Tackle it Tuesday: The Big Board   

February 26, 2008 | 11 Comments

Shauntelle over at A Beautiful Abode suggested that I should join the Tackle It Tuesday meme, so here goes. My big project this week is the Big Board. I tried to get pictures, but it’s kinda hard to photograph something transparent, so I’ll just give you the quick rundown.

I’m a very visual person. I need to see everything going on, for my own mental health. If I can’t see it, I’m likely to forget about it, and that usually has consequences. Bad consequences. So there’s the background for this project. There’s a lot going on in this family, and I need to be able to see it all at once.

I have my household notebook, but it’s simply not big enough to show me everything at once. I decided what I really needed was a really big whiteboard - ideally about 3′ x 4′. I could go bigger, but that’s the size of the wall space I can devote to this. When I priced out whiteboards of that size at the office store, well….I decided that household organization probably isn’t worth a week’s worth of groceries for the family. So - it’s time to get creative.

Step 1. Get a big sheet of plexiglass. I spent $19.95 for a sheet that measures 3′ x 4′ at the local home improvement warehouse. While you’re there, pick up some picture wire and some strong wall hooks. I’m using Hercules Hooks because they’re rated to 150 lbs. and don’t need to be drilled into a stud.

Step 2. Drill two holes at the top corners of the plexiglass.

Step 3. Thread the picture wire through the holes and knot securely on the back side.

Step 4. Put the Hercules Hooks into the wall so they line up nice and straight.

Step 5. Hang the Big Board.

Not too hard, huh? The great part is, plexiglass takes dry erase markers perfectly. They erase better than real whiteboards do, I think. There’s no scrubbing, and no ghost lines left if you leave something up for a week or more.

Now, I have a different color for each member of the family, an area where I list out what I need to do each day for about a week, and a brainstorming area for - well, brainstorms, notes to self (or others!), and general mind dumping.

We’ve had this up for about 10 days now, and the family has already learned that if they need me to know about something, they write it on the Big Board. If it’s not on the Big Board, I don’t know about it and I’m not responsible for remembering it!

So there you go. My first Tackle It Tuesday post. Here’s to plenty more!

The Weakest Link   

February 22, 2008 | Comments

We’ve all heard the phrase “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” Well, this week I made a very revealing discovery. When it comes to keeping a household running smoothly, there are two basic methods:

• The CEO method, in which there is one primary person in charge of keeping the whole system running smoothly.
• The Co-Op method, in which everyone has responsibility for some part of the system, and enough knowledge of the rest of the system to step in if one person is unavailable.

Wanna take a quick guess as to which method most of us use?

In our house, I’m the organized one. I accept that. I’m really good at planning, organizing, and coming up with new ways of getting things done. I’m also only one person, and a pretty average one at that. I don’t have some extraordinary gift for squeezing 25 hours out of the day.

My family is generally good about helping out - as long as I tell them exactly what I need done, and give them a deadline to have it done by. Unfortunately, when I got sick early this week and ended up spending three days essentially on bedrest, everything ground to a screeching halt. Literally. By Wednesday evening, the family ate frozen pizza off of paper plates. (Not that there’s anything wrong with either frozen pizza or paper plates on occasion!) Laundry hasn’t been done since Monday. Don’t ask about the shortcuts we’ve taken in homeschooling this week!

The CEO method of household management has its benefits - you have a single point of contact for household management questions, and well, sometimes management by committee just doesn’t work.

If several members of your family are good at organizing and managing, the Co-op method might just work for you - one person is responsible for laundry, another deals with meals, someone else does the planning.

It’s a great idea, but a pure Co-op method won’t work in our family so we need a hybrid approach. And we have a hard deadline to implement it - if I’m still occupying the corner office in this household when the baby arrives in May . . . I don’t want to see the chaos I’ll come home to!

So here’s the plan.

I’m expanding upon my current household notebook, and will document a lot of the processes that I “just know” right now - like the stuff that I know goes on every week’s grocery list, and how long we can let dishes or laundry go before nobody can eat or get dressed. The overall goal here is to ensure than when/if I am gone for several days at a time, the entire household won’t grind to a halt again.

Wish me luck! This isn’t a small project, and I’ll post progress here as I go along.