January 2, 2024 • 48 mins
In today's very January-appropriate episode, Laura and Sarah share their favorite organizing tactics for their calendars, household, and ideas! From car clean-outs to content calendars, this episode has it all.
In the Q&A, a listener writes in asking about the logistics of going on a family bike ride with 7 people.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist,
and speaker.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
And this is Sarah hart Unger.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger.
On the side, we are two working parents who love
our careers and our families.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Welcome to Best of both Worlds.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Here we talk about how real women manage work, family,
and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping
out long term career goals. We want you to get
the most out of life.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Welcome to Best of both Worlds. This is Laura.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
This is our first episode of twenty twenty four, So
happy New Year to everyone. We're very excited to start
a new year of best of both worlds. Got a
lot of great content planned over the next twelve months
and hopefully all of you listening now will be along
for the ride, and maybe we'll get some new listeners
along the way for the year as well. So Happy
New Year, Sarah.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Yes, Happy New Year. This is one of my favorite
times of year. So I'm so excited that we are
doing an episode that's a little bit on theme right now.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah, we're going to be talking about how to organize
your life and lots of different domains. But I know
a lot of people listening to this are already kind
of black belt level organizers in your career and your
personal life. So perhaps you won't get anything new for this,
but I think you will, because the truth is, we
can always be more organized. Like I like to think
(01:23):
I'm reasonably good at being organized, Sarah, I know you
are incredibly organized, and yet there's always things that kind
of fall through the crack so that we could do better.
On one recent experience I had was realizing at some
point in mid to late December that my two post
holiday babies, we're going to both want birthday parties. And
(01:46):
it turns out that January is not, in fact a
long way in the future from December, like early January
is only two weeks away from say, mid to late December,
and so all of a sudden, like, oh no, we
didn't do anything and had to last minute plan stuff.
But you know now I know that, and so I
went ahead and put on my calendar for December first,
(02:08):
twenty twenty four to think about what my kids are
going to want to do for their birthdays and to
ask them and thus have the ability to just have
the venue of our choice, as opposed to frantically hoping
that the bouncy house place has a cancelation and stuff
like that.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Love it. I mean, that trick of just pinging yourself
in the easiest way possible, just ready it in your
planner that you know you'll turn to twelve months from now.
Is it is one of my favorites. It's so simple
and yet so effective.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Hello December twenty twenty four, Laura, I hope you're enjoying
planning that birthday party exactly.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
How about you, Sarah?
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Have you had any recent to near missus or things
like that.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
I mean, I thought of two and one is that
I've talked about decluttering nine million times and it's just
not really happening. I'll do one tiny area and then
I'll lose steam. And Yeah, I feel like I'm very
organized with respect to time and tasks, and luckily like
(03:06):
actual things that need to happen aren't falling through the cracks.
But I feel like my space is not serving me
in the way that it could be. And kind of related,
I do feel like, even though I'm able to get
everything done, I'm too close to the edge at all
times and I'd like to work on that. However, I
was reflecting on it, and I'm like, this has been
(03:27):
me since like high school, So I don't entirely know
if my tendency to kind of keep adding without necessarily
subtracting is going anywhere. So maybe I just had to
figure out how to make peace with it and be
happy that even though things have been a little close,
everything has always gotten done, and sometimes my version of
close isn't necessarily as bad as it may seem.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah, I don't think it's the same version of close
that I think many other people would be.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Like, oh, oh, you plan that a long way ahead
of time. I wasn't close at all. Anyway.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
This episode is all about organized in your life in
the new year, about some of our favorite strategies for
managing life in four different domains. We're going to be
talking about schedules, kitchen and meals, household in general meaning
stuff and systems and ideas, so we'll get to all
four of those domains in general, just remembering that complexity
(04:19):
isn't the enemy.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Chaos is.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
So these are all about ways to calm the chaos
so you can make time for what matters and have
a little bit less of your focus on the things
that don't.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
So we'll start with schedules.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
So Sarah, maybe you can talk us through your various
schedule organization, habits, rituals, techniques, and maybe somebody can pick
up something from that.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yeah. So, I mean, this is an area, unlike the
physical space piece where I have very little to add,
this is an area where I do feel like I've
got a really good system. I mean, honestly, to some extent,
this is what a I teach a seven week course
on investilaid plans academy. But I'm going to do the
three version, which is that every morning I look at
(05:03):
my day, I think through any hiccups, look at the
tasks I have, look at my schedule. I have a
calendar that's kind of like ironclad one source of truth,
but also kind of going out from the daily level.
Every week I look at that week ahead and scan
for issues, so I'm less likely to be surprised by
something during any given day, like if the kids have
to be in opposite directions at the same time. And
(05:25):
I do some kind of prioritization at the weekly level,
kind of thinking about what I want to get done
based on larger scale goals. I will say that part
of organizing my schedule actually involves making sure I'm up
to date on email, which in my mind is like
clearing it out, because that is where sometimes things lurk
that have important deadlines or very time sensitive information embedded.
(05:48):
And I find that by making sure that I'm totally
up to date on that before I go plan the
next week, I'm in a better scenario. I use tools
like a whiteboard to just plan our week on the
board so the family knows what is coming up up,
and I also have a larger scale kind of calendar
on paper. I know a lot of people are digital,
but for us, paper is the right tool right now
(06:08):
because Jenvie is not exactly going to be pulling out
her Google calendar app. And then that's I mean, really,
I just have a system at each time horizon to
make sure I know what's coming, and by doing that regularly,
I'm not usually surprised by much, which is great. It
is true that sometimes when you're kind of turning the
calendar page like to a new year, it can get
(06:28):
a little dicey like in your example, but for the
most part, that really helps me know kind of what's
coming and try to deal with any potential chaos and
handle it so that it's just complexity using me also
using your freeze. I will say one thing I don't
tend to organize is a lot of content I find
it with my creativity, like writing my blog posts or
(06:49):
even like thinking about topics for the podcast, both podcasts.
I kind of like it to be as of the
moment as possible. So of course we record episodes ahead
of time, but I just I don't love the idea
of like a whole year or month or something like
scheduled in advance. I like to like kind of catch
as catch can with what feels really fun to talk about.
And you and I are pretty good about, like we
don't schedule our recording sessions a million years in advance
(07:11):
as well, we kind of fit them in a couple
weeks ahead of time just when they need to happen.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Absolutely well.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
We'll get to a little bit more about organizing our
ideas later in the episode and can talk a little
bit more about how each of us do that in.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Terms of schedule.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
My three minute version with Sarah, I think you were
actually two and a half minutes, so.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
You were very concise. We're being efficient here.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
So I plan my upcoming weeks on Thursdays or Fridays,
depending on when works better for me. I generally advocate
doing it at least by Friday, though if people haven't
gotten to it by that point, and I look at
what is coming up and what I need to do
and want to do in three different spheres. Broadly, that's
(07:54):
professionally and personally, but personally encompasses both family and friend relationships,
and then also what I need to do for myself
in terms of my mental, emotional, physical, whatever health. So
that core planning session is when I really think about
what's coming up in the very near future and then
take a slightly more forward glance to stuff that is
(08:17):
coming down the pike in the next few weeks that
is going to need to be addressed. And so I
kind of think of it as like shining a flashlight
into the dark. The stuff that is near you is
relatively well illumined, and stuff that is a little bit
further away is slightly less illumined. And it's kind of funny.
I feel like we're almost always in a kind of
three or four week looking forward cycle, and I don't
(08:39):
know why, that is, but I know what the weekend
dates are, for instance, of the next three to four weeks,
but in the past that it's not as clear to
me unless there's something really big that's happening on a
particular weekend. And so I've pondered, like, why is it
that the forward motion but I don't know it does,
so then you know, also in that time, kind of
(09:00):
try to think about what the people who work with
me should be focusing on. I generally send the upcoming
weekend schedule on Thursday to my husband and my older children,
and I try to leave space to accommodate the kids'
social lives, because I can tell you that teenagers are
(09:20):
not planning their weekends eight to nine days ahead of time.
But usually if I remind them of what's going on
on Thursday, then they can sort of talk with their
friends on Friday and hopefully make plans that fit within that,
and they generally do. I plan the upcoming week's activity
schedule on Fridays, I send that to Michael and our
(09:42):
caregivers who are helping with driving. I print up a
copy for the kids to look at on the counter.
This way, Ruth and Alex really aren't as much in
digital stuff, but they can see it too. And this
is the master schedule of who goes where and when,
includes who drives them. It always gets updated to there's
always a pen near it because it's pretty hard to
(10:02):
anticipate everything that will happen on Thursday and Friday on
the previous Friday, but you're usually pretty close so seldom
has to get completely redone.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Hopefully that was also two and a half minutes, I.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Think, so, yeah, we're going to talk about a few
household rhythms that have been helpful for us in my household.
On weeknights we have I generally am trying to get
Henry down sort of between eight and eight thirties when
that process starts. He's been hard to get down lately
because he's giving up his nap and so when in
(10:35):
the days he does nap, he's up quite late, so
that is not as good as I would like it
to be. But hopefully that will happen in the next
year that he will just be down between eight and
eight thirty. The kids need to be in their rooms
at nine o'clock with no devices. They can't have their
laptops though, because the older children are often doing some
homework during that time. Lights out is at ten. I
(10:59):
enforce that for younger kids. The older ones sometimes are
still finishing up a few things, and I'm not saying
stop doing your social studies homework because I'm not going
to give you five more minutes. Also, at a certain point,
you don't have your mom turn out your light in
any way that isn't forceable if you are old enough
to drive. All right, So exercising, I think it's really
(11:22):
about fitting it in, and I increasingly come to this
as life is during busy seasons. We've just came out
of the holidays. It's not about finding long periods of time.
But it does help to sort of designate a certain
number of windows per week that you know you will
do it. So I always work out with my trainer
on Mondays at twelve thirty pm, so I've got that
in my calendar pretty well blocked unless it's Christmas and
(11:45):
New Years are a Monday, so I need to reschedule
those or I did.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
I guess this is airing in the new year.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
I tend to run on the treadmills on Tuesday and
Thursday morning from roughly six thirty to seven while kids
are getting ready, and I tend to do a longer
run on Saturday mornings, and then just one other thing structurally,
trying to build in a few non working hours with childcare.
