The last few years, I’ve been struggling a little bit. Getting our girls was a bit unexpected, and to be honest, in the beginning I thought I had it all figured out already.
I didn’t.
It took me a long time to even admit that I was drowning in the current situation. I was falling so far behind with everything I wanted out of life. I’d quit college (for the second time), I stopped working for clients, I even abandoned my old blog because it seemed silly to write about writing when there was a small child who depended on me for almost everything.
(No, that’s not a shot at most mommy bloggers — I genuinely didn’t think I had the time in my day to manage both.)
However, this year, I’ve decided to do things a little bit differently. I acknowledge that some of the things I gave up were due to First Time Parent Syndrome — quite simply, I was overprotective and overinvested because I’d never been in this situation before and was just so convinced I was already screwing it up.
If that sounds like you, don’t worry — you’re not screwing it all up. We’re all doing the best we can with the information we have.
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
–Maya Angelou
If you’re looking to dig yourself out of that rut, too (and you think there’s any chance I may have done it the right way!), keep reading — I’ll share with you how I’m getting back on track to my best life in 2020.
I’m streamlining my planner system.
As a planner addict not in recovery, it’s hard for me to admit when I’m leaning on my planning system too hard. In fact, most of the times I’m feeling overwhelmed, I tend to lean into the planning because it helps me to make sense of the mess. This year, I’m taking a different approach.
I’m not micro-managing Google Calendar anymore.
There was a time (not very long ago, in fact) that my Google Calendar would be filled to the brim with my ideal schedule. I thought that, by filling in what I wanted my days to look like, I’d be pressured into making them actually look like what I had mapped out.
Spoiler alert: This just left me feeling overwhelmed and behind. All. The. Time. Clinging to my vision of what a perfect day, a perfect week, or a perfect month “really looked like” was damaging the way that I viewed what my days, weeks, and months actually looked like. I couldn’t see how well I was doing because I was too hung up on the things I was missing.
Now that I’m not using Google Calendar for a catch-all for everything in my life, I can look at it and just see what I need to do at any point in time. And you know what? That’s a little less work than it felt like before, now that I don’t have so many optional tasks and incidentals cluttering up the view. But, I still have Google Calendar there to catch the things I might otherwise forget to move to my planner. And having a specified “Google Calendar date” day means I’m not forgetting to move anything, either.
I’m building systems instead of individual plans.
I’m a creature of habit, and while the idea of doing something new and different every day sounds exciting, it doesn’t actually work for me. I run way better on routines. I was throwing myself off every single day trying to work a fresh plan out so it worked… then I’d be back at square one the next morning trying to make that plan work, too. This was so draining!
This year, I’m simplifying my life by creating systems. Since my brain and body work better on a routine, I’m breaking my weekly goals down into a few smaller systems, organized by my color codes. Baby Dragon’s activity calendar gets broken down according to what makes the most sense for us that day. “Walk and talk” activities are moved to days when we’re already walking to and from school, “family game night” activities are moved to days when we’re all having dinner together anyway, and so on.
Another system I’m using is the blog system. Since my wife has the same work days every week (and I try not to spend too much “work time” on her days off), it’s easy for me to plan ahead which days I’ll be working on active parts of the blog process, and which days I should do some back-end stuff. It’s not a perfect system; there have been a couple pretty big snags already. But what’s important is that there’s a framework in place that I can compare to, and it makes it easier to fit other things into the system.
Schedule, Tasks, and Reminders.
This year, I’ve decided that these are the only three categories that really matter, and these are the three categories I separate my plans into.
“Schedule” items are things that are time-specific. For example, my wife’s work days, my participation days at the preschool, and of course the much-loved Show and Tell days are all penned into the schedule section (and backed up in my Google Calendar).
“Task” items are things that need action, although not necessarily my own action. I write down my four-year-old’s “family activities” (the school’s fancy way of giving homework without calling it homework) and the chores we have to do around the house. I write down the bills I have to pay manually and the errands I need to run. In general, these things can be migrated to another day if they need to, but sometimes that’s only possible because I plan to do them ahead of time (and sometimes the plans fall through).
Lastly, “Reminder” items are things that are going to happen whether I do anything about them or not. This is where I hold information about incoming packages, auto-pay bills, birthdays, holidays… The things that continue all on their own. These things don’t necessarily need to be handled, but they keep me up-to-date on the things that otherwise might get lost among the other two categories.
Keeping everything separated makes my anxious mind just a little bit more restful, and it helps me to remember what’s really important. At a glance, I can look and see what’s expected of me, and all that’s kept on my Google Calendar is the stuff that’s non-negotiable.
Make it cute!
For those of us who are functional planners (or non-planners), the idea of making something cute so that we use it more doesn’t necessarily come easy to us. However, it makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Would you rather look at a plain, boring spreadsheet, or a fancy infographic? Most people would pick the second. (I happen to fall somewhere in between, but that’s another story for another day.)
