- Check your child’s school bag for paper letters or your email account for emails from school
- Take photos of school letters on your phone or stick on pinboard if you need to refer to them at a later date
- Make a note of all relevant dates and mark your calendar straightaway
- Prepare as much as possible the night before for the following morning
- Have a place for all of the children’s hobby / extracurricular activity equipment
- Have a dedicated basket for gloves, woolly hats and scarves in the winter and sunhats and sun cream in the summer.
- Occasionally let your children listen to an audio book for a bedtime story.
- Replace fabric sofas and carpets in the living area with leather sofas and laminate flooring for ease of cleaning.
- Plan meals at least one week in advance and cook in batches for the freezer.
- Allow each family member to choose their favourite meal to eat, as long as it is not too time-consuming to prepare.
- Assign light household tasks to your children as soon as they are old enough, age 4+
- Only wash children’s clothes / school uniforms when dirty. Clothes can often be worn for a second day.
- Tidy the house as you go along. If a job takes 2 to 3 minutes or less to do, do it straight away, i.e. make your bed as soon as you get up.
- Have a box for each family member into which you place any possessions of theirs left around the house
- Buy your shopping in bulk – especially non-perishables – where your budget and living space allows.
- Stock up on birthday cards and birthday presents in advance if you have young children. You will also be able to save money on 3 for 2 offers and similar.
- Before giving young children stickers to play with, peel off the negative space first to allow the stickers to be peeled off more quickly.
- Have a tune which you only play at tidy-up time so that children will automatically know to tidy up when it is played.
- If your children wear school uniform, buy slightly different styles of sock for each child, i.e. plain and ribbed, so that you know which socks belong to whom.
- Store duvet sets inside their respective pillowcases.
- Keep a jar of small change handy.
- Have a whiteboard where members of the family can write down which groceries need replenishing when they see they are running low.
- Organise your food cupboards so that similar food items are stored together.
- Keep up to date with laundry and only iron where necessary
- Keep keys, phones and purses / wallets in one place
- Multitask while speaking on the phone or watching TV if possible