(12:13):
So we have a few hours on Saturday that Henry
goes to his Saturday sitters, and also two Fridays a month,
and this has really just opened up a lot of
opportunities for spending more time doing big kid things or
possibly having some date nights. How about you, Sarah, let's
talk a few household rhythms before we go to our break.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, so a very good point about the screen time
and losing control over that at some certain point. For us,
we're still in the portion where I have some well
I basically do have the ability to say we're doing
it now and we're not doing it another time. So
we usually have a rhythm on weekends where they kind
of know not to even like ask me for it
(12:54):
screens specifically until the afternoon, which is nice. I feel
like they've just kind of ingrained that, like we do
something active in the morning and then the afternoon, like
if we're home, we chill. That's kind of like our rhythm.
Yes to the non working hours childcare. For us, it's
not really about weekend coverage, but it's about evenings because
now that I'm a travel sports parent, we just often
(13:17):
have more need for driving than just one person, and
my husband isn't able to reliably make it in the evening.
He does make it sometimes, but again it's not something
I can like count on. And so I mean, our
rhythms are kind of now. Our nanny nos like most
days she picks up the kids at three point thirty
ish and then stays until the driving needs are finished,
(13:37):
and that might be at six, that might be at eight.
It kind of depends on the day. She does come
in earlier at least once a week to do some
housework type stuff and grocery shop et cetera. Well, not
really grocery shop but like prep food as we'll get
to in a later segment. But yeah, so that kind
of works for us. And then I will say for
my exercise, I am as routine driven as it gets
(13:59):
pretty much every kind of normal morning, unless I'm on
vacation or something. I'm usually exercising beginning somewhere between five
thirty and six am, because that is the time I
know won't get messed with, and it's that important to me.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
So absolutely it's important not to have it messed with.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
You want to make sure you've carved out time in
your schedule for things that are important to you. We're
going to take a quick break and we will be
back with more on how to organize your life. Well,
(14:35):
we are back talking about how to organize your life
in the new year. So next pivoting to the realm
of kitchen and meals and broadly I guess this goes
under the household banner, but because it is somewhat separate
from the idea of general household routines with stuff, we
thought we would separate it out. So, Sarah, how is
(14:58):
your family eating and kitchen operating these days?
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Yeah, so, I mean it's evolved based on various seasons
of what's going on kid activity wise, But in terms
of meal planning, almost every week we're either doing prep dish,
which I've talked about before and we've actually think we
had the founder on the podcast, or I do like
a meal kit or I do an old favorites week.
Old favorites tend to be reserved for like, I don't know,
(15:22):
we just want to like the kids are missing some
of their favorites, someone's asked for something, they just want
to eat, tacos, whatever, So it's usually one of those
three things. I typically grocery shoping has changed, which is
why I mentioned our nanny doing it. There was a
time she was doing it, and every once in a
while if we have a crazy weekend, I'll ask her
to shop on Mondays. But I love going to Trader Joe's,
like I actually enjoy it. So usually I go these
(15:43):
days on Sunday and then I make Sunday dinner. That's
the one meal that I typically cook weekly. She helps
by cooking Monday through Thursday, and then usually we do
leftovers or easy stuff on Friday and then take out Saturday.
So that's kind of our rhythm shopping wise. In addition
to my Sunday trip, there sometimes is like a refill bananas.
That's what we tend to always run out of, like
no matter how many I buy midweek, and she's very
(16:06):
good at finding like buy one, get one free deals
at public so I appreciate that, and sometimes she actually
does her own shopping at the same time, so it's
kind of nice. Efficient and dishwasher because you mentioned it,
usually like it does get run every day. I feel
like it has to, Like there's enough eaters in our house.
I can't imagine it not needing to be run every day.
(16:29):
Often she will run it, like in the morning, but
we will empty it because she might be gone by
the time it's done, so that works. That's actually one
of the tours. I oddly don't mind. I think, Laura,
maybe you told me to time it once and it
was like seven minutes, and I'm like, that is just
not a very long time. And the dishes are nice
and warm, like it's not the worst, all right. So
then dinner itself is often in shifts. I've spoken many
(16:50):
times about how most nights we do not do family dinner.
That wasn't what I kind of envisioned as like a
twenty something, But here we are my husband's home late
a lot of the time, the kids have sports, they
have activities, whatever, So Monday through Thursday, there's a lot
of eating in shifts. On Friday night, it's usually meat
and the kids because there are not activities. Typically that night.
Saturday night, it's usually the whole family, unless it's a
(17:11):
date night, so either we're doing takeout or we're all
going out to eat together, which my kids are now
at an age where that's actually pretty fun. And then
Sunday is like our one, like traditional, I'm cooking dinner.
We all sit around the table and I really enjoy that.
And then finally breakfast.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
I don't do anything great. Like I've tried fun things.
I've tried a rotation. I've tried getting them to tell
me the night before what they want. Nothing has really stuck.
So it's kind of just do what you can do quickly.
They do a lot of their own making breakfast and
it I'll often make smoothies. She'll make them for all
three of them. I will say, sometimes I buy some
baked good at Trader Joe's on Sunday so I can
(17:49):
serve it Monday morning, because that's like something slightly more
fun to get out of bed. Or if I'm feeling
really fancy, I'll buy like a muffin mix and then
I'll make super easy muffins, serve those on Monday morning.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
That's about it.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yeah, I love that idea, and I think that's one
I'm going to start implementing in the new year, is
buy something on Sunday. I haven't been going to trade
O Joe's. We have one not that far from here,
well helthough the bridge between us and it is out,
so it's slightly further than it would be. But in
the parking lots nuts but vegan banana bread is something
I could eat too, But you know the yeah, that
would make Monday morning better. Have that with fruit and
(18:22):
that's Monday. I've also found that pancakes are really easier
than I often think they're like. To me, it was like, oh,
that's a big cooked breakfast. It's not like you make
you know, the crusties mix like poor powder in a bowl,
pour water on it, turn on a pan like you've
got pancakes in five minutes or less. So that's an
option I probably do at least once a week with
(18:44):
the kids, and then they tend to make their own
stuff on the other days.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
So yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
In our house, the dishwasher gets run overnight, regardless of
how much stuff isn't it. It was an argument for
a while between me and Michael, because he's like, well,
it's not full, we shouldn't run it. But then the
whole is off and then it doesn't get emptied in
the middle of the day, and so then people are
piling their stuff in the sink, and then you have
twice as much dishes. It feels like you have to
(19:10):
do at night. So just run it, like even if
it's half full, just run it.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
I feel like it must be mostly full.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
You have a lot of eaters too.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
We have a lot of eating. It is almost every
night it's full, but some nights it isn't. And then
when the cycle gets off, it just makes me grumpy.
But he's the one usually starting it at night. So
this is, you know, kind of a discussion we had
at one point. So that's one household cycle that sort
of keeps things from building up. I mean, we almost
always do the dishes immediately after whatever meal they've been doing.
(19:40):
Try to even do dishes while things are being cooked,
Like if a pan is done, get that washed, because otherwise,
again it stacks up. And there's nothing more sort of
discouraging than a giant pile of dishes, like a couple
dishes whatever. You know, you can get through them pretty quickly,
but once it start like stacking up next to the sink,
you can't even fit them in the sink anymore. Then
(20:01):
you feel like you may as well not bother.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
In general, store things near where they are used. We
have actually moved items around to kind of make this
more efficient. Our silverware drawer moved from one place to
another because it was slightly closer to the dishwasher and
was an easier move to put it over there, And
then when you took the silver or container out, it
didn't go in the same place the recycling was, so
(20:29):
it was just it was more efficient to move it.
But everything follows that idea, like pans are in the
drawer under the stove sheet, pans are near the oven,
Coffee cups are in then cupboard over the coffee maker,
and so forth. We have a couple of meal rotations.
We are currently doing pasta mondays, which I like because
(20:50):
pasta is easy. We boil water and cook the pasta.
Adults and some children generally like a more interesting sauce,
and I guess one could spend any amount of time
making a pasta sauce, but we generally just buy rows
orreos however you say it, and then veggie it up
(21:11):
and put other things in it. So we usually put
Italian sausage in it. Maybe spinach, maybe red pepper or
maybe onions makes it a lot more tasty. So anyway,
it's a very easy meal to make. It's really only
like two or three dishes to wash afterwards, and then
no one has to think about Monday, which is good
because Monday is generally a busy day that everyone's getting
(21:33):
back in the swing of things. We're doing make your
own pizza on Thursdays. This used to be Fridays, but
then Friday's got more complicated for various reasons. It's also
a night we might go out with the big kids,
so we moved the pizza to Thursdays, which you know,
generally works better. People are eating more and shift on Thursdays,
and it's pretty easy to put pizza dough in the
oven with sauce and cheese. I make it with no cheese.
(21:57):
It's just sauce and veggie.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
It's good stuff.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
And then our house manager is generally cooking on Wednesdays.
In the past, we've had different meal templates, like we
did breakfast for dinner as a night. Now that's kind
of gotten into a frequent but not weekly kind of rotation.
I think of my back pocket meals like fajitas or
wings and nachos during football season on Saturdays, or surf
and turf sometimes breakfast. I always just fry eggs. I
(22:25):
don't want to think about it for me. The kids
can eat what they want, but I'm frying eggs, and
that's generally how it goes. Michael does a lot of
our grocery shopping on weekends, and then ur Nanny will
do a short shop during the week for whatever we're
out of. I sometimes go to the grocery store just
for fun, to get my own special foods.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
It can be fun, especially if you don't go all
the time, like you get to see the new stuff
that comes out. I love the seasonality of some grocery stores.
Like I mean you also you love Costco? Right, No,
your husband loves Costco. I don't know if it's Costco.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
I actually I decided one weekend our date was going
to be there because I knew he so really wanted
to go there, and I was just like, Okay, we'll
have that be our time we're spending together.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
And it was, you know, we spent time together.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
And then he bought you a Costco diamond necklace and
the super romantic date. I just can't get out of
the fact that they have like jewels there.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
They do, they do have big jewels there. It's kind
of crazy what they sell there. I just, I mean,
we go into this weird Costco mindset where it's very
clear that everything is per unit cheaper, but then you
buy a lot more of it, and so we always
wind up with these somewhat ridiculous like tallies of how
(23:41):
much we have spent there, and it's like, well, because
you bought thirty six organic eggs, but that would have
been twice as much at the regular grocery store. And
we do eventually get through the thirty six eggs, I
mean pretty quickly in fact. So I just, I guess
I just have to get my head or on the
fact that feeding seven people is kind of pricey.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
It is. That's probably true.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
Costco's too much for me, Like, I can't do it.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
It is a little bit overwhelming.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I've tried to go during weekdays sometimes, but it's far
enough away that I don't want to do that, right
because it's like twenty minutes away. You're spending an hour there,
twenty minutes back, twenty minutes unloading. That's it's at least
two hours out of my work day, and I don't
feel like that's probably the best use of my time.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
So we can start a whole discussion about their people's
favorite grocery stores. Let us know what we're getting wrong. No,
I'm just kidding.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Yeah, I like wegmn's, weg Mens is cool, Trader Joe's.
