4 Business Principles to Create a Happier & More Organized Home

TGIF! The work week is over! Escape the office for a couple days! Retreat to the solace of home!

But wait. What if it’s sometimes the other way around? TGIM? Back to the office for five days, where the mail is sorted and there’s a tight schedule you can follow. Where there are no dirty socks under your chair. Even if you are not headed to an office on Monday morning, perhaps you long for the organizational oasis you imagine your spouse or close friends basking in while you fight to tame the utter chaos of domestic life. Between sorting the mail, paying bills, caring for kids, running errands, scheduling home maintenance, planning meals, and all of the hundred other little things that quickly take over the day, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

In a business, the board would bring in a consultant or hire an assistant if the CEO was overbooked. Why should your home be any different?

Run Your Home Like A Business

The truth is, there is no reason your home can’t run like a well-oiled machine. It’s becoming a common practice to apply some simple business principles to how we set up, manage and organize our homes and families. Families are loving the results and feeling happier and more grounded on the home front.

Don’t get too excited. You don’t get to fire your five-year-old for booby trapping the living room floor with Legos. However, you probably can restructure a few home management policies that make Lego booby traps a thing of the past. Much like a group of employees functions together as a team, a family should be a team that works together toward a common goal. Toward that end, families can benefit from applying some key business practices:

Create a Family Mission Statement

Start with who you are and make sure you know your family’s core values. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll likely never get there. Nothing can give your life that hamster-wheel feeling more than thinking you are exerting a lot of energy, but getting nowhere fast. And what’s worse, you have no idea where you’re headed to begin with.

Successful businesses avoid this trap by having a mission statement, and using it as a tool to decide where to focus their resources. Successful families should, too. With an established set of goals and beliefs—a Family Mission Statement—and intentional decision making that aligns with those goals and beliefs, you’ll find that gradually the day-in-and-day-out takes on meaning and feels purposeful rather than punishing.

Gather your family up for a fun night of laughter, games, and junk food, and, as part of your time together, brainstorm and identify a list of 6-10 things that make your family who they are. Incorporate them onto a creative poster or collage and display it where everyone sees it each day. Get in the habit of checking in with it. Use it as a tool to evaluate the choices your family members are making as individuals and as a team. Let it inform how you choose to allocate your time and resources. Does this activity or commitment support our family mission statement? Yes? Great—game on! No? Then drop it. (Or, if it’s necessary, delegate it.) Monogram Concierge can help you manage those tasks that must get done but don’t support your family’s mission.

Identify Your Most Challenging Areas

Begin by making a list of all the things you and your family do that seem to pull you away from your goals or beliefs. This task can be accomplished with input from all family members, or you may prefer to keep this one between you and your spouse. You can also enlist help from us at Monogram Concierge. Often an objective third party can help you more effectively work through this important diagnostic step. We can meet with you in your home and walk you through the areas of greatest frustration and challenge for your family.

Is it a constant struggle to keep your house clean and organized? Is the morning routine making the children cry and causing you to pull your hair out? Are you spending more time preparing meals than enjoying them with your family? Is your schedule so frenetic that everything and everyone just seems out of control? Your personal concierge can help you focus on the places that need the most attention in order to help your home run more smoothly and feel more like a haven and less like a zoo.

Get To Work on Your List

If your list of challenge areas seems daunting, let us help you pick just two or three to focus on in order to get some initial traction. Remember, Rome was not organized in a day. Not only can we empower you to implement some helpful lifestyle management strategies, but we can actually execute some of those systems for you, taking some things off of your plate so that you have time to focus more on tasks and activities that strengthen your family.

Monogram Concierge can assist you with everything from organizing your mudroom to picking up groceries to filling your gas tank each week. Here are a few of the challenging areas that our clients let us manage for them:

• Home Services such as scheduling yearly maintenance, researching and making major home purchases, scheduling lawn care, organizing a punch list for minor repairs, arranging for deep cleanings twice a year, managing subscription services, and much more.
• Auto Services such as scheduling regular oil changes and maintenance, getting the car washed and cleaned and topped off with gas each week, getting the car detailed twice a year, and managing taxes, registrations, paperwork, and any DMV visit that doesn’t require your presence. (Yes. We will stand in line at the DMV for you.)
• Personal Services such as creating a manageable meal plan, delivering groceries, scheduling personal appointments, maintaining a family calendar, simplifying morning routines, running errands, caring for pets, and staying on top of school functions.

Embrace the Family Meeting

While the stuffy but necessary weekly office meeting can be tedious and dry, the weekly family meeting can be fun-loving and re-charging. We encourage you to pick a regular time each week—perhaps a night where your family is consistently able to sit down to dinner together. Commit to a 10-15 minute check-in. Require everyone to share insights and inputs. Ask each other how the week has gone. What things did we accomplish that solidify our family mission? Where did we struggle or feel frustration? What can we do differently next week in order to make it more efficient, effective, and successful? You’ll be amazed how everyone will come to treasure these meetings and how much you will learn from your kiddos.

The best CEOs know that time is their most valuable and irreplaceable resource. In order for your family to be its best, you need to embrace the same idea. Free yourself to focus on what is important, and find other ways to handle the things that crowd out your ability to make the most of your time. Call us today to schedule your first strategy meeting so that your home can run like a great business too.