Management tools are indispensable for keeping the home and hearth organized, tracking all the happenings, and maintaining sanity.
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Yes, you heard right. Maintaining sanity. My sanity to be exact 🙂
We all have one thing in common. We are busy people. Our schedules, our to-do’s, and our lives seem to be on the non-stop cycle. The continuous hamster wheel that doesn’t seem to slow down.
WHAT IS NEEDED FOR A HOME{STEAD}
What is the biggest piece of advice I can offer any homemaker or homesteader? Get organized. Write it all down. Get in the habit of keeping detailed records on anything and everything. Right from the beginning.
I for one need help keeping it all straight. Keeping it organized so I literally don’t go off the deep end if you get my meaning.
No matter if you live in an apartment at city center, are a suburban resident, or own 200 acres on a traditional homestead, we can all use a little help in planning, tracking, scheduling, & maintaining our to-do’s. Using the right “tools” for the HOME’stead can help you do just that.
I know they help this busy homesteader 😉
TIME MANAGEMENT TOOLS
I hear it often. “I just don’t have time”. The good news? We are all allotted the same amount of time in a day. How we choose to utilize that time is a choice.
If you haven’t already read and apply some of the suggestions in my “Organizing The Homestead” series, I highly recommend taking a moment and reading through. These tips and suggestions work.
I wouldn’t be able to juggle home, garden, preserving the harvest, run two businesses, and creating & maintaining the blog if they didn’t. Just sayin’ 😉
Utilizing organizational tools may be the most important HOME’stead management tools that I use for creating binders and managing it all.
What’s my approach for keeping it all straight in a nutshell? It all begins with setting a goal, staying accountable to those goals, and managing the time I’ve allotted to each in an organized and thoughtful way.
My goal setting planning & tracker printable set can assist you in creating realistic goals, tracking them weekly, monthly, seasonally, and quarterly at a glance until completion. Click the image below or the link above to grab your set of 12 printable sheets.
GARDEN MANAGEMENT TOOLS
Nope. I’m not speaking of the spade or the shovel here. I’m talking record keeping. Detailed ones that can be referred to year-to-year.
For years I used a garden journal which worked, well, ok. It didn’t have the details at a glance that I wanted to see and use.
As they say, “necessity is the mother of invention”, so when I couldn’t find exactly what I needed, I created it.
If you, like me, are someone who has struggled keeping your gardening endeavors organized, scheduled, and planned, then this Garden Management Planner, for homesteaders at heart living anywhere, is tailor made for you.
FOOD PRESERVATION MANAGEMENT TOOLS
Anyone who has a pantry knows it can be difficult to keep track of what you have on hand. How many times have you found a jar of something lurking in the back of the cupboard & wondered just how long its been there?
When you can & preserve your harvests, its imperative that there are no “lurking” jars with outdated product! I created a Canning Planner printable set so that doesn’t happen.
With 15 beautifully crafted printable pages, it’s easy to keep track of your canning and preserving efforts year after year! No more lurking jars. Ever 😉
CHICKEN MANAGEMENT TOOLS
Raising, maintaining, and keeping chickens is something that even those in city centers are now doing. And with good reason.
Who doesn’t enjoy watching those fluffy butts AND reaping their daily gifts in the form of the ever amazing, incredible edible eggs as they say 🙂
This whimsical backyard chicken journal was made with you, and well, me too, in mind. Below are just a few of the pics of the pages included in this log.
I use this backyard chicken journal to track everything from the flock itself to income & expenses, health records, coop maintenance, and everything in between.
If you raise chickens, no matter if it’s one or 200, this journal was created just for you. You can thank me later 🙂
KITCHEN MANAGEMENT TOOLS
Sometimes I like to create just for the fun of it. When I needed more recipe cards for a gift I was giving (my homemade canned goods) and wanted to include the recipe, I created these fun farm inspired recipe cards.
Being the old fashioned gal that I am, I still prefer to handle my recipes. They are just more convenient. I don’t have to search the web, or my digital files. I just open my recipe box and voila! Pull the one I want.
This recipe card set comes with 5 different farm inspired designs and gild the lily of any gift given. Oh, and did I mention how cute they are to use in my own kitchen?
You get the idea. Record keeping has saved my sanity more than I can describe when keeping my HOMEstead running in an organized and orderly fashion.
I’m always fine tuning the records and creations I use to keep myself & my home a bit more organized. So come back often and see what I’ve been creating & using here on the hill to ease my burdens, keep my sanity, and have my HOMEstead running smoothly!
OH!!! Did I mention that as a gift for being a subscriber you can receive 15% off your first order? Yup, simply scroll to the right and subscribe to receive your coupon code!
I hope you find these management tools as useful as I do. After all, “I am too organized”, said no one ever 😉
What are your favorite HOME’stead management tools?
Love, Light, & Laughter ~
21 comments
Organization is a good thing. Your experiences would be helpful for anyone whether a beginner or pro. everyone can learn new skills. Sounds very interesting .
Organizing all of the stuff that needs doing is so hard! I’ve just started canning and it really does take consistent planning and organizing. I love your tools. I can’t wait to try them.
I have very little gardening/homesteading experience so I would love to learn more!
I’d like the canning management tools so I can keep track of my canning …. I am organized as much as possible, but better tools to keep organized are always welcome! These look like they would really help me to be better prepared and see what I have.
I used to watch my grandmother can veggies all the time, but she never taught me how to do it. I’ve tried canning before, but it was a disaster because I wasn’t organized and had no idea of what I was really doing. Winning these tools would greatly help me achieve my goal of becoming a homesteader and living a self-sufficient life.
Your canning management tool would help me out a lot. I can every year and always try to rotate the jars, but there are always a few that get lost in the shuffle and I find them and wonder are they still good? This would help me keep better organized.
When I think of it, my life would benefit so much from a bit of more organizing. Fabulously done!
Love that you told us your age! I am a 70-year-old mother and grandmother who backyard gardens alone. One of my shortcomings is record-keeping and organization when it comes to gardening, making tinctures and extracts, etc. These tools look like an excellent way to keep things on track, learn from mistakes, and plan for the future.
Thank you, Barbara! Love that you are still gardening & it goes to show, age is only a number!!
I love how organized you are, it’s really encouraging and the push I need to move forward. Thank you!
Suzan, such a wise post! Your suggestion to manage your garden organization tools is what I need! I’ve dabbled in gardening and always loved it, but only last year did we finally invest in three large raised vegetable beds and I need to keep organized in order to fully utilize our garden and it’s produce!
These are so beautiful! I’m headed to your Etsy shop right now! I can’t even imagine having my life so organized!
This is such a helpful post even just for the gardening package. My dad plants a garden each year and has inspired me to eventually plant one when we have built our home.
Great tips and beautiful planners for anyone looking to get more organized! I think these would also make great gift ideas!
You offer great encouragement and advice! I think now more than ever people are considering homesteading.
This is exactly what I need on my small family farm. I am so UNORGANIZED! This is what I’ve been looking for to help me. Thanks so much!!!
Geez, this post hit home! I live on what I like to call a farmstead and this is definitely the area where I struggle most with. I never plant out my garden and fly by the seat of my pants most days. Thank you for the resources and tips! I need to implement them!
Your organization is incredibly inspiring. These are beautiful! Do you create separate binders or keep one large binder with dividers?
I’m working on creating one large binder with dividers. I created them to work together :). Keep an eye out for a complete homestead package!
Definitely keeping an eye out, these are so great!
This is awesome and helpful! Thinking we have things in control using these tools gives us peace of mind and definitely helps with our sanity. Thank you for sharing!