I've may try again if I have good vegan banana.
But we now have a McCaffrey's right by our house,
so that's been exciting.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Hmmm. All right, well enough about food. Although Laura, you
didn't plant this, but Laura has a newsletter called vander Hacks,
and this will have been an old entry by the
time this airs. But my guess is if for you
subscribe via subseac, you can scroll back and read old ones.
And she did a great one today as we're recording this.
(25:00):
Sorry it is a little tiny bit before it airs,
but you get us. And it was so good. It
was all about food and food prep and making your
life easier in the kitchen. I thought she did such
a good job with that. And so if you want
more food discussion from Laura specifically, should subscribe to vander
Hacks and then scroll back to late December and look
for her entry about food.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Well, thank you, Sarah, thanks for that little commercial. I
appreciate it. Pivoting to organizing your household basically kids stuff
and your own stuff and systems for that. Maybe Sarah,
you want to start with that. I guess I was
just talking about the meal stuff.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Well, I have not much to say about this. I
feel like this is an area we are just like
there's like where I want to be and then there's
where we are and there's like a wide chasm. So
I'm just going to share the few things that we
do pretty well. I'm good about cleaning out my own
work bag, like I hate when it just builds up stuff.
So about every week I'll like dump everything out Marie
(25:59):
condo style and like put stuff back in. And I
also will do that about every month or so with
the car, and that's really satisfying. Just be like empty,
I don't mean wash it, but like take all the
kids crap out of it and like clean it up.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Remember we are on a one time a year cadence
of car washing, right, and that are the resolution for
the year.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
Yes, that is the resolution. But you can get rid
of your trash in the car much more frequently than that,
because that is a much lower bar than actually washing
and vacuuming all the surfaces and stuff. I feel like
I'm good about the kids kind of are. They know,
before they get their screen time that I talked about
in the family routines on the weekends, they have to
do like a general cleanup, which doesn't mean that like
(26:38):
the drawers are nice, ha ha, but like at least
it looks, you know, there's not like stuff on the floor.
I'm not going to step on a lego, so that's good.
And I do feel like our hand me downs are
a better game than I would have thought because I
don't do a lot of it. But every so often
Annabelle will just be like this doesn't fit, and Genevieve
will just grab it. And what this results in is
her wearing a lot of oversized clothing. Because they're five
(27:00):
and a half years apart. That's not like a one
size kind of a difference, but it's really cute and honestly,
oversize is in. So I saw genevieven this picture wearing
this like I had bought two of them, one for
anabel and one for Genevieve, probably two years ago at Target,
they were like these little green plaid like holiday dresses,
and I saw Genevieve wearing it and I'm like, okay,
She's like, like it's clearly at least a size too big,
(27:21):
but like she was rocking it, and uh yeah, So
we're pretty good with the hand me downs. And then
in terms of like laundry, it works very well, but
I have like I don't do any of it, so
our nanny does about eighty to ninety percent of it.
She does it pretty much all load every day when
she is not there or on the weekends. My husband
usually does it and I do it like one percent
(27:42):
of the time, and I do so many other things,
so I don't feel too bad about that. It's like
not my favorite. And then in terms of like heavy cleaning,
we do hire a cleaning service every other week. Sometimes
it's less than that because they cancel. That's okay, and
that that seems to be enough to keep things at
least reasonable. But yeah, I would like a more organized household.
(28:05):
I would like to have less stuff in our house.
I actually be happier with like a smaller house, and
then like less stuff in the house, But here we are.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Well you know, you have a good sized house. It's
not you know, too big, not too small, it's just
you know in the middle.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Oh no, it's not a huge house. It's it's not
a giant house. But it's just like I have this
like minimalist ideal that like I am not meeting. But
that's okay.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, well I got to say so when we you know,
earlier in the beginning of twenty twenty three, wound up
hiring this house manager. Her first project was going through
and like decluttering all this stuff. And then I find
it's actually a lot easier to maintain a lot of it.
Once the boxes were out of the kids' rooms, once
(28:52):
there was a spot for everything. Then I'm not saying
it doesn't get slightly disastrous. I mean, some of my
children wind up making it more just ostross than others.
But it's not quite as far away from being picked
up as it would be if things weren't sort of
pared down to what was actively being used. And obviously
(29:14):
systems need to be maintained. There's never a like do
it and forget about it, whatever some decluttering experts would
tell you. But you do smaller projects. So you know,
my two older boys were recently instructed to go through
their stuff and get rid of the clothes that do
not fit them right, And it just meant that there
was a lot less stuff piled up on the floor,
which then there's less stuff piled up on the floor.
(29:37):
Then you know what's actually dirty, Like it mostly makes
its way to the hamper. The cleaning clothes aren't still
on the floor like after you brought them back in
that they haven't put them away because they don't want
to deal with like the overflowing drawer. I mean it
just it creates a nice cycle of it. So I'm
just throwing this out there for anyone that you wouldn't
necessarily have to hire somebody on an ongoing basis if
(29:57):
you didn't want that, but you might want to bring
someone in for some number of hours for a week
or two to jump start this process. That might be
an affordable way to get to the place where then
you could spend less time maintaining it.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
So throwing that out there as an idea.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
I will take that clip and play it for my husband.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Okay, that sounds good.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Speaking of yes organization, we have a pretty well set
up mudroom and this was by design, Like when we
were got renovating this house, one of the first things
we did was like, we need a mudroom, and we
need it with these cubbies and hooks, and then we
need a pantry which is behind the mudroom. So all
that stuff was purposely designed in the renovating of this house,
(30:45):
but because it gets used, I mean that's how we
go in and out of the house. I mean, everything
has to go there are shoes, backpacks, coats, mittens, hats.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
We try not to put too much sports.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Equipment in there because then it gets overwhelming. So mostly
sports equipment goes in a different cli that's a little
bit further away, because usually if you know you're going
to something, you can get your bag that's in the
other closet. But anything that's used daily goes in the mudroom.
Everyone has their own bin for their shoes.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
They do not use.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Them, but the shoes that they are not actively wearing
every single day do wind up in there, right, So
it's only the daily shoes that they're either wearing because
they're out of the house, or it's one pair that's
on the floor, as opposed to ten pairs per person
on the floor, which would be like seventy pairs and
that just would be crazy. We've actually built up a
(31:37):
pretty good hand me down system. We have clear bins
with labels on them with the sizes, and the upside
of that is that Alex is currently getting a lot
of Sam's old shirts. They have sort of a similar
vibe in terms of liking, you know, like I don't
know video gaming related themes, and that Alex has a
(31:59):
number of coat options that were from older children, which
is good because they get misplaced frequently. Sam is wearing
Jasper's old coat. We didn't have to buy a coat
for Henry. He actually has like three options of old
coats he can choose from and lose as the case
may be, and then we have another one as a backup.
We only have to buy boots this year for the
older two boys, and I bought them slightly big, so
(32:21):
I'm hoping I get at least one more year for
each of them out of that, and then Sam can
wear Jaspers and pass them on down. I think we
have pretty much every size now. In terms of picking up,
we pick up the house on Wednesday nights because the
cleaners come on Thursday morning. They do the kitchen every
time and they split the house the other week and
(32:42):
doing the bedrooms one week and then doing some other
areas like the playroom and the living room on the
other week. The result of this is that the kids
need to pick up their rooms every other Wednesday, and
the playroom gets picked up on the other Wednesday. So
that's kind of the cadence of how the picking up
happens around here. We did put labels on Alex and
(33:02):
Henry's drawers, and this is more because, I mean, the
older kids are in charge of their own stuff, right,
but those are the two that other people, and more
than one person are gonna be involved in, like putting
their things away. So it's partly for them. I mean,
Alex can read, so he can see where his stuff is.
Henry obviously cannot. But it might be me, it might
(33:25):
be or nanny, it might be my husband. You know,
there's lots of people who could be putting stuff away
for Henry, and so all of us having a guideline
of where things need to go is actually kind of helpful.
In terms of laundry, our nanny mostly does the kid laundry.
Michael and I each do our own. We do one
load a week for a while, we were doing it
(33:45):
to gather and then it's just like, well we had
too which stuff. It was like we're cramming it into
one load. It's just what's the point and then we
have to separate it out as well. So I'll do it,
and then he'll do it, or he'll do it, then
I'll do it, And yeah, it's actually much more efficient
because then you can just kind of pull your own
stuff out in a basket and don't actually have to
(34:06):
put it away if you don't want to, because nobody
else's stuff is in there. So I will admit that
some weeks that has wound up happening. And then finally,
in terms of organization in the playroom again, lots of
labeled bins, just making it a little bit easier. Like
where do the magnetiles go? Will they go in this bin?
Labeled magnetiles? That's pretty straightforward.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
I have a question, okay, because I think you're actually
much more relaxed than the average person about a lot
of this stuff. Do you be cause you mentioned the
kids like picking up every other Wednesday, So like is
the stuff in the bins every day? Or are you're like, oh,
I don't care and then like every once in a while,
the stuff goes in the bins.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Like, yeah, it goes in the bins every other Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
I think that's a really critical piece for people listening
to this.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Okay, yeah, oh yeah, it's not in there every night.
I don't I don't want to do it every night.
I'd be spending my entire life clean up the playroom.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Well no, but Instagram, Instagram and the like are selling
this vision of like a house that is like perfectly
picked up in every room, like before you go to
bed or like that. That's like, oh no, some sort
of standard, And I think both of us I would
love that standard, but I recognize it's not possible. And
I don't even think you care about that standard. And
(35:22):
so sometimes when people ask about, like how do you
keep up with everything? I think they miss the fact
that you actually do not focus on having things look
pristine on like a daily basis, Like they're functional, They're
super functional.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Yeah, I would. I would say that's true.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
I mean there are exceptions to that, in the sense
of like some common areas in the house I do
try to keep relatively picked up. I also we have
some counters in the kitchen that I do my best
to push all stuff. I mean, paperwork binds up, building up,
but I put it to one pile on one of
the counters and then try to enforce with the children
(36:02):
and my husband and everyone else that the other counter
stays clear, like it needs to be clear like once
a day, partly because otherwise it just stuff attracts other stuff.
