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Love Your Home!     

Your home is your castle - or is it? How do you feel when you step through the door and arrive into your home? Do you experience feelings of comfort and relief or do you feel stressed and anxious? By taking a few steps to make your home life systems easier and more streamlined, you can begin to take charge and conquer those stressful feelings.

1. Harness the paper: Kids with school forms, papers you brought home from work, mail, store flyers, and the list goes on. The key is to have a good sorting station designated in a central spot. Trays or baskets can be labeled for kids, mail, flyers... you get the idea. Place the appropriate papers  in the right tray and teach the kids to take responsibility for emptying their backpacks and sorting their own papers.
2. Become the Queen (or King) of delegation: Teenagers in the home who now have drivers licenses can be assigned a once-a-month grocery run. Arm them with a shopping list and a pre-paid debit card or cash and send them on their way. If you have more than one driving teenager, let them take turns. Two teens each doing one weekly grocery session can really save you time, plus they will learn about budgeting and making smart food choices!
3. Automate assembly lines: Just imagine if Ford had to build their cars one at a time - why should you make all your meals that way? Pick one day in the week to set up your own station for prepping kids lunches - assemble and bag any foods that don't need to be prepared fresh, then label with the date and child's name. Pick one other day to cook and bake a number of one-dish dinners for the entire week. When you get home, just re-heat!
4. Embrace technology: Encourage your kids that have cell phones to communicate with you via text which can save a lot of running around and reduce your anxiety. Know where they are, when they need to be picked up, and share your online family calendars so that everyone is synchronized and there are no surprises about who is going where, when and with whom.

When you arrive home, knowing that things are going to run smoothly because the kids can put their papers away, you have a well-stocked pantry, your dinner is pre-cooked, and you don't have any last minute surprises, you will feel that sense of comfort and relief upon entering the door of your home, or should I say your castle.

 Read more ideas on organizing your living space ...  

 
When a consumer switches banks or a business switches suppliers, companies have proven that there is an economic cost involved. Similarly, there is a cost effect on our brain when it gets interrupted by switching tasks. In an experiment with a control group that was not interrupted while they were asked to read a short passage and answer questions and another group that was interrupted with brief emails on further instructions, the brain drain on the interrupted group made them answer correctly 20% less often!

While it's not surprising that this "toggling" causes us to loose focus, many of us find it difficult to turn off the distractions. But if you can quantify how much it is costing you - reducing your performance from 80% to 60% - then you may just have the motivation needed to close your email application, turn of your instant alerts, and just do one task at a time.

Want to know how much disorganization is costing you? Click here... 

nfo@kaosgroup.com 

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