” “magazine tear-outs to sort,” “paper snowflake patterns,” “decorating ideas,” “letters received,” and “yard & garden ideas.” When we were thinking about building a home, I had about 10 different folders to collect ideas and information related to that, but I culled all those when I reorganized the office a couple months ago and kept only what ideas I might want to incorporate into this house.

Instead of a file drawer with files, you might also consider setting up binders.

Workspace-in-Transit

One optional thing you might want to set up, especially if you have lots of outside activities or appointments, is a mobile workstation.

Many people lose opportunities to be productive because they’re not equipped to take advantage of the odd moments and windows of time that open up as they move from one place to another, or when they’re in off-site environments. The combination of a good processing style, the right tools, and good interconnected systems at home can make traveling a highly leveraged way to get certain kinds of work done.

So, to that diaper bag, add list-making materials or keep a place reserved for tossing in your always-at-hand device or clipboard. Then, if a friend at the park suggests a book or movie or restaurant, you can jot it down; or, if you end up nursing in the car, you have something to read; or, if you’re in a waiting room and the children are miraculously occupied, you can jot down ideas and notes about your weekend plans or the upcoming birthday or holiday.