And next thing you know, you have dirty dishes from
two days ago on top of somebody else's permission slip.
That's you know, next to someone's socks that they put
on the counter, like please, like why did you put
socks on the counter.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
To sort of.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Help with that problem, I put a hamper on the
first floor, right next to the kitchen with a sign
saying dirty clothes to go upstairs, right, And that is
where if you feel the need to take off your hoodie,
your socks, whatever else on the first floor, you put
your stuff in there right as opposed to leaving it
(36:45):
all over my counter, which makes me very crabby when
there is stuff all over my counter. Yeah, I would
say it's a mix because the playroom I don't have
to walk through all the time, right, Like it's up
on the third floor. It is like a converted attic,
so it's not like I'm walking through there on a
daily basis, like as I'm trying to go to sleep
or go to my home office. So it doesn't bother
me that that is not picked up. Once every two
(37:07):
weeks is enough to make sure that it's not overwhelming.
But when I came home from Best Laid Plans Live,
there was a pile I swear six inches thick on
my kitchen counter and it made me so unhappy that
(37:28):
I was just like, because clearly nobody else was maintaining
it in my absence. I was like, that's I guess
what I spend my time putting away is making sure
that that stays at us.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
I think the big takeaway tip here is like, figure
out which pieces of your home you want to have
like a really frequent cadence of clearance, and which pieces
maybe you can be at peace with less. So because
that is less overwhelming than thinking my house has to
be like an Instagram picture, Oh.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Yeah all the time.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah, So I have one countertop that would be instagram
worthy and then other things are a lot less. So
I aspire to keep my home office more organized. And
we're actually recording this on a Thursday, And it was
the thursday when the cleaners are here for that particular
part of the house, and they cleaned up my office
and I'm like, wow, it's actually looks really nice. I
didn't think they were going to do that, but they did.
(38:17):
I think all the paperwork is just in one pile
on my desk. I guess I better check that. But yeah,
make your peace with certain things and then other things.
You can just be on a cadence of regular but
not constant pick up if.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
That makes sense. Love it.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
So, ideas, why don't we get back to the ideas
you started talking about this a little of how you
organize like your blog post ideas and your best laid
plans ideas or if you're going to introduce something into
your courses. I mean, maybe you can talk a little
bit about how you keep track of all that.
Speaker 3 (38:53):
Yeah, all of that stuff, like all of it is
in Apple notes, like that is my searchable, like if
I to say so. Tiago Forte is a writer who
wrote a book that I haven't read yet but I purchased,
called Building Your Second Brain. I like the concept.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
I find books are really helpful when you purchase them.
But don't read them.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
It's right there for me to go through after my
current nonfiction read. But no, no, no, I love the
idea of a second brain. I've heard the book maybe
gets really in the weeds about technique, but I mean, honestly,
just the concept of it like resonates with me. And
I will say my second brain is apple Notes, like
well and Gmail. Gmail's like my long term memory storage,
and then apple Notes is my like projects I'm working on.
(39:34):
So I do keep like all my podcast stuff, all
the ad stuff, all the you know, when I'm brainstorming something,
it goes in there. I put my goals lists in there.
I put tickets in there when I get like those
little mobile tickets in email. But I don't want to
have to like pull it off on email. Just take
a screenshot, dump it, copy paste it right into Apple Notes.
My kids' health forms that I have to come up
with that data again and again, Like how many times
(39:55):
does somebody want to know when my kids last TETNIS
shot is? I can find it. It's in Apple Notes
travel stuff, like I have folders for all of those things,
and it's that's like I would say, that's how I
organize my ideas, but also just having a regular cadence
or review of stuff coming in email, what's up whatever,
like whatever it is that it is. I like to
kind of have everything cleared out by the end of
(40:17):
the week if I can. Sometimes it goes two weeks.
It's kind of like the equivalent of like my playroom
the email. Sometimes, like I can just as long as
I know it's going to get done, then that's fine,
but I do want it to be done. And then
I have the world's most basic, stupid organizing tip, which
is I haven't used bookmarks, like online bookmarks, Like I
(40:38):
just never like got into that. I don't know, like
bookmarks seem like they were for someone else or something.
But I've noticed the frequency of like Google drive docs
or like sheets or something like that, and you can
bookmark that page just like any other website. And now
I don't have to like search inside of sheets every
time I want to find like our ad schedule or
(40:59):
something like that, I can just click my bookmark and
there it comes. And that's been kind of revolutionary. It
saves a whole couple steps. So I'm into bookmarks.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Bookmarks are good. Bookmarks are good.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
I'll put a real shout out here for emailing yourself.
I think this is another very simple, like not complicated
at all. Probably everyone thinks to do it, but maybe
some people don't. Because you always have your phone with you.
So if you're out somewhere, like if you're running, and
you're like, oh, I have an idea for this, you
can pause, pull out your phone, send yourself an email
(41:33):
about it, and then keep going. And the thing about
your email is I am guessing that most people listening
to this do in fact process your primary inbox on
some sort of regular schedule, right that whether you get
to Current once a week or once a day or
whatever it is you're doing, you will in fact see
(41:54):
an email that you send to yourself. And especially if
you have a time where you're doing email processing to
get to Current, that you're sitting at your desk and
you've got your calendar, got whatever other resources you have,
you can then act on that email. So it's a
way to be sure that you will get that idea
at a time that you can act on it. You know,
(42:15):
you can also put things on your calendar for random dates.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
This is another.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Pretty simple but good way to trigger your brain to
remember it in the future is that if you know,
come December you're going to need to think about birthday parties,
then simply put it on your calendar for any date
in December. It doesn't mean I'm going to plan my kids'
birthday parties on December first, but whatever I'm doing that week,
I will see that entry and I will probably put
(42:40):
it on my to do list for the next week,
right and then it will be in that active processing
part of my brain. So you know, that's another really
really simple, basic thing, but you.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Know it was worth doing.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
I do sort of content calendars just because I'm trying
to keep track of a lot of different I mean,
between the Vanderha newsletter, between Before Breakfast episodes.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
But it's not like I.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Really have a whole huge list of future ideas somewhere,
because when you have to come up with this, many
things don't linger in the future pile very long. You're
just like, okay, that's a workable idea. It's going on
the calendar. So those are kind of the active idea
generation places too. There's not some separate idea for it.
They just get used as soon as they come up
(43:27):
with them.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Well, if it makes you feel better, all of the
things we talked about that are upcoming in twenty twenty four,
for best of both Worlds and Patreon are safely living
in Apple notes, so I can find them at any time.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Excellent.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
They are in Sarah's Apple notes, which is maybe that's
my third brain. I don't know, need some accessory brains here,
all right, So Sarah, why don't you read the question
since I guess it's for me.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
Sure, this is a very practical organizing adjacent question, specifically
for Laura, I have no input. Okay, when your family
does a bike ride, what as logistics for getting all
the bikes to the place where you will ride. We
still have one on training wheels and are so close
to being able to take a real family big bike ride.
Me too, And I'm not sure about the logistics of
(44:11):
transporting the five bikes. We do have a minivan and
I've put the three kid bikes in the back of
that before. But what about the adult bikes. Do you
use one of those things where you attached bikes to
the back of the car, and if so, any specific recommendations.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
Yes, absolutely, we use one of those things that you
attached to the back of the car. So a couple
of years ago. I'm well maybe almost like a decade ago. Now.
We put a hitch on the back of like attachment
on the back of my Acura so that you can
then stick on this. It's Fool as the brand of
bike rack. I mean it's you don't have to keep
(44:45):
it on all the time obviously, because then you'd never
be able to open your trunk. But you put it
on and it can fold up so it's up, and
then put the bikes on it, and when the bikes
aren't on it, you can fold it down so you
can open your trunk. But that's what we attach most
of the bikes too. I think one we have you
can get five bikes on, So that would be something
that you could just look into doing just like that, right,
(45:05):
you know, you'd get the if your minivan doesn't have
a hitch, get one put on and something that just
a car shop could do, and then get the fool.
It comes with the little rubber things to safely securely
attach your bike on there. You can also just put
a bike clock on there as well. In addition to that,
you know, if you're parking somewhere where the bikes will
still be there when you're not using them. We probably
(45:26):
want to invest in a bike clock as well that
is compatible with that. But you know, given that you
said you can get three bikes into the back of
the minivan and I guess still have your kids in
the minivan with you, then you can also just could
get a smaller bike rack too that would hold two
adult bikes. There's probably some that are a little bit
less substantial if you are not going to need to
transport five bikes on something. So but for us, it
(45:49):
actually takes two cars because you can put five bikes
on a rack, you can't put seven bikes on the rack.
So and also we've had people in kid related bike
things like the Burly and the tag Along, and it
turns out that you can't put seven people in a
car and put the Burley in there. You have to
fold down the back seat. So it's a two car
(46:10):
trip for us.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
But that's okay.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
I mean, if we're all doing it together, there's not
really a problem of driving two cars to whatever location
we're going to. So yeah, that's how we do it. Amazing,
all right, Love the Week, Love of the week. So
I got to say storage space. So I have lived
in much smaller places. But one of the reasons we
(46:37):
wound up leaving New York we needed more space when
we were having a third kid, and I realized that
our stuff had filled every available storage space and there's
some amount you can pare it down. And I know
people live in small apartments with ten kids or something.
I mean, people make it work, right, But it was
just feeling like it was so hard to keep it clean,
(46:57):
to get things put away, and so just having a
second closet where the off season sports stuff can go
to keep the mudroom cleaner like it just, I don't know,
it makes life feel a.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
Little bit less chaotic. So my love of the week
is storage space. I'm a big fan.
Speaker 3 (47:17):
Well mine is nothing related to this episode, but I
kind of say hot beverages are so nice and so cozy,
and since we did talk about Trader Jos a whole lot,
I will shout out to the orange Roybos tea, which
probably will only be around for a month or so
because that's how they are, but it's really nice. It's orange.
I don't think there's caffein because I think Roybos is
capeine free and it's just super cozy. So I recommend.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
Awesome sounds yummy.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been
talking about how to organize your life in twenty twenty four.
Hopefully got at least one tip or idea that you
haven't tried before. We will be back next week with
more on making work and life fit together.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the
shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on it and.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
You can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please
join us next time for more on making work and
life work together.
