A Simple Planning System for Homemakers (That Truly Works)

Inside: a look at how to devise your very own planning system (yes, I said system) that works for all the moving parts of your life. This is something that requires a surprising amount of thought.

The beautiful papers, the color-coded sticky notes, the inspiring quote stickers. Buying planning supplies can be fun, pretty, and satisfying . The only problem? So very, very little of it actually works. You have a planner to carry in your purse, a big family calendar on the fridge, your grocery lists is… somewhere…. and those reminders on your phone just keep repeating until you finally turn them all off.

Okay. That’s okay. It’s not your fault. The problem is that calendars and to-do lists are quite different things and planners attempt to merge them into some Franken-system that goes against nature. Let’s fix that.

A Calendar and a Planner Are Different

This is the key thing that’s probably tripping you up in your planner quest. Things like your trip to Alaska and vacuuming the guest room are operating in two different brain spaces and they really need two different planning spaces.

Not to mention the fact that your appointments, school plays, and son’s baseball games are sometimes relevant to everyone in the family and sometimes only relevant to you.

This means there needs to be a family calendar and a personal calendar. Paper is fine, but things like this change all the time so it’s going to mean a lot of copying things down and then changing them. Digital calendars can be synced with outside sources (for example, your son’s softball team likely uses an app that hooks to Google Calendar and Apple Calendar), and they can be shared with the rest of your family.

And if you’re going to be using a digital calendar like this for family events, it only makes sense to use that same system for your personal calendar. No on wants to schedule their haircut at the same time they’re picking up Timmy from baseball camp. Right? Right.

What About Routines, Goals, etc?

Okay fine. So now our appointments are settled. What about your tasks? Things like laundry day is every Tuesday, or you lift weights Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday, or on the first of the month the dog gets his heartworm medicine? What about the fact that you need to get the guest room ready the week before Thanksgiving and that Christmas shopping needs to be done the second weekend of December?

Do we clutter up our calendar with that? With every little personal task, even if it doesn’t have a set time? No. We do not. The calendar is for events. These are quite different. These will go in your planner.

What kind of planner to choose? Let’s discuss that next.

Paper vs. Digital

But…if you work outside the home (even part time), or manage other projects with a digital aspect to them (such as a small business, homeschooling with an online curriculum, extensive volunteer work where you get lots of emails), I’d encourage you to switch to something digital.

Why a digital tool? Because when tasks are “assigned” to you digitally (you log in to a curriculum and see a lesson plan, you have an order for your business, you have a new volunteer shift request), constantly transferring things over to paper is tedious and doesn’t let you make changes easily. For now, just stay open to the idea of digital. We’ll come back to this.

Other Things That Need To Make It Into Your Daily Plan

Okay. We have our calendar. We have our self-assigned tasks like cleaning and working out. But that’s not all.

• We have emails coming in from school, maybe work, maybe family. Things like “can you bring that baking dish to church for me next week”. You read it, you forget about it. Oops.
• Maybe you use a project management system (Asana, Trello, etc.) for work and it’s assigning you things. Maybe you are an organized person and you use a system like that for homeschooling, or your garden, or planning canning season, raising chicks. Good job, by the way.
• Your Christmas plans and gift ideas.
• You have a meal plan… somewhere. (I actually recommend a physical one so you can put in on your fridge and everyone can see it.)
• We have reminders that we have spoken into our phone that will pop up five minutes before they need to be thought of right now at that very moment!
• Yearly goals and plans we’ve build for our homes.

Due to the realities of our world, most of them are digital, and they are coming from all different directions, and they are overwhelming.

Realizing How Complicated This Is

This is why a planner has never stuck for you, and why all the most beautiful metallic pens in the world can’t save you. You are creating a pretty and inspiring and artistic… hobby… that is not working for everyday life.

A paper method will require you to consult your calendar every week, write down those fixed events onto your weekly planner, and then plan other tasks around them. For a lot of people (including myself, for many years!), this is fine. If you have a simple life without a lot of external demands, I think paper works beautifully.