What do I mean by make it cute? Simply, stickers (and emojis, for the digital things) can go a long way toward not only making sure you love your planning system, but can also make it easier to see things at a glance. You don’t (necessarily) have to read an emoji or sticker… You can just look at it and tell what it’s trying to communicate. Slap those emojis and stickers into your planning system strategically and let them do their thing.
(I’ll have an entire post about emoji-coding coming up soon; don’t forget to keep an eye out for it!)
I’m streamlining my budget.
I emoji-code my banking app, too.
As a matter of fact, emoji-coding the banking app came before emoji-coding my Google Calendar. Since I’m often budgeting on-the-go in between other tasks and schedule items, I need to be able to see my plans as efficiently as possible. Assigning specific emojis to specific bills helps with this.
For example, cash back budgets get the 🏧 emoji, my car insurance and registration get the 🚘 emoji, anything on auto-pay gets the 🔁 emoji, and anything that requires extra action on my part gets the ⚠️ emoji. Whether I’m assigning charges that have already come through or planning for the next paycheck, these emojis help me see at a glance what I need to know about each budget item. I still use text labels, too, for further clarification, but most of the time the emojis are what I plan from.
(Soon I’ll have an entire post dedicated to how I emoji-code my budget and calendar apps — keep an eye out for that post if this idea intrigues you!)
Auto-pay is not the enemy.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve tried to streamline my life and screwed myself over with auto-pay. Since I’m just a tad bit obsessive (and simultaneously forgetful), I’ve been known to manually pay bills that were already set to auto-pay… Which, without proper planning, can easily overdraw an account. Thankfully our bank doesn’t actually overdraw, it simply borrows from another budget, but I have frantically moved money around so that my numbers balance out.
However, since I assigned a specific emoji to auto-pay bills, the likelihood of double-paying has gone down significantly. The truth is, for the large majority of people, auto-pay is a lifesaver. Now that I have an effective way to differentiate bills that actually don’t need any attention from me, it feels like I’ve got a virtual assistant handling the mundane. (I’ve had a virtual assistant who didn’t handle the mundane as well as my system does.) This frees up time and energy to focus on the things I can’t automate.
There’s never too much cushion.
One of the things that has helped the most with the budget is being able to cushion things. I understand that not everyone can afford the luxury of a fully-padded budget; I know we sure can’t. But even just rounding up to the next dollar can have a tremendous impact on your financial situation. The only “scrambling for change” I do now is moving around the cushions from one budget to another. I try to pad the budgets a little more whenever I can, but I know that even if I don’t, I’m covered.
Let’s say, for example, my credit card minimum payments are $25/month. Obviously paying just the minimum is no way to get out of debt, so I budget $25 for each credit card out of each paycheck. On the checks we have more money to work with, I can even bump that up to $50/check, but I know that I’ll never dip under the $25. When I’m balancing out the budget at the end of the pay period, I can choose to use that cushion to pay on the credit cards, or I can move it to another budget that needs it just a little more. Either way, it’s like finding extra money laying around — exactly where I put it.
Bonus tip: Switch to Simple for your online banking.
I wish I could take all the credit for refining my budget system, but alas, sometimes it really is in the tools themselves. We’ve used Simple as our primary bank for almost three years now, and the tools to get through our financial crises were sitting there the whole time — I just had to learn how to use them. Your banking app might even offer similar features; it’s worth looking into.
If you’re on the lookout for a new bank yourself, I cannot recommend Simple enough. The app uses the time-honored principle of “envelope budgeting” with a unique edge. I can partition my wife’s paychecks (and my infrequent income) into as many separate budgets as I need. Whatever’s leftover goes into “Safe to Spend,” a catch-all budget; this is the only amount you can see without manually opening your Goals and Expenses tabs.
Best of all, in the three years we’ve been using Simple, we have never been charged a single fee (aside from the odd withdrawal fee when my wife refuses to use the Free ATM finder). We even have a high-yield savings account that pays out interest every month based on the end-of-day balance. As long as I keep funneling money into our savings goals, the savings will keep paying me, too. 🙂
I’m streamlining my dinner plans.
In 2020, I’m over obsessively planning intricate meals. The reality is that meal-planning is supposed to make your life simpler, and I was doing it all wrong. These days, I’m doing practically no grocery shopping anymore, which makes my anxiety a lot easier to manage, and also frees up some extra time for things. Still, I have a homemade dinner on the table six nights a week. How do I do it?
Meal kit delivery.
This is the age of delivery — nearly anything you want can be ordered ahead of time and shipped to your door for a small fee. Dinner is no exception. I’m not totally new to the idea of the meal kit; the one we subscribe to now is not the first one we’ve ever subscribed to, but there are a few reasons Every Plate is my new favorite.