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist,
and speaker.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
And this is Sarah hart Unger.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger.
On the side, we are two working parents who love
our careers and our families.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Welcome to Best of both Worlds.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Here we talk about how real women manage work, family,
and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping
out long term career goals. We want you to get
the most out of life.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Welcome to Best of both Worlds. This is Laura.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
This is our first episode of twenty twenty four, So
happy New Year to everyone. We're very excited to start
a new year of best of both worlds. Got a
lot of great content planned over the next twelve months
and hopefully all of you listening now will be along
for the ride, and maybe we'll get some new listeners
along the way for the year as well. So Happy
New Year, Sarah.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Yes, Happy New Year. This is one of my favorite
times of year. So I'm so excited that we are
doing an episode that's a little bit on theme right now.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah, we're going to be talking about how to organize
your life and lots of different domains. But I know
a lot of people listening to this are already kind
of black belt level organizers in your career and your
personal life. So perhaps you won't get anything new for this,
but I think you will, because the truth is, we
can always be more organized. Like I like to think
(01:23):
I'm reasonably good at being organized, Sarah, I know you
are incredibly organized, and yet there's always things that kind
of fall through the crack so that we could do better.
On one recent experience I had was realizing at some
point in mid to late December that my two post
holiday babies, we're going to both want birthday parties. And
(01:46):
it turns out that January is not, in fact a
long way in the future from December, like early January
is only two weeks away from say, mid to late December,
and so all of a sudden, like, oh no, we
didn't do anything and had to last minute plan stuff.
But you know now I know that, and so I
went ahead and put on my calendar for December first,
(02:08):
twenty twenty four to think about what my kids are
going to want to do for their birthdays and to
ask them and thus have the ability to just have
the venue of our choice, as opposed to frantically hoping
that the bouncy house place has a cancelation and stuff
like that.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Love it. I mean, that trick of just pinging yourself
in the easiest way possible, just ready it in your
planner that you know you'll turn to twelve months from now.
Is it is one of my favorites. It's so simple
and yet so effective.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Hello December twenty twenty four, Laura, I hope you're enjoying
planning that birthday party exactly.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
How about you, Sarah?
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Have you had any recent to near missus or things
like that.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
I mean, I thought of two and one is that
I've talked about decluttering nine million times and it's just
not really happening. I'll do one tiny area and then
I'll lose steam. And Yeah, I feel like I'm very
organized with respect to time and tasks, and luckily like
(03:06):
actual things that need to happen aren't falling through the cracks.
But I feel like my space is not serving me
in the way that it could be. And kind of related,
I do feel like, even though I'm able to get
everything done, I'm too close to the edge at all
times and I'd like to work on that. However, I
was reflecting on it, and I'm like, this has been
(03:27):
me since like high school, So I don't entirely know
if my tendency to kind of keep adding without necessarily
subtracting is going anywhere. So maybe I just had to
figure out how to make peace with it and be
happy that even though things have been a little close,
everything has always gotten done, and sometimes my version of
close isn't necessarily as bad as it may seem.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah, I don't think it's the same version of close
that I think many other people would be.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Like, oh, oh, you plan that a long way ahead
of time. I wasn't close at all. Anyway.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
This episode is all about organized in your life in
the new year, about some of our favorite strategies for
managing life in four different domains. We're going to be
talking about schedules, kitchen and meals, household in general meaning
stuff and systems and ideas, so we'll get to all
four of those domains in general, just remembering that complexity
(04:19):
isn't the enemy.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Chaos is.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
So these are all about ways to calm the chaos
so you can make time for what matters and have
a little bit less of your focus on the things
that don't.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
So we'll start with schedules.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
So Sarah, maybe you can talk us through your various
schedule organization, habits, rituals, techniques, and maybe somebody can pick
up something from that.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yeah. So, I mean, this is an area, unlike the
physical space piece where I have very little to add,
this is an area where I do feel like I've
got a really good system. I mean, honestly, to some extent,
this is what a I teach a seven week course
on investilaid plans academy. But I'm going to do the
three version, which is that every morning I look at
(05:03):
my day, I think through any hiccups, look at the
tasks I have, look at my schedule. I have a
calendar that's kind of like ironclad one source of truth,
but also kind of going out from the daily level.
Every week I look at that week ahead and scan
for issues, so I'm less likely to be surprised by
something during any given day, like if the kids have
to be in opposite directions at the same time. And
(05:25):
I do some kind of prioritization at the weekly level,
kind of thinking about what I want to get done
based on larger scale goals. I will say that part
of organizing my schedule actually involves making sure I'm up
to date on email, which in my mind is like
clearing it out, because that is where sometimes things lurk
that have important deadlines or very time sensitive information embedded.
(05:48):
And I find that by making sure that I'm totally
up to date on that before I go plan the
next week, I'm in a better scenario. I use tools
like a whiteboard to just plan our week on the
board so the family knows what is coming up up,
and I also have a larger scale kind of calendar
on paper. I know a lot of people are digital,
but for us, paper is the right tool right now
(06:08):
because Jenvie is not exactly going to be pulling out
her Google calendar app. And then that's I mean, really,
I just have a system at each time horizon to
make sure I know what's coming, and by doing that regularly,
I'm not usually surprised by much, which is great. It
is true that sometimes when you're kind of turning the
calendar page like to a new year, it can get
(06:28):
a little dicey like in your example, but for the
most part, that really helps me know kind of what's
coming and try to deal with any potential chaos and
handle it so that it's just complexity using me also
using your freeze. I will say one thing I don't
tend to organize is a lot of content I find
it with my creativity, like writing my blog posts or
(06:49):
even like thinking about topics for the podcast, both podcasts.
I kind of like it to be as of the
moment as possible. So of course we record episodes ahead
of time, but I just I don't love the idea
of like a whole year or month or something like
scheduled in advance. I like to like kind of catch
as catch can with what feels really fun to talk about.
And you and I are pretty good about, like we
don't schedule our recording sessions a million years in advance
(07:11):
as well, we kind of fit them in a couple
weeks ahead of time just when they need to happen.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Absolutely well.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
We'll get to a little bit more about organizing our
ideas later in the episode and can talk a little
bit more about how each of us do that in.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Terms of schedule.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
My three minute version with Sarah, I think you were
actually two and a half minutes, so.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
You were very concise. We're being efficient here.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
So I plan my upcoming weeks on Thursdays or Fridays,
depending on when works better for me. I generally advocate
doing it at least by Friday, though if people haven't
gotten to it by that point, and I look at
what is coming up and what I need to do
and want to do in three different spheres. Broadly, that's
(07:54):
professionally and personally, but personally encompasses both family and friend relationships,
and then also what I need to do for myself
in terms of my mental, emotional, physical, whatever health. So
that core planning session is when I really think about
what's coming up in the very near future and then
take a slightly more forward glance to stuff that is
(08:17):
coming down the pike in the next few weeks that
is going to need to be addressed. And so I
kind of think of it as like shining a flashlight
into the dark. The stuff that is near you is
relatively well illumined, and stuff that is a little bit
further away is slightly less illumined. And it's kind of funny.
I feel like we're almost always in a kind of
three or four week looking forward cycle, and I don't
(08:39):
know why, that is, but I know what the weekend
dates are, for instance, of the next three to four weeks,
but in the past that it's not as clear to
me unless there's something really big that's happening on a
particular weekend. And so I've pondered, like, why is it
that the forward motion but I don't know it does,
so then you know, also in that time, kind of
(09:00):
try to think about what the people who work with
me should be focusing on. I generally send the upcoming
weekend schedule on Thursday to my husband and my older children,
and I try to leave space to accommodate the kids'
social lives, because I can tell you that teenagers are
(09:20):
not planning their weekends eight to nine days ahead of time.
But usually if I remind them of what's going on
on Thursday, then they can sort of talk with their
friends on Friday and hopefully make plans that fit within that,
and they generally do. I plan the upcoming week's activity
schedule on Fridays, I send that to Michael and our
(09:42):
caregivers who are helping with driving. I print up a
copy for the kids to look at on the counter.
This way, Ruth and Alex really aren't as much in
digital stuff, but they can see it too. And this
is the master schedule of who goes where and when,
includes who drives them. It always gets updated to there's
always a pen near it because it's pretty hard to
(10:02):
anticipate everything that will happen on Thursday and Friday on
the previous Friday, but you're usually pretty close so seldom
has to get completely redone.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Hopefully that was also two and a half minutes, I.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Think, so, yeah, we're going to talk about a few
household rhythms that have been helpful for us in my household.
On weeknights we have I generally am trying to get
Henry down sort of between eight and eight thirties when
that process starts. He's been hard to get down lately
because he's giving up his nap and so when in
(10:35):
the days he does nap, he's up quite late, so
that is not as good as I would like it
to be. But hopefully that will happen in the next
year that he will just be down between eight and
eight thirty. The kids need to be in their rooms
at nine o'clock with no devices. They can't have their
laptops though, because the older children are often doing some
homework during that time. Lights out is at ten. I
(10:59):
enforce that for younger kids. The older ones sometimes are
still finishing up a few things, and I'm not saying
stop doing your social studies homework because I'm not going
to give you five more minutes. Also, at a certain point,
you don't have your mom turn out your light in
any way that isn't forceable if you are old enough
to drive. All right, So exercising, I think it's really
(11:22):
about fitting it in, and I increasingly come to this
as life is during busy seasons. We've just came out
of the holidays. It's not about finding long periods of time.
But it does help to sort of designate a certain
number of windows per week that you know you will
do it. So I always work out with my trainer
on Mondays at twelve thirty pm, so I've got that
in my calendar pretty well blocked unless it's Christmas and
(11:45):
New Years are a Monday, so I need to reschedule
those or I did.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
I guess this is airing in the new year.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
I tend to run on the treadmills on Tuesday and
Thursday morning from roughly six thirty to seven while kids
are getting ready, and I tend to do a longer
run on Saturday mornings, and then just one other thing structurally,
trying to build in a few non working hours with childcare.
(12:13):
So we have a few hours on Saturday that Henry
goes to his Saturday sitters, and also two Fridays a month,
and this has really just opened up a lot of
opportunities for spending more time doing big kid things or
possibly having some date nights. How about you, Sarah, let's
talk a few household rhythms before we go to our break.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Yeah, so a very good point about the screen time
and losing control over that at some certain point. For us,
we're still in the portion where I have some well
I basically do have the ability to say we're doing
it now and we're not doing it another time. So
we usually have a rhythm on weekends where they kind
of know not to even like ask me for it
(12:54):
screens specifically until the afternoon, which is nice. I feel
like they've just kind of ingrained that, like we do
something active in the morning and then the afternoon, like
if we're home, we chill. That's kind of like our rhythm.
