Is there a Flylady for FlyFulltimeworkingCouples?

tastybrains — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:46:18 -0800

Is there anything like FlyLady but for people who actually work outside the home? Lazy 20-something couple is looking for help keeping our apartment from being a sty. I love Flylady, but I can't keep up with her ... are there any similar systems that work better for people who work outside the home? Flylady seems mostly geared towards Stay-at-home-Moms, and while I am envious of people who are able to squeeze in a load of laundry at 10am, I am not one of them.

My new husband and I are trying to work out our household chores angst so that we stay on top of basic cleaning, but I guess our parents didn't teach us how to act like grown-ups.

Any links, books, or suggestions on how to set up a *realistic* plan for cleaning/organizing and splitting up chores between two lazy people who work long hours would be great.

A housekeeper is, unfortunately, not an option right now. And, as often as I ask, the cats refuse to pitch in.

Merging GTD and FlyLady

Andrhia — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 18:25:08 -0800

ProductivityFilter: Help a work-at-home mother of two design a GTD-meets-FlyLady life management system. Very much I have a busy calendar and a bajillion tasks to manage at any one time, and I need to find a good way of handling it all. I have had great success separately with GTD and FlyLady in the past, and I've also done well with the paper Franklin Planner system, but I'm feeling a little daunted by the scale of my current situation. I am dead certain the key to retaining my sanity will be a well-constructed and very rigid set of daily and weekly routines, integrated with inescapable reminders of some sort. (At one point in the past, I had a fantastic set of Entourage reminders for my regular routines, and it made my life totally fabulous.) I am equally certain that I will do best if my personal and professional obligations are both accounted for in this theoretical system. Please help me find the tools and framework to keep my act together.

Here are my specifics: I just had my second child a week ago, and my first just started school a couple of weeks before that, so I have a whole new set of responsibilities and obligations to keep track of. (Homework? Really? In *preschool*?) Meanwhile, I do work full-time out of a home office and have some other misc. professional development obligations; GTD alone would handle it well, and has done so before. As an added wrinkle, my household is in disarray because my old (and faulty to begin with) systems fell down pretty completely in late pregnancy due to fatigue and ongoing construction work (but I had a great FlyLady-inspired system running a couple of years ago!). And of course there are ongoing requirements for self-care and keeping in touch with friends and providing time and affection to my husband and kids to think of... Basically, I'm a girl with an awful lot going on.

I use OSX but switch freely between a desktop and laptop, which is what ultimately broke my lovely Entourage reminder system; if I could find a way to run a loosely Entourage-style to-do/calendar/reminder system across both machines, I think my life would be utterly perfect. No, really. I need to find a way to track and remind for both repeating tasks and calendar items ranging from "pick up daughter from school in 15 minutes" to "write X by Friday" to "Pediatrician appointment next Thursday at noon." I don't travel and it's rare for me to be far from a computer, unless I'm actively out running errands. I enjoy paper-based systems and have limped by the past year with a Franklin planner, but they just don't have the timely in-your-face reminding I need now and I never did quite figure out how to track routine tasks with them to the degree of granularity I would prefer.

What systems or tools (or combination thereof) would you recommend for tracking regular routines, appointments, and one-off tasks and projects? How should I best organize it all? Anyone been in my shoes and have great advice for me?

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Is there a Flylady for FlyFulltimeworkingCouples?

Merging GTD and FlyLady