The Family Home Organisation Hub

In my home we don't have one of those gorgeous family calendars with a column for each member of the family.  No.  We're up to date with the technology.  We use Google Calendars.  Hubby and I both have access to one another's calendars on PC and phone, so we always know what the other person is up to, and won't end up both out leaving nobody to watch the children.

We aren't totally paper free though.  They say the kitchen is the hub of the home, and it certainly is in ours.  I love bits of paper, lists and organisation, so the kitchen is full of them!  I'm sure there are tidier ways to organise family life, but I haven't got that far yet.  Here are a few examples of the organisation bits and pieces in my kitchen:

This is our weekly reward chart.  The columns are days of the week, the rows are for "routine, obedience, helpfulness and kindness" as well as a bonus row.  The idea is that the children end up with at least 20 smiley faces remaining at the end of the week for some form of small reward, such as a book, some bubbles, a magazine etc.

Here are our routines.  The morning routine takes us from getting up through to going to pre-school, there's a short one for lunchtime (C. quite often gets lost between coming home and remembering to go to the loo and take his shoes off), and there's one for the evening, which tells the children what they should be doing between 5pm and bedtime.  They are quite simple, and picture based, with no times attached, just so they can see what they should be doing next.  I can point them to the routine instead of nagging them (in theory!).

my to-do list.  It covers three weeks at a time.  There's a column for Scout tasks, a column for potential business/money-making tasks, and two columns for everything else.

Hmmm... not so very tidy.  You can see my to-do list, but you'll also see a visual timetable for the week showing broad activities for am, pm and evening, my purse, and a pile of letters and info from pre-school, as well as the enrolment information handbook from the Primary School. 

the notice board.  On the whiteboard part there are phone numbers for local police, neighbours and baby-sitters, the evening meal plan for the week and the shopping list.  On the pin board are birthday party invitations, a playdough recipe, the dates for different bin collections, our recycling centre card and swimming pool opening times among other things.

How do you organise your family life?