Yes to the non working hours childcare. For us, it's
not really about weekend coverage, but it's about evenings because
now that I'm a travel sports parent, we just often
(13:17):
have more need for driving than just one person, and
my husband isn't able to reliably make it in the evening.
He does make it sometimes, but again it's not something
I can like count on. And so I mean, our
rhythms are kind of now. Our nanny nos like most
days she picks up the kids at three point thirty
ish and then stays until the driving needs are finished,
(13:37):
and that might be at six, that might be at eight.
It kind of depends on the day. She does come
in earlier at least once a week to do some
housework type stuff and grocery shop et cetera. Well, not
really grocery shop but like prep food as we'll get
to in a later segment. But yeah, so that kind
of works for us. And then I will say for
my exercise, I am as routine driven as it gets
(13:59):
pretty much every kind of normal morning, unless I'm on
vacation or something. I'm usually exercising beginning somewhere between five
thirty and six am, because that is the time I
know won't get messed with, and it's that important to me.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
So absolutely it's important not to have it messed with.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
You want to make sure you've carved out time in
your schedule for things that are important to you. We're
going to take a quick break and we will be
back with more on how to organize your life. Well,
(14:35):
we are back talking about how to organize your life
in the new year. So next pivoting to the realm
of kitchen and meals and broadly I guess this goes
under the household banner, but because it is somewhat separate
from the idea of general household routines with stuff, we
thought we would separate it out. So, Sarah, how is
(14:58):
your family eating and kitchen operating these days?
Speaker 3 (15:02):
Yeah, so, I mean it's evolved based on various seasons
of what's going on kid activity wise, But in terms
of meal planning, almost every week we're either doing prep dish,
which I've talked about before and we've actually think we
had the founder on the podcast, or I do like
a meal kit or I do an old favorites week.
Old favorites tend to be reserved for like, I don't know,
(15:22):
we just want to like the kids are missing some
of their favorites, someone's asked for something, they just want
to eat, tacos, whatever, So it's usually one of those
three things. I typically grocery shoping has changed, which is
why I mentioned our nanny doing it. There was a
time she was doing it, and every once in a
while if we have a crazy weekend, I'll ask her
to shop on Mondays. But I love going to Trader Joe's,
like I actually enjoy it. So usually I go these
(15:43):
days on Sunday and then I make Sunday dinner. That's
the one meal that I typically cook weekly. She helps
by cooking Monday through Thursday, and then usually we do
leftovers or easy stuff on Friday and then take out Saturday.
So that's kind of our rhythm shopping wise. In addition
to my Sunday trip, there sometimes is like a refill bananas.
That's what we tend to always run out of, like
no matter how many I buy midweek, and she's very
(16:06):
good at finding like buy one, get one free deals
at public so I appreciate that, and sometimes she actually
does her own shopping at the same time, so it's
kind of nice. Efficient and dishwasher because you mentioned it,
usually like it does get run every day. I feel
like it has to, Like there's enough eaters in our house.
I can't imagine it not needing to be run every day.
(16:29):
Often she will run it, like in the morning, but
we will empty it because she might be gone by
the time it's done, so that works. That's actually one
of the tours. I oddly don't mind. I think, Laura,
maybe you told me to time it once and it
was like seven minutes, and I'm like, that is just
not a very long time. And the dishes are nice
and warm, like it's not the worst, all right. So
then dinner itself is often in shifts. I've spoken many
(16:50):
times about how most nights we do not do family dinner.
That wasn't what I kind of envisioned as like a
twenty something, But here we are my husband's home late
a lot of the time, the kids have sports, they
have activities, whatever, So Monday through Thursday, there's a lot
of eating in shifts. On Friday night, it's usually meat
and the kids because there are not activities. Typically that night.
Saturday night, it's usually the whole family, unless it's a
(17:11):
date night, so either we're doing takeout or we're all
going out to eat together, which my kids are now
at an age where that's actually pretty fun. And then
Sunday is like our one, like traditional, I'm cooking dinner.
We all sit around the table and I really enjoy that.
And then finally breakfast.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
I don't do anything great. Like I've tried fun things.
I've tried a rotation. I've tried getting them to tell
me the night before what they want. Nothing has really stuck.
So it's kind of just do what you can do quickly.
They do a lot of their own making breakfast and
it I'll often make smoothies. She'll make them for all
three of them. I will say, sometimes I buy some
baked good at Trader Joe's on Sunday so I can
(17:49):
serve it Monday morning, because that's like something slightly more
fun to get out of bed. Or if I'm feeling
really fancy, I'll buy like a muffin mix and then
I'll make super easy muffins, serve those on Monday morning.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
That's about it.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Yeah, I love that idea, and I think that's one
I'm going to start implementing in the new year, is
buy something on Sunday. I haven't been going to trade
O Joe's. We have one not that far from here,
well helthough the bridge between us and it is out,
so it's slightly further than it would be. But in
the parking lots nuts but vegan banana bread is something
I could eat too, But you know the yeah, that
would make Monday morning better. Have that with fruit and
(18:22):
that's Monday. I've also found that pancakes are really easier
than I often think they're like. To me, it was like, oh,
that's a big cooked breakfast. It's not like you make
you know, the crusties mix like poor powder in a bowl,
pour water on it, turn on a pan like you've
got pancakes in five minutes or less. So that's an
option I probably do at least once a week with
(18:44):
the kids, and then they tend to make their own
stuff on the other days.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
So yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
In our house, the dishwasher gets run overnight, regardless of
how much stuff isn't it. It was an argument for
a while between me and Michael, because he's like, well,
it's not full, we shouldn't run it. But then the
whole is off and then it doesn't get emptied in
the middle of the day, and so then people are
piling their stuff in the sink, and then you have
twice as much dishes. It feels like you have to
(19:10):
do at night. So just run it, like even if
it's half full, just run it.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
I feel like it must be mostly full.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
You have a lot of eaters too.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
We have a lot of eating. It is almost every
night it's full, but some nights it isn't. And then
when the cycle gets off, it just makes me grumpy.
But he's the one usually starting it at night. So
this is, you know, kind of a discussion we had
at one point. So that's one household cycle that sort
of keeps things from building up. I mean, we almost
always do the dishes immediately after whatever meal they've been doing.
(19:40):
Try to even do dishes while things are being cooked,
Like if a pan is done, get that washed, because otherwise,
again it stacks up. And there's nothing more sort of
discouraging than a giant pile of dishes, like a couple
dishes whatever. You know, you can get through them pretty quickly,
but once it start like stacking up next to the sink,
you can't even fit them in the sink anymore. Then
(20:01):
you feel like you may as well not bother.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
In general, store things near where they are used. We
have actually moved items around to kind of make this
more efficient. Our silverware drawer moved from one place to
another because it was slightly closer to the dishwasher and
was an easier move to put it over there, And
then when you took the silver or container out, it
didn't go in the same place the recycling was, so
(20:29):
it was just it was more efficient to move it.
But everything follows that idea, like pans are in the
drawer under the stove sheet, pans are near the oven,
Coffee cups are in then cupboard over the coffee maker,
and so forth. We have a couple of meal rotations.
We are currently doing pasta mondays, which I like because
(20:50):
pasta is easy. We boil water and cook the pasta.
Adults and some children generally like a more interesting sauce,
and I guess one could spend any amount of time
making a pasta sauce, but we generally just buy rows
orreos however you say it, and then veggie it up
(21:11):
and put other things in it. So we usually put
Italian sausage in it. Maybe spinach, maybe red pepper or
maybe onions makes it a lot more tasty. So anyway,
it's a very easy meal to make. It's really only
like two or three dishes to wash afterwards, and then
no one has to think about Monday, which is good
because Monday is generally a busy day that everyone's getting
(21:33):
back in the swing of things. We're doing make your
own pizza on Thursdays. This used to be Fridays, but
then Friday's got more complicated for various reasons. It's also
a night we might go out with the big kids,
so we moved the pizza to Thursdays, which you know,
generally works better. People are eating more and shift on Thursdays,
and it's pretty easy to put pizza dough in the
oven with sauce and cheese. I make it with no cheese.
(21:57):
It's just sauce and veggie.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
It's good stuff.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
And then our house manager is generally cooking on Wednesdays.
In the past, we've had different meal templates, like we
did breakfast for dinner as a night. Now that's kind
of gotten into a frequent but not weekly kind of rotation.
I think of my back pocket meals like fajitas or
wings and nachos during football season on Saturdays, or surf
and turf sometimes breakfast. I always just fry eggs. I
(22:25):
don't want to think about it for me. The kids
can eat what they want, but I'm frying eggs, and
that's generally how it goes. Michael does a lot of
our grocery shopping on weekends, and then ur Nanny will
do a short shop during the week for whatever we're
out of. I sometimes go to the grocery store just
for fun, to get my own special foods.
Speaker 3 (22:47):
It can be fun, especially if you don't go all
the time, like you get to see the new stuff
that comes out. I love the seasonality of some grocery stores.
Like I mean you also you love Costco? Right, No,
your husband loves Costco. I don't know if it's Costco.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
I actually I decided one weekend our date was going
to be there because I knew he so really wanted
to go there, and I was just like, Okay, we'll
have that be our time we're spending together.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
And it was, you know, we spent time together.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
And then he bought you a Costco diamond necklace and
the super romantic date. I just can't get out of
the fact that they have like jewels there.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
They do, they do have big jewels there. It's kind
of crazy what they sell there. I just, I mean,
we go into this weird Costco mindset where it's very
clear that everything is per unit cheaper, but then you
buy a lot more of it, and so we always
wind up with these somewhat ridiculous like tallies of how
(23:41):
much we have spent there, and it's like, well, because
you bought thirty six organic eggs, but that would have
been twice as much at the regular grocery store. And
we do eventually get through the thirty six eggs, I
mean pretty quickly in fact. So I just, I guess
I just have to get my head or on the
fact that feeding seven people is kind of pricey.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
It is. That's probably true.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
Costco's too much for me, Like, I can't do it.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
It is a little bit overwhelming.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
I've tried to go during weekdays sometimes, but it's far
enough away that I don't want to do that, right
because it's like twenty minutes away. You're spending an hour there,
twenty minutes back, twenty minutes unloading. That's it's at least
two hours out of my work day, and I don't
feel like that's probably the best use of my time.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
So we can start a whole discussion about their people's
favorite grocery stores. Let us know what we're getting wrong. No,
I'm just kidding.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Yeah, I like wegmn's, weg Mens is cool, Trader Joe's.
