Building a System to Effectively Use Your Home
This section focuses on creating an effective home management system that helps readers maintain their living spaces in a way that keep everything clean, safe, and in good shape. We will discuss determining how to use our spaces, setting a base for rooms so we know what to expect, and building a radar so that we can take care of tasks as needed.
Creating an effective home system will save you time, money, and unnecessary headaches.
We spend much of our lives at home. After all, home is where we sleep, make meals, and share time with family.
It is no surprise that this place, which stores all of our personal belongings and keeps us warm when we rest our heads, requires considerable maintenance. Beyond structural maintenance, landscaping, and utilities (all of which I am unqualified to discuss), we always seem to have something to do when it comes to maintaining our homes. Cleaning floors, maintaining clothes, and storing food are common tasks that can consume much more time than necessary if we do not operate an effective home system.
I find that my home runs smoothly when I take time to figure out what I need and plan my space accordingly. In a home, we need space for food, space for hygiene, and space for repose. Additionally, we may want various spaces for work, social/communal activities, and recreation/fitness. Careful thought into how we want to use our space and what these uses require will free our heads of much of the worry associated with maintaining our homes. Our homes are best used when they are true to the lives we hope to live, and maintenance will be much easier when we have our places set in the way that most naturally makes sense for us.
Determining How to Use Your Home
Some rooms have a predetermined purpose When you walk in a room and see an oven and a dishwasher, you tend to think kitchen, not bedroom. In these circumstances, the decision is already made and we can next consider how to best utilize the space and whether we want to pair the room with accessory purposes. For example, if we live in a home with multiple bedrooms, we may decide to make one a guest bedroom with a desk for remote work (a choice made by yours truly, from which he writes to you today).
A room’s use is determined by a variety of factors. A room is best utilized if its use fits the room’s appliances and fixtures (unless you choose to reconfigure your home, in which case you would be better served discussing with a contractor and not G) and suits your needs. While a room may be great for a game lounge, you may have more pressing needs for the space. Consider what it takes to make your day run smoothly and proceed from there.
Note: your personal well-being should always be factored into your decision making. Just because a room may have a more productive use from a work/financial standpoint, it doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice your passions and happiness. Rooms, like many things, require a bit of balance. Take care of yourself and appreciate that happiness should be part of the plan.
Setting a Good Base
Setting a base format for our rooms will allow us to more efficiently use the space, recognize when maintenance is needed, and devote less thought to the overall operation of our home.
Once a room has been given its purpose, you can next begin optimizing the space to suit your needs. Why, you might ask, do I need to optimize the space? What more do I need to know than what I am doing in that room and how I want to style it?
A room without forethought will perpetually live in mess.
While the broad concepts of a room may come together naturally, the details of a room’s usage will drain mental energy and cause incessant clutter if they are not carefully considered. Let’s consider the kitchen. You know where the stove is and you aren’t planning on moving the sink around anytime soon. That much is locked in.
Which drawer houses silverware? Where should the glassware go? Do you have space for your dishes to dry? How will you organize your fridge? Do you know where you’ll store dry goods?
Many of the answers to these questions will become obvious with some lived-in time. However, planning will save you a lot of friction and wastefulness in your day-to day life. I will provide outlines for how I like to maintain rooms in future blog posts at reader requests (please send in your requests, as I write this site to help us both improve!).
Once we’ve defined our rooms and built our base structures, we will next use the room for its intended purpose. When we do so (and especially when we have just reformatted a room), we are wise to pay attention to the room’s common requirements to keep it moving smoothly, discussed further below.
Learning a Room’s Common Requirements
Rooms, like most things, exist in temporary states defined by the life and activities that occupy them. No matter how good a base we set for a room, it will require regular maintenance to keep it in working order and to ensure it continues to suit our needs.
We have to clean the floors and pick up our personal belongings, and food in the fridge will eventually expire.
As we go through daily business and breathe life into our halls, it is in our interest to think about the maintenance that accumulates in our homes throughout the days and weeks. Better still, we should consider what each particular room in our house takes to meet the standard we envisioned when we initially conceived of its base form.
When we learn the common requirements for our rooms, we provide ourselves insight into how we use our space and what our (somewhat) fixed chores will entail. These requirements do not need to be paired with a regimented chore schedule, but instead can be addressed on an as-needed basis (see my discussion on weighing tasks for more).
Time devoted to learning our rooms’ common requirements is time spent learning how we choose to live. A better understanding of our choices and habits will help us improve on the things we see as important, as well as build a radar that allows us to detect when areas are in need of maintenance.
Building Your Radar
In order to best use our home and keep it consistently working as designed, we must build ourselves a radar.
This radar need not consist of any technology or hardware, but instead requires a strong working understanding of how we have defined our spaces and what they take to operate. When we are creating our radar, we are really developing a list of the most important requirements for a given space and the common maintenance needs so that we can quickly and easily assess each part of our house and determine whether some work is due.
Often, it is not practical to set aside designated portions of our time to particular tasks. Some tasks may come due at inconsistent times (ex. adding water to your coffee machine or running your dishwasher), and sometimes outside factors will shift our preferences (ex. if we are having a dinner party, cleaning dishes increases in priority and other task may be fine to put on hold). Additionally, you simply might not like the restrictiveness of chore schedules, instead favoring a free-form day and trusting your own innate productive drive (if you are someone who enjoys chore schedules, you may nonetheless find this guidance useful so that you can more effectively manage your home and refine your chore scheduling).
Building your radar is a personal question, asking you to consider your tolerances and how your home can make you most happy. For example, if you have a very high food safety standards, your radar may have additional steps in the kitchen and food storage spaces. Additionally, if you do not mind when your clothes aren’t perfectly folded and stored at all times, you may have lower radar sensitivity when you assess your bedroom’s cleanliness. It is important that your requirements are true to your personal preferences (and accommodate those of cohabitants, so that their preferences are also treated with respect) because chores are most difficult to complete when we do not believe in them. We are more likely to do unfavorable work when we know it’s the right thing to do and can do it our way.
More Frequent Check-Ins for Fewer Headaches
Our rooms are defined, we have made a base and recognize what the rooms require to operate. We are able to recognize the room’s setup, and know when things are out of place or need to be maintained. If we want to really make this machine hum, we are well-served increasing our check-ins across our home. We have spent much time thinking about how to place and use everything in a way that makes sense, frontloading our mental exertion and creating a functional machine. Like every good machine, our homes will thrive if they are regularly cared for so that all of the moving parts are well-oiled.
I find that quick sweeps of my house when free time becomes available dramatically improve my ability to keep my home running smoothly. I do not need to check every room at once, and am able to poke in freely from one room to another as time provides.
Increased check-ins serve multiple purposes. First, when we maintain more, we will notice the smaller projects and remedy them before major work is needed. Second, we increase our familiarity with our home and its needs. As we regularly inspect our rooms, we see how our strategies are working, allowing us to consider them further and maintain them or refine as needed.
Finally, we better understand our entire homes and appreciate the beautiful systems we have created. When we float from room to room, we see how our bedroom maintenance flows into our kitchen and restrooms, promoting an ecosystem that helps sustain, protect, and rejuvenate us. We live in the home we found to be best for us, and our check-ins show us why it’s worth it.
-G
Efficiently ELITE
At the end of the day, this site is designed to serve as a resource. Like many good resources, Efficiently ELITE is always seeking outside input to refine its content and improve its ability to help people take more autonomy over their ability to move. Do you have any suggestions? Please contact me and let me know below!
