A Simple Homemaking Binder

If you are looking for a simple planning method but binders and planners aren’t quite working for you, read on. This method is flexible, practical, and free.

Are homemaking binders still popular? I used to be obsessed with them, as a classic control freak. I tried many printables and even decorated my binder with a QUILT made out of scrapbook paper. (Very strange.) The binders never got used. There was too much excess information in them, I couldn’t take them anywhere because they were enormous, and curling up with one on the couch was awkward. Planners seem to be a bit more practical, but they are bizarrely expensive and I was always leaving them in my purse. Have you had similar planning system fails? Today I want to share a simple method that works.

Homemaking binders usually fail because they are too big and have too much stuff in them. If you want a cleaning checklist, you do not want to look through the office information for your child’s pediatrician. Taking the binder with you is weird, so you also have a planner. There are stickers. The planners with all their accessories are running into the triple digits. When you want to remember what you planned to make for dinner, you have to pull out this embarrassing giant. Stop the madness.

Planning your week, the simple way

Enter: the weekly planning sheet. It can live at home, it is not overwhelming, and it is free. (Or you can buy an upgraded version in my shop.)

There is something natural about planning life a week at a time. Seven digits in a phone number, seven days in a week. The human brain likes it. So a weekly planning sheet made sense to me vs a monthly calendar set up, which tends to be filled out on the first of the month and never looked at again. Anyone else? No?

This page is a hybrid planner/ to do list. Don’t you feel that planners with a full page for each day make you feel inadequate and encourage you to start writing down stupid things? Most days probably only need a few notes jotted down, and this keeps it simple. Just look at your phone for any appointments and put a little note on that day.

On the right are boxes for things to be tackled that week, or things to jot down as the week goes on that you would like to get to later. Easy! Low pressure. A few minutes on Sunday to get ready for the week.

Now it can go on the fridge or somewhere handy to keep reminding you. When the week is over, move things from the later box to next week’s NOW box. Or not. I have kept things in the later box for months and I am not ashamed.

What about meal planning?

I plan my meals out on a separate page. But there is room for it all on one page if you prefer. This is the template I use:

At the top is just a friendly box to get you thinking, before it starts demanding things from you for each day of the week. Not too much space to make you feel like you need to plan snacks. That’s too crazy.

Now if you don’t like binders, this is plenty of planning. You’re done.

But if you do…

A practical homemaking binder

The key to a practical homemaking binder is to make it for reference only, and keep it SMALL. There should be no sitting with it and filling stuff out on a weekly basis. No printing out a daily page that makes you check off “sweep the floors” every morning from now until the end of time.

It is just there to give you ideas and help you remember long term goals and plans. So if you have a weekly schedule set up to help you get ahead of the housework, you might refer to the binder to give you ideas about what you can do.

Some practical things I have found helpful in my homemaking binder

• A page for each day of the week “laundry day”, etc., and what I would like to get accomplished on that day
• A page of deep cleaning tasks that I can refer to
• Gift ideas
• Projects I want to work on and where to find the instructions
• Books to read
• Gardening tasks and when to do them
• Goals for the year

So when you sit down to plan for the week, you have this whole binder of ideas. NOT a to-do list. Just ideas.

What you need to set up this system:

Paper and a pencil. That’s what is so nice about it, no weird stuff to buy.

But if you would like to use all the printables I showed (and many others), just sign up below for my email list. They are all free in the subscriber library, along with many other goodies!

Watch me plan my week using these pages:

Let me know if you are planner or binder person, or are ready for something simpler.

If you are interested in a separate set of tips and printable on meal planning, I have a post on that as well.

Hope this was helpful!