I've may try again if I have good vegan banana.
But we now have a McCaffrey's right by our house,
so that's been exciting.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Hmmm. All right, well enough about food. Although Laura, you
didn't plant this, but Laura has a newsletter called vander Hacks,
and this will have been an old entry by the
time this airs. But my guess is if for you
subscribe via subseac, you can scroll back and read old ones.
And she did a great one today as we're recording this.
(25:00):
Sorry it is a little tiny bit before it airs,
but you get us. And it was so good. It
was all about food and food prep and making your
life easier in the kitchen. I thought she did such
a good job with that. And so if you want
more food discussion from Laura specifically, should subscribe to vander
Hacks and then scroll back to late December and look
for her entry about food.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Well, thank you, Sarah, thanks for that little commercial. I
appreciate it. Pivoting to organizing your household basically kids stuff
and your own stuff and systems for that. Maybe Sarah,
you want to start with that. I guess I was
just talking about the meal stuff.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Well, I have not much to say about this. I
feel like this is an area we are just like
there's like where I want to be and then there's
where we are and there's like a wide chasm. So
I'm just going to share the few things that we
do pretty well. I'm good about cleaning out my own
work bag, like I hate when it just builds up stuff.
So about every week I'll like dump everything out Marie
(25:59):
condo style and like put stuff back in. And I
also will do that about every month or so with
the car, and that's really satisfying. Just be like empty,
I don't mean wash it, but like take all the
kids crap out of it and like clean it up.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Remember we are on a one time a year cadence
of car washing, right, and that are the resolution for
the year.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
Yes, that is the resolution. But you can get rid
of your trash in the car much more frequently than that,
because that is a much lower bar than actually washing
and vacuuming all the surfaces and stuff. I feel like
I'm good about the kids kind of are. They know,
before they get their screen time that I talked about
in the family routines on the weekends, they have to
do like a general cleanup, which doesn't mean that like
(26:38):
the drawers are nice, ha ha, but like at least
it looks, you know, there's not like stuff on the floor.
I'm not going to step on a lego, so that's good.
And I do feel like our hand me downs are
a better game than I would have thought because I
don't do a lot of it. But every so often
Annabelle will just be like this doesn't fit, and Genevieve
will just grab it. And what this results in is
her wearing a lot of oversized clothing. Because they're five
(27:00):
and a half years apart. That's not like a one
size kind of a difference, but it's really cute and honestly,
oversize is in. So I saw genevieven this picture wearing
this like I had bought two of them, one for
anabel and one for Genevieve, probably two years ago at Target,
they were like these little green plaid like holiday dresses,
and I saw Genevieve wearing it and I'm like, okay,
She's like, like it's clearly at least a size too big,
(27:21):
but like she was rocking it, and uh yeah, So
we're pretty good with the hand me downs. And then
in terms of like laundry, it works very well, but
I have like I don't do any of it, so
our nanny does about eighty to ninety percent of it.
She does it pretty much all load every day when
she is not there or on the weekends. My husband
usually does it and I do it like one percent
(27:42):
of the time, and I do so many other things,
so I don't feel too bad about that. It's like
not my favorite. And then in terms of like heavy cleaning,
we do hire a cleaning service every other week. Sometimes
it's less than that because they cancel. That's okay, and
that that seems to be enough to keep things at
least reasonable. But yeah, I would like a more organized household.
(28:05):
I would like to have less stuff in our house.
I actually be happier with like a smaller house, and
then like less stuff in the house, But here we are.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Well you know, you have a good sized house. It's
not you know, too big, not too small, it's just
you know in the middle.
Speaker 3 (28:23):
Oh no, it's not a huge house. It's it's not
a giant house. But it's just like I have this
like minimalist ideal that like I am not meeting. But
that's okay.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, well I got to say so when we you know,
earlier in the beginning of twenty twenty three, wound up
hiring this house manager. Her first project was going through
and like decluttering all this stuff. And then I find
it's actually a lot easier to maintain a lot of it.
Once the boxes were out of the kids' rooms, once
(28:52):
there was a spot for everything. Then I'm not saying
it doesn't get slightly disastrous. I mean, some of my
children wind up making it more just ostross than others.
But it's not quite as far away from being picked
up as it would be if things weren't sort of
pared down to what was actively being used. And obviously
(29:14):
systems need to be maintained. There's never a like do
it and forget about it, whatever some decluttering experts would
tell you. But you do smaller projects. So you know,
my two older boys were recently instructed to go through
their stuff and get rid of the clothes that do
not fit them right, And it just meant that there
was a lot less stuff piled up on the floor,
which then there's less stuff piled up on the floor.
(29:37):
Then you know what's actually dirty, Like it mostly makes
its way to the hamper. The cleaning clothes aren't still
on the floor like after you brought them back in
that they haven't put them away because they don't want
to deal with like the overflowing drawer. I mean it
just it creates a nice cycle of it. So I'm
just throwing this out there for anyone that you wouldn't
necessarily have to hire somebody on an ongoing basis if
(29:57):
you didn't want that, but you might want to bring
someone in for some number of hours for a week
or two to jump start this process. That might be
an affordable way to get to the place where then
you could spend less time maintaining it.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
So throwing that out there as an idea.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
I will take that clip and play it for my husband.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Okay, that sounds good.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Speaking of yes organization, we have a pretty well set
up mudroom and this was by design, Like when we
were got renovating this house, one of the first things
we did was like, we need a mudroom, and we
need it with these cubbies and hooks, and then we
need a pantry which is behind the mudroom. So all
that stuff was purposely designed in the renovating of this house,
(30:45):
but because it gets used, I mean that's how we
go in and out of the house. I mean, everything
has to go there are shoes, backpacks, coats, mittens, hats.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
We try not to put too much sports.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Equipment in there because then it gets overwhelming. So mostly
sports equipment goes in a different cli that's a little
bit further away, because usually if you know you're going
to something, you can get your bag that's in the
other closet. But anything that's used daily goes in the mudroom.
Everyone has their own bin for their shoes.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
They do not use.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Them, but the shoes that they are not actively wearing
every single day do wind up in there, right, So
it's only the daily shoes that they're either wearing because
they're out of the house, or it's one pair that's
on the floor, as opposed to ten pairs per person
on the floor, which would be like seventy pairs and
that just would be crazy. We've actually built up a
(31:37):
pretty good hand me down system. We have clear bins
with labels on them with the sizes, and the upside
of that is that Alex is currently getting a lot
of Sam's old shirts. They have sort of a similar
vibe in terms of liking, you know, like I don't
know video gaming related themes, and that Alex has a
(31:59):
number of coat options that were from older children, which
is good because they get misplaced frequently. Sam is wearing
Jasper's old coat. We didn't have to buy a coat
for Henry. He actually has like three options of old
coats he can choose from and lose as the case
may be, and then we have another one as a backup.
We only have to buy boots this year for the
older two boys, and I bought them slightly big, so
(32:21):
I'm hoping I get at least one more year for
each of them out of that, and then Sam can
wear Jaspers and pass them on down. I think we
have pretty much every size now. In terms of picking up,
we pick up the house on Wednesday nights because the
cleaners come on Thursday morning. They do the kitchen every
time and they split the house the other week and
(32:42):
doing the bedrooms one week and then doing some other
areas like the playroom and the living room on the
other week. The result of this is that the kids
need to pick up their rooms every other Wednesday, and
the playroom gets picked up on the other Wednesday. So
that's kind of the cadence of how the picking up
happens around here. We did put labels on Alex and
(33:02):
Henry's drawers, and this is more because, I mean, the
older kids are in charge of their own stuff, right,
but those are the two that other people, and more
than one person are gonna be involved in, like putting
their things away. So it's partly for them. I mean,
Alex can read, so he can see where his stuff is.
Henry obviously cannot. But it might be me, it might
(33:25):
be or nanny, it might be my husband. You know,
there's lots of people who could be putting stuff away
for Henry, and so all of us having a guideline
of where things need to go is actually kind of helpful.
In terms of laundry, our nanny mostly does the kid laundry.
Michael and I each do our own. We do one
load a week for a while, we were doing it
(33:45):
to gather and then it's just like, well we had
too which stuff. It was like we're cramming it into
one load. It's just what's the point and then we
have to separate it out as well. So I'll do it,
and then he'll do it, or he'll do it, then
I'll do it, And yeah, it's actually much more efficient
because then you can just kind of pull your own
stuff out in a basket and don't actually have to
(34:06):
put it away if you don't want to, because nobody
else's stuff is in there. So I will admit that
some weeks that has wound up happening. And then finally,
in terms of organization in the playroom again, lots of
labeled bins, just making it a little bit easier. Like
where do the magnetiles go? Will they go in this bin?
Labeled magnetiles? That's pretty straightforward.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
I have a question, okay, because I think you're actually
much more relaxed than the average person about a lot
of this stuff. Do you be cause you mentioned the
kids like picking up every other Wednesday, So like is
the stuff in the bins every day? Or are you're like, oh,
I don't care and then like every once in a while,
the stuff goes in the bins.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Like, yeah, it goes in the bins every other Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
I think that's a really critical piece for people listening
to this.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
Okay, yeah, oh yeah, it's not in there every night.
I don't I don't want to do it every night.
I'd be spending my entire life clean up the playroom.
Speaker 3 (35:01):
Well no, but Instagram, Instagram and the like are selling
this vision of like a house that is like perfectly
picked up in every room, like before you go to
bed or like that. That's like, oh no, some sort
of standard, And I think both of us I would
love that standard, but I recognize it's not possible. And
I don't even think you care about that standard. And
(35:22):
so sometimes when people ask about, like how do you
keep up with everything? I think they miss the fact
that you actually do not focus on having things look
pristine on like a daily basis, Like they're functional, They're
super functional.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Yeah, I would. I would say that's true.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
I mean there are exceptions to that, in the sense
of like some common areas in the house I do
try to keep relatively picked up. I also we have
some counters in the kitchen that I do my best
to push all stuff. I mean, paperwork binds up, building up,
but I put it to one pile on one of
the counters and then try to enforce with the children
(36:02):
and my husband and everyone else that the other counter
stays clear, like it needs to be clear like once
a day, partly because otherwise it just stuff attracts other stuff.