But if your life feels demanding, something digital will simplify it. And when I say “something” digital, there’s actually one particular tool I recommend. We will get there in a second.

Here is something that has worked for me, and I hope it works for you.

So many people will tell you there’s something about writing things down. And I get that, I think. Your paper loving self can (and should!) keep a daily physical journal. A few pages of free writing every morning does you a world of good in so many ways.

My Method

First, let’s get this out of the way: this tool has a free trial, but there is no free version. It’s $20/ month (less if you pay annually). But there is no good substitute for what it does, really nothing else like it. It will be overkill for some of you!

How It Works

Okay. I’ll show you how I personally use Sunsama, but they have lots of articles and tutorials on their site. The basic idea is it syncs with every other digital tool you use and condenses them into a real plan. Let me show you.

Setting Recurring Tasks For My Personal Routines

First, I build out a sort of “bare minimum” schedule. This has all my recurring tasks that I do on a regular basic. Some are every weekday (my morning routine, evening routine, mid-day clean up), and some are less frequent, like my workout routine, giving the dog his medicine on the first of the month, or making a meal plan every week.

Some of these will have subtasks within them. Like my weekday wakeup ritual has a few chores, a few personal care things, etc. I am able to change it periodically if my routine changes.

Once all of these are set up, it’s easy to see that even when you have “nothing planned” you really do have things planned.

Adding Random Tasks

Of course, you can add a simple one-time task, just like adding things to a to-do list. Easy peasy, just click the plus sign and add it.

Choose an estimated time and what channel it goes to, or don’t.

Adding Calendar Events

Now comes the magic. Once Sunsama is synced with your calendar, it just takes seconds to add scheduled events to your daily tasks. As your drag things over, the time they take is added to that little rectangle at the top of your tasks, which is a running total of how many hours you have scheduled. You can set you ideal work hours or can just use it to see when you’re getting too busy.

If you have multiple digital calendars in your life, that’s fine. It will pull from all of them. It will also sync with Apple reminders so you can drag things you’ve added to your phone into your plan. Yay!

Adding Tasks from Project Management

I use Asana to plan my blogging tasks, like posts I want to write and videos I want to make. And that makes it easy to me to assign things to myself, then pull them into Sunsama and add to my to-do list. I use the free version of Asana and it’s all I need.

Like this:

You can do this daily just for the day ahead, or you can plan ahead and add them to the future, always keeping an eye on that number at the top so you aren’t overworked.

Adding Tasks from Emails

This is one of my favorite parts. I always check my email from my dashboard so I can add emails that need me to do something about them. Otherwise I’ll read them and forget. God forbid I miss that SiriusXM offer, ha.

This will only sync to one email account, but if you have multiples you can set up, there is a workaround. I use Zapier to set up an automation where I star an email from any other email account, it sends a task to Sunsama.

Checking Things off and Making Changes

Once your plan is set, there are two ways to work off of it: a simple to do list (my preference), or a daily calendar view, where you drag your tasks to specific times.

As you complete a task, just check it off. You can hit the small play button when you start and it will time how long it takes you. Sometimes this keeps you focused.

If you don’t get to something, it automatically moves to the next day. If you realize that something isn’t going to happen mid-day, you can have it moved 1 day or 1 week so it’s not sitting there bugging you. The system is designed to be quite flexible.

More Things I Don’t Always Use

You can have Sunsama auto-summarize your day, set goals within the platform, add a backlog of tasks that you pull from (this would work well if you don’t want to use Asana or similar), remind you to do daily and weekly planning, walk you through a shutdown ritual, and other things I can’t even think of.

Final Thoughts on Planning

Please always remember that the goal of planning is have a workable daily plan. You need to combine your routines, goals, projects, events, and emails into a to-do list. How you do it is up to you, but that’s the goal.

Good luck. You have a hard job. You’re doing it well. A plan will be help.