Questions, questions, questions… Are you the center for communication in your family foundation? A central location for your family calendar, grocery lists and meal planning may be your salvation. Watch this video for strategies I use to organize family menu planning, grocery shopping and other compilations of habitation expectations. Following these tips will take some frustration out of your obligations as you will no longer be the sole communication destination. Hopefully the elimination of the discussion about what is for dinner tonight will bring about a transformation in your cohabitation commendations!
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/TCDCom.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we’re going to talk about what we call a communication station. This is the area in your home where you share lots of information with the other members of your family. This can be in the kitchen or a mud room, wherever the rest of the family commonly is coming and going. This is our kitchen right here that we are using. This is a modular system that I purchased from the Pottery Barn a while back. They have all these different components that fit on to these railings. So they have this corkboard and the chalkboard, and they have lots of different cubbies and different things that you can get for these various components. Whatever works for your family. This is what fits in this space and works for the needs that we have.
So we have mostly – because we have teenage boys – a lot of things that have to do with food in our communication station. Here’s our grocery list. I have an entire other video about methods for making shopping lists. This is what we call our quadrant method. You can see that on the other video. We also sometimes use these preprinted shopping lists that you can get in our store (Update August, 2016: This product is no longer available, please contact us at service@clutterdiet.com for updated information), and this is just another really easy way to circle what you need very quickly. Another thing that we do a lot here is the menu planning. This is a list of what we’re having for dinner for the rest of the week so everybody will know. [POP] I can plan that and then correspondingly put whatever I need to put on the grocery list as well. Here we can put whatever messages we need to, to communicate to each other. And then this is probably going to make you laugh if you have teenage boys, but the boys kept saying this summer that we didn’t have any food in the house. So I just made a list of all the food we have in the refrigerator and freezer so that they could actually see that we really do have food for them to eat. So things like that you can just put randomly on whatever makes sense for you and your family. Here I’ve got a list of chores that need to be done around the house. Up here we have extra scratch paper that we can use for additional notes. I do use the paper from the office that’s printed on one side, and just flip that over and cut it and use that for scratch paper.
Another thing that we have nearby this communication station is the family binder, which we’ve done other videos about, you can see the link on the screen here. The family binder is the place to put that quick reference information about school policies and frequently used numbers, other things that your family all might need to reference. We have things like our neighborhood directory that’s printed, all that stuff is nearby and the family all knows that it’s here for them to access whenever necessary.
So, if you would like some help with your project of putting together your communication station, we can help you with that in our Quick Start Program. Anybody can join our program as a member for free for 14 days. You can find out more about that at https://www.clutterdiet.com/quickstart.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been searching for how to improve communication in a busy family.
Lorie, Those are some great ideas. When my boys were at home we used a large desk calendar and hung it on the side of the fridge. Each boy had a different colored marker for their activities. Since I don’t have a good wall space for a communication center the fridge worked well for the grocery list and all the other notes.
Thanks, Janice! The fridge is often the communication hub of the home. 😉