Goal 40: Make a home management notebook

I love the idea of organization. I spend lots of time reading blogs, magazines and books about how to organize and have collected thousands (really thousands!) of tips about organizing. But I also have a secret. I am not very organized.

I am really good at collecting tips and designing new ways to be organized. But when it comes to maintaining things I am pretty darn lazy not very good. This was the problem with any home management book I have devised until now.


The idea behind a home management book (or Control Journal) is pretty good. It is supposed to be a binder in which the primary homekeeper stores any and all resources that they use to maintain a home. Many people include routines, cleaning schedules, meal plans and other forms and resources. Just google "home management binder" and you will find many examples. Many are cute, informative, and seem like they would be really handy. Except for me there is one problem. Making things cute can go on forever, and as soon as I would get one thing printed I would think of a better way to use it. You don't know how many times I actually bought a form or collection of cute forms from a company, only to think of a little tweak that would make it better and then spend half a day completely designing my own customized image. I am a genius when it comes to pages and layouts. But I never actually used the book!!

Until one day I read about how Leo Babauta organizes his personal computer. And I realized that I simply needed to make my computer's Finder into my home management notebook. I have organized my Documents folder into 3 categories: 2Home Management Binder, 3Read (which includes all my e-books) and 4Archive (which are things I want to keep but I don't reference very often).

Then I have organized my 2Home Management Binder folder into categories I would have included into my paper home management binder. The picture above is a screen shot of this.

This has been working out wonderfully for me as I no longer worry about printing off tons of different forms only to not use them, or worse decide just a few minutes later that I want to change them. It changes right along with me! Ah, sometimes life can be so simple.

In the next post I will discuss further details about what is actually in these folders! Do you have a certain way you like to organize your computer?