Turn Your Entryway Into a Command Center
Create a clever shoe solution. Keeping your shoes by the door ensures that on busy mornings, the left shoe isn’t in the bedroom while the right shoe somehow ended up in the playroom. However, shoes can quickly pile up into a mess of their own. If there’s space in your entryway, cubbies or labeled storage bins are a great solution to make sure each kid has a designated spot for their shoes. If you don’t have storage space by the door, a wall-mounted coat rack is a great workaround. Install the rack close to the floor and have your kids hang their shoes on the hooks when they come in. To your battle stations, everyone! Make sure each member of your family has a designated spot to put their belongings in the command center, including you. Sure, you might not have homework to keep track of, but what about your keys? Your parent battle station can include a bowl for keys, a tray for new mail, and a calendar to help you monitor your weekly schedule at a glance. Organizing your entryway won’t magically make school mornings stress-free unless you consistently utilize the system.
“Has anyone seen my backpack?” “Dad, did you sign my permission slip?” “Mom, I can’t find my shoes!”
This is the household anthem heard on school mornings across the United States — a chaotic rush of tracking down shoes, throwing together lunches, and racing to the bus stop. What if there were a stress-free way to make sure everyone in your family had everything they needed to walk out the door each morning? Believe it or not, it’s possible! And it all starts with turning your home’s entryway into an organized command center. Get hooked on coat racks. Building an entryway command center starts with coat racks. You should have enough hooks for every member of your family to hang their jackets, backpacks, and purses. It’s also good to have some extra hooks just in case. Get your family in the habit of hanging their belongings in the entryway rather than trailing them through the house.
Kids will need to build the habits of leaving their shoes by the door and returning their backpacks to the hooks after they do their homework. So stick to the plan, be patient, and take it one day at a time.
BY ORGANIZING YOUR DOCUMENTS
their desk, inside a filing cabinet, or locked away in a safe. No matter where you keep this information, the most essential question to ask yourself is this: Can I access this information quickly and accurately? Proper organization and storage, as well as taking the time to eliminate clutter, are very beneficial when it comes to these types of documents. Staying organized not only allows you to access needed information quickly, but it can also help reduce the
stress and anxiety caused by replacing important paperwork or spending hours searching for it.
To help get you started, here are a few tips you can follow to organize your documents:
August kicks off with Simply Your Life Week, which makes this a great time to get some things in order. Simplifying our lives means more than going through the closet, decluttering our living rooms, and getting rid of the things we don’t use anymore. The goal of simplifying is to make things easier on us as we live our daily lives, but it can help us in the future as well. It’s important to have your important documents at hand and to know where you find them in your home. These include your Social Security card, birth certificate, passport, a will or trust, power of attorney, medical records, and other such information that you may need in an emergency or certain situations. In many instances, some people keep all these documents tucked away in a folder on
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Sort through your documents and decide what to keep and what to toss.
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Destroy any outdated information you have, such as bank statements that are 3 years or older or tax returns that are 7 years or older. Store your documents using a method you’re comfortable with and that works best for you. This could be physical storage in your office or digital storage on the cloud.
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Take some time this month to sit down and go through your information. The time and effort you put into it will pay off in the future.
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