Balancing being a working mom is something that has been difficult for me ever since my daughter was born. Having to maintain a household on top of that was extra stress and while I am fortunate enough to have someone come clean and help with laundry every other week, I still have to handle the day-to-day pieces of life, such as emptying the dishwasher, vacuuming the floor, organizing my closet, and making sure dinner is on the table. Over the last two years I have found myself overly stressed with figuring out how to get it all done.
That’s where Fly Lady came in. I first learned about her and TikTok through one of my favorite accounts, Rosa Picosa. Rosa is a mom of two who, at the time, was following the Fly Lady Method of keeping the home maintained and the amount of overwhelm mom‘s experience low. I downloaded the free app and the rest was history.
The Fly Lady method tracks small habits daily, weekly, and monthly. On a day-to-day basis there’s a morning routine, afternoon routine, and evening routine, to keep the home running smoothly. Some of the things in these routines include making sure your teeth are brushed (I can’t tell you how many times I forgot to do this as a new mom), figuring out what’s for dinner before it’s actually dinner time, and making time for yourself to exercise and do your skin care routine. The daily tasks help me from keeping any one thing from piling up and causing me stress. For example, you do one load of laundry per day. However, I don’t have a load of laundry to do every day, but I do have it most days and this prevents me from having to spend Sunday doing five or six loads.
The weekly tasks are known as The Home Blessing. These are things that really need to be done weekly throughout your home and it’s a good strategy to keep them from being built up and causing, again, more stress. Are you sensing a theme here? This includes vacuuming, mopping the floors, washing your bedsheets and taking out the trash. There are also weekly rotating zones. These are areas that don’t need to be cleaned every week, but should be cleaned on a monthly basis. For example, the zone this week is the kitchen. I cleaned out my fridge and freezer, got them organized, scrubbed the stove, organized my junk drawer, and a couple other necessities in the kitchen.
Having these checklists really helps me to reduce the overwhelm and decision fatigue I deal with on a daily basis. I don’t have to think about what to do next in order to keep my house in order; I just open the app and figure it out. Another thing I love about Fly Lady is she doesn’t expect you to spend all day cleaning. She encourages you to set a timer for just 15 minutes and spend 15 minutes focused on tidying up and another 15 minutes focused on the zone. As far as the weekly home blessing, people do it differently based on what works for them. I try to do it all in one day, however some people will do one task per day and that works for them. I highly recommend checking out the app if you are struggling to find the right way to take care of your household and are feeling overwhelmed on a daily basis. My day-to-day stress has reduced greatly since following this method and I hope it can help you too.
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