And next thing you know, you have dirty dishes from
two days ago on top of somebody else's permission slip.
That's you know, next to someone's socks that they put
on the counter, like please, like why did you put
socks on the counter.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
To sort of.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Help with that problem, I put a hamper on the
first floor, right next to the kitchen with a sign
saying dirty clothes to go upstairs, right, And that is
where if you feel the need to take off your hoodie,
your socks, whatever else on the first floor, you put
your stuff in there right as opposed to leaving it
(36:45):
all over my counter, which makes me very crabby when
there is stuff all over my counter. Yeah, I would
say it's a mix because the playroom I don't have
to walk through all the time, right, Like it's up
on the third floor. It is like a converted attic,
so it's not like I'm walking through there on a
daily basis, like as I'm trying to go to sleep
or go to my home office. So it doesn't bother
me that that is not picked up. Once every two
(37:07):
weeks is enough to make sure that it's not overwhelming.
But when I came home from Best Laid Plans Live,
there was a pile I swear six inches thick on
my kitchen counter and it made me so unhappy that
(37:28):
I was just like, because clearly nobody else was maintaining
it in my absence. I was like, that's I guess
what I spend my time putting away is making sure
that that stays at us.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
I think the big takeaway tip here is like, figure
out which pieces of your home you want to have
like a really frequent cadence of clearance, and which pieces
maybe you can be at peace with less. So because
that is less overwhelming than thinking my house has to
be like an Instagram picture, Oh.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Yeah all the time.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah, So I have one countertop that would be instagram
worthy and then other things are a lot less. So
I aspire to keep my home office more organized. And
we're actually recording this on a Thursday, And it was
the thursday when the cleaners are here for that particular
part of the house, and they cleaned up my office
and I'm like, wow, it's actually looks really nice. I
didn't think they were going to do that, but they did.
(38:17):
I think all the paperwork is just in one pile
on my desk. I guess I better check that. But yeah,
make your peace with certain things and then other things.
You can just be on a cadence of regular but
not constant pick up if.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
That makes sense. Love it.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
So, ideas, why don't we get back to the ideas
you started talking about this a little of how you
organize like your blog post ideas and your best laid
plans ideas or if you're going to introduce something into
your courses. I mean, maybe you can talk a little
bit about how you keep track of all that.
Speaker 3 (38:53):
Yeah, all of that stuff, like all of it is
in Apple notes, like that is my searchable, like if
I to say so. Tiago Forte is a writer who
wrote a book that I haven't read yet but I purchased,
called Building Your Second Brain. I like the concept.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
I find books are really helpful when you purchase them.
But don't read them.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
It's right there for me to go through after my
current nonfiction read. But no, no, no, I love the
idea of a second brain. I've heard the book maybe
gets really in the weeds about technique, but I mean, honestly,
just the concept of it like resonates with me. And
I will say my second brain is apple Notes, like
well and Gmail. Gmail's like my long term memory storage,
and then apple Notes is my like projects I'm working on.
(39:34):
So I do keep like all my podcast stuff, all
the ad stuff, all the you know, when I'm brainstorming something,
it goes in there. I put my goals lists in there.
I put tickets in there when I get like those
little mobile tickets in email. But I don't want to
have to like pull it off on email. Just take
a screenshot, dump it, copy paste it right into Apple Notes.
My kids' health forms that I have to come up
with that data again and again, Like how many times
(39:55):
does somebody want to know when my kids last TETNIS
shot is? I can find it. It's in Apple Notes
travel stuff, like I have folders for all of those things,
and it's that's like I would say, that's how I
organize my ideas, but also just having a regular cadence
or review of stuff coming in email, what's up whatever,
like whatever it is that it is. I like to
kind of have everything cleared out by the end of
(40:17):
the week if I can. Sometimes it goes two weeks.
It's kind of like the equivalent of like my playroom
the email. Sometimes, like I can just as long as
I know it's going to get done, then that's fine,
but I do want it to be done. And then
I have the world's most basic, stupid organizing tip, which
is I haven't used bookmarks, like online bookmarks, Like I
(40:38):
just never like got into that. I don't know, like
bookmarks seem like they were for someone else or something.
But I've noticed the frequency of like Google drive docs
or like sheets or something like that, and you can
bookmark that page just like any other website. And now
I don't have to like search inside of sheets every
time I want to find like our ad schedule or
(40:59):
something like that, I can just click my bookmark and
there it comes. And that's been kind of revolutionary. It
saves a whole couple steps. So I'm into bookmarks.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Bookmarks are good. Bookmarks are good.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
I'll put a real shout out here for emailing yourself.
I think this is another very simple, like not complicated
at all. Probably everyone thinks to do it, but maybe
some people don't. Because you always have your phone with you.
So if you're out somewhere, like if you're running, and
you're like, oh, I have an idea for this, you
can pause, pull out your phone, send yourself an email
(41:33):
about it, and then keep going. And the thing about
your email is I am guessing that most people listening
to this do in fact process your primary inbox on
some sort of regular schedule, right that whether you get
to Current once a week or once a day or
whatever it is you're doing, you will in fact see
(41:54):
an email that you send to yourself. And especially if
you have a time where you're doing email processing to
get to Current, that you're sitting at your desk and
you've got your calendar, got whatever other resources you have,
you can then act on that email. So it's a
way to be sure that you will get that idea
at a time that you can act on it. You know,
(42:15):
you can also put things on your calendar for random dates.
Speaker 1 (42:18):
This is another.
Speaker 2 (42:20):
Pretty simple but good way to trigger your brain to
remember it in the future is that if you know,
come December you're going to need to think about birthday parties,
then simply put it on your calendar for any date
in December. It doesn't mean I'm going to plan my kids'
birthday parties on December first, but whatever I'm doing that week,
I will see that entry and I will probably put
(42:40):
it on my to do list for the next week,
right and then it will be in that active processing
part of my brain. So you know, that's another really
really simple, basic thing, but you.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
Know it was worth doing.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
I do sort of content calendars just because I'm trying
to keep track of a lot of different I mean,
between the Vanderha newsletter, between Before Breakfast episodes.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
But it's not like I.
Speaker 2 (43:05):
Really have a whole huge list of future ideas somewhere,
because when you have to come up with this, many
things don't linger in the future pile very long. You're
just like, okay, that's a workable idea. It's going on
the calendar. So those are kind of the active idea
generation places too. There's not some separate idea for it.
They just get used as soon as they come up
(43:27):
with them.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Well, if it makes you feel better, all of the
things we talked about that are upcoming in twenty twenty four,
for best of both Worlds and Patreon are safely living
in Apple notes, so I can find them at any time.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Excellent.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
They are in Sarah's Apple notes, which is maybe that's
my third brain. I don't know, need some accessory brains here,
all right, So Sarah, why don't you read the question
since I guess it's for me.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
Sure, this is a very practical organizing adjacent question, specifically
for Laura, I have no input. Okay, when your family
does a bike ride, what as logistics for getting all
the bikes to the place where you will ride. We
still have one on training wheels and are so close
to being able to take a real family big bike ride.
Me too, And I'm not sure about the logistics of
(44:11):
transporting the five bikes. We do have a minivan and
I've put the three kid bikes in the back of
that before. But what about the adult bikes. Do you
use one of those things where you attached bikes to
the back of the car, and if so, any specific recommendations.
Speaker 2 (44:24):
Yes, absolutely, we use one of those things that you
attached to the back of the car. So a couple
of years ago. I'm well maybe almost like a decade ago. Now.
We put a hitch on the back of like attachment
on the back of my Acura so that you can
then stick on this. It's Fool as the brand of
bike rack. I mean it's you don't have to keep
(44:45):
it on all the time obviously, because then you'd never
be able to open your trunk. But you put it
on and it can fold up so it's up, and
then put the bikes on it, and when the bikes
aren't on it, you can fold it down so you
can open your trunk. But that's what we attach most
of the bikes too. I think one we have you
can get five bikes on, So that would be something
that you could just look into doing just like that, right,
(45:05):
you know, you'd get the if your minivan doesn't have
a hitch, get one put on and something that just
a car shop could do, and then get the fool.
It comes with the little rubber things to safely securely
attach your bike on there. You can also just put
a bike clock on there as well. In addition to that,
you know, if you're parking somewhere where the bikes will
still be there when you're not using them. We probably
(45:26):
want to invest in a bike clock as well that
is compatible with that. But you know, given that you
said you can get three bikes into the back of
the minivan and I guess still have your kids in
the minivan with you, then you can also just could
get a smaller bike rack too that would hold two
adult bikes. There's probably some that are a little bit
less substantial if you are not going to need to
transport five bikes on something. So but for us, it
(45:49):
actually takes two cars because you can put five bikes
on a rack, you can't put seven bikes on the rack.
So and also we've had people in kid related bike
things like the Burly and the tag Along, and it
turns out that you can't put seven people in a
car and put the Burley in there. You have to
fold down the back seat. So it's a two car
(46:10):
trip for us.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
But that's okay.
Speaker 2 (46:13):
I mean, if we're all doing it together, there's not
really a problem of driving two cars to whatever location
we're going to. So yeah, that's how we do it. Amazing,
all right, Love the Week, Love of the week. So
I got to say storage space. So I have lived
in much smaller places. But one of the reasons we
(46:37):
wound up leaving New York we needed more space when
we were having a third kid, and I realized that
our stuff had filled every available storage space and there's
some amount you can pare it down. And I know
people live in small apartments with ten kids or something.
I mean, people make it work, right, But it was
just feeling like it was so hard to keep it clean,
(46:57):
to get things put away, and so just having a
second closet where the off season sports stuff can go
to keep the mudroom cleaner like it just, I don't know,
it makes life feel a.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
Little bit less chaotic. So my love of the week
is storage space. I'm a big fan.
Speaker 3 (47:17):
Well mine is nothing related to this episode, but I
kind of say hot beverages are so nice and so cozy,
and since we did talk about Trader Jos a whole lot,
I will shout out to the orange Roybos tea, which
probably will only be around for a month or so
because that's how they are, but it's really nice. It's orange.
I don't think there's caffein because I think Roybos is
capeine free and it's just super cozy. So I recommend.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
Awesome sounds yummy.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been
talking about how to organize your life in twenty twenty four.
Hopefully got at least one tip or idea that you
haven't tried before. We will be back next week with
more on making work and life fit together.
Speaker 3 (47:53):
Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the
shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on it and.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
You can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please
join us next time for more on making work and
life work together.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.