- Affordable: Every Plate costs about half the price of meal kits from their parent company, HelloFresh. I loved HelloFresh, but couldn’t afford to continue after my promo pricing because I would have been paying about $70/week just to feed my wife and I two days a week. Now, I feed all four of us, three days a week, with the same budget.
- Tasty: I don’t think there’s been a single meal yet that we haven’t wanted to make again sometime. Baby Dragon gets a kick out of announcing which ones should definitely go in our recipe book (I haven’t had the heart to tell her we’re not doing that anymore!), and I get a kick out of taking credit for awesome, creative meals.
- Simple: Every Plate sends me an e-mail when it’s time to pick my meals for the next week, and the meal-picker is incredibly intuitive. Even the kids can get involved in it, since there is a big picture of each dinner (and they know I’ll be leaving out any onions, jalapenos, and mushrooms pictured). When it comes time to make the meals, there are six steps — that’s it. They know that their main customers are busy families, and they run accordingly.
- Filling: To be fair, we have a box meant for four adults, and two of our family are children (one of whom hasn’t been spending much time at home lately). But we almost always have a small portion of leftovers because the meals are meant to fill a family’s hungry bellies.
- Not excessively healthy: I try to be a reasonably healthy cook, but let’s be real — kids complicate that. My Every Plate meals aren’t meant to be my kids’ healthy solution. They’re meant to make my life easier. I know that these meals are going to skimp on vegetables a little bit, so I just stock up on extra veggies with my grocery box. I feel better because I don’t have to fight with the kids, and they feel better because they’re still getting a balanced diet. We just don’t make every single meal a perfect balance anymore.
(Please note that if you have specific dietary needs, Every Plate is not able to manage those and you must personally decide which meals work with your family’s needs. Our “needs” are no artificial colors, low salt, and no “problematic” ingredients — all of which are easy to manage. I’ll be writing up a full review of Every Plate soon, so if you’re waiting for more information before pulling the trigger, rest assured — it’s coming soon.)
Grocery delivery.
Since I’m way too much of a control freak to let someone else pick all of our dinners (and also Every Plate doesn’t offer a four-person, seven-meal dinner box), we also get actual groceries delivered, too. But, since I’m also a little extra, they’re ugly groceries.
(Ugly produce from Imperfect Foods, that is.)
While I’m not totally in love with Imperfect Foods, I do like that it’s semi-automated. That is, I can choose on a week-by-week basis whether I customize my box or not. I do, of course, because of aforementioned control-freak-iness, but it’s nice knowing that I could skip it if things get too hectic. I’ve already told them that there are 4 of us and we want a little bit of everything. We’ve got a loose budget defined within the site, and I can buy more (or less) as necessary to fit it into the actual budget.
I will be writing a full review on Imperfect Foods once we’ve received a little more boxes, so if you’re holding out for more information, I promise, it’ll be here soon!
Plan it (a few days) ahead of time!
It seems so simple, yet it’s something I used to stress myself out over. The old way had me planning for two weeks at a time, without regard to which of the children would be with us at any particular time. If they were dropped off unannounced right at dinner time, I’d have to scramble to make things work.
However… The new system fixes this problem. I plan out my Every Plate dinners when I confirm the next week’s Every Plate box. I plan out my Imperfect dinners when I confirm that week’s Imperfect Produce box. I’m never planned more than a week out, and no one ever goes to bed hungry anymore.*
By planning just a few days at a time, I leave myself room to move things around a little bit without succumbing to analysis-paralysis. I know my Wednesday Every Plate box needs to make 3 meals, and my Friday Imperfect Produce box needs to make three meals. Our seventh day is full of whichever leftovers we have, or — if we don’t have any — a nice fun family meal that we can afford now because the budget is managed.
*Just for my own sanity and clarity, I’d like to make it known that we have never starved, even before this new system was in place, but there were some nights when we had to skimp on dinner and fill up on fruit and dessert after… I’m glad to say that fruits and desserts have both fallen back to their old “bonus” positions and are no longer a way to make ends meet.
Everything is connected.
Although these areas might seem separate, the truth is, they all factor in together. By making room in the budget, I’ve got the extra money to splurge on meal kits. These meal kits make planning dinner easier, which makes me more likely to prep in advance… which leaves more room in my schedule for the things we want to do (which we can afford to do because of a well-managed budget). It’s all connected, and each thing makes the others easier.
Of course, there’s still a lot of time left in 2020, and I’m sure it won’t be smooth sailing the whole way… But having a solid system for streamlining will definitely help avoid any drastic pitfalls.
What tricks and systems are you putting in place to manage your year easier? Let me know in the comments!
Semi-Planned Chaos 