Do you successfully organise yourself out of overwhelm? How?

[CooksDryMeasure]

Consistently feel pretty overwhelmed at the moment. We both work every day although I only work school hours. We have 3 kids, activities on every day except on Friday evening. Two cats & one dog. I have a cleaner but never meal plan & seem to visit the shops twenty million times a week. I feel like I can only just cope with every day & anything extra is likely to push me over the brink - eg coordinating necessary house repairs.

I would say my life is fairly normal although I do have 3 kids & they are busy kids (instead of eg 2 less busy kids) but surely most people feel more on top of things?! is organisation the key to this?

You sound really full on and over capacity.

Look at your life what can you drop? (I appreciate some of these might not be possible!)

Can either of you drop hours or ask to condense your hours for extra time off?

What do you cook? Batch cooking is a saviour, look up slow cooker meals you can bung everything in with no prep and leave to cook while you’re at work, portion up and freeze extra portions.

Buy easy freezer food so there’s always something in.

Realistically, do your kids need that many activities? Can they drop some? It’s good for kids to be bored or make their own fun sometimes.

I often feel like this too. And my mind is always on what needs done next rather than on the thing I'm doing, which doesn't help.

I have found that the following things can help:

• Setting reminders on my phone for routine tasks e.g. get kid's sports kit ready on Wednesday (otherwise I will forget...)
• Automate as much as possible and reduce the need to make decisions e.g meal planning
• Decide in advance what I'm going to do during any small "gaps" of time in the day e.g. while son is at activity for an hour, I'm going to do the food shopping
• Weekly planner on the fridge with all the weekly clubs, chores, meals etc
• lower standards for cleaning 😊

But I do still struggle! Good luck

Thoughts reading your post:

• get your groceries delivered.
• do they need so many activities?

Three kids and three pets plus two adults working is always going to be pretty full on though.

Who else is doing jobs apart from you and can anyone else do more?

Shared calendars are good. I like a weekly planner visible in the kitchen too so I can see where I'm meant to be.

Realistically are your kids doing too much? I said we would always just do scouts and swimming plus a sport of their choice and thought that was ok, but then I had two kids who had activities on different nights! So I was out all the time!

If they are going to continue the hobbies then try to schedule things you can do while they're there, and you're waiting eg at the swimming pool.

I would go buy a nice coffee and then plan an online shop during scouts. I've started to prefer the click and collect option so I'm not hanging around waiting for a shop. Take a couple of laundry baskets to fling everything in and then it's dead easy to lift in. Then at swimming I would do homework with one kid while the other one swam. Obviously only works depending on the ages of your kids.

A meal plan helps. And making it visible so whoever is home first or finished work knows to start cooking a spag bol because the mince goes out of date tomorrow.

Also consider sitting down together and making a dinner list. Then just plan from that. I like the books by Sarah Rossi (she's called taming twins on Instagram). She has a one pot book and a thirty minute one which have some great tasty recipes.

With the house and endless housework.....I try to do a quick tidy up after tea - we all take ten mins or a room to straighten. I've very much become a believer in "done is better than perfect".

Same here @CooksDryMeasure, and I really like @Sunnysidegold idea "done is better than perfect".

ATM I feel constantly one thing away from not being able to cope, or sometimes even just half a thing...so I try and work on the basis of something I learned years ago at work...never have more than three things on your to-do list. That's three things a day...and somehow that feels manageable and they (mostly) get done, rather than feeling completely overwhelmed by a long, long complicated list.

Meal planning - make two nights a week really easy, so good bread and soup (bought not home-made!) or pizza or anything else that's easy to get out of its box into the oven and onto a plate. Shopping delivered to home, and activities two nights a week max...kids need down-time too!

I only have one 5yo but am a lone parent who works full time. Things that help me

• ordering food deliveries
• meal planning
• breakfast club 3x a week so I have an extra 30 mins in the morning to sort the house
• clean 1 room a day (I have 7 rooms so works well)
• 30 min tidy up every night
• give 5yo tasks that he loves and that help me (wiping the table, putting dishes in the sink, vacuuming under the sofa pillows etc) - it all adds up!
• things like grocery ordering and life admin gets done when he's at his clubs. Sometimes I use this time to go for a run.
• write a list of everything I'm going to do for the day in order of importance. Anything that doesn't get done goes on next day's list.
• school uniforms all ironed and hung on Sunday night
• pay for a gardener so the garden is always nice
• book after school club a couple of times a month ad hoc so I have time to do nice things like go out for a coffee or get my nails done
• have protected time in the evening where I am just relaxing. Usually 45 mins for book and bath

I order food deliveries but tend to do 4/5 days at a time rather than a full week. This reduces the overwhelming task of meal planning, means things last until the next shop, and means that I do fewer top ups (in theory)

I have a big list of jobs that are non essential but do need doing, every week I pick a couple, and do those. I accept that this means the list will never be done, but I have so many house/aesthetic kind of jobs to do and I like to feel like I'm chipping away at them. This week it was to frame 2 postcards. It's been in my list since one of the frames broke, oooooh, a year ago.

I lower my standards massively about cleaning. I will whizz round quickly for an hour after work a few days a week and I do a bigger clean at the weekend. We can't afford a cleaner or a gardener.

I schedule exercise and self care every day. The exercise I manage. The self care not so much, but when I'm feeling really overwhelmed I know I need to prioritise it.

Last week when ds was at football, I sat in the car for 20 minutes and did a whole load of life admin- paid school lunches, added all the school dates to my diary, responded to loads of party invites and other stuff, wrote a list of jobs, etc etc. I did so much in that 20 mins! I am going to do that every few weeks I think, it was such a good use of my time.