Routine Goals

The preschool hour, cooking lessons, family devotions, home educating, personal devotions, quiet reading, puzzle building, game playing, responsibility training: when do all these things happen in a frazzled household?

All of those vital elements–priorities, if you will–of family life were precisely why an eye-rolling cleaning routine was necessary in my household. Housekeeping responsibilities can be contained and streamlined with planning, and if the household is going to be busy, then wherever streamlining works, it preserves time for activities requiring dedicated time.

A coordinated group routine for cleaning the kitchen following supper opens time for family devotions. Designed limits on daily cleaning clear the way for a preschool hour each morning. The accrued benefits of timed cleaning, planned menus and scheduled nap time give, not a few free minutes, but free afternoon hours for someone (maybe you?) to rest, to read, to pray, to think about behavior issues “scientifically,” to stare into space, if need be. (Don’t laugh; staring into space, if not a worrisome sign of a seizure, is a profitable daydreaming sign of the brain working beyond conscious constraints to creatively address dilemmas. Given good healthy brain food like Bible verses, pure motives, biblical priorities, and a willingness to think expansively, the brain can produce some amazing solutions.)

The goal of any routine (schedule/process/structure) is to design a comprehensive skeleton to fulfill the priority. In turn, this design skeleton makes it possible to control the time the process takes on any given day. We need to realize that even when we do not plan or design a routine, a default routine, usually inefficient and frustrating, asserts itself anyway. If we do not have a designed routine for preparing for bed at night, children get over-tired, tuck-in time varies wildly, the list of “helps” to ease into bed grows and grows and grows. Anyone who has tried to vary part of such a haphazard routine knows it is carved in stone and cannot be violated in the smallest degree without wailing and even more time is spent “settling down.”

Another goal for routine making is to design a process that includes habit-making time–enough application time to make the new habit truly become a newly ingrained habit. This means planning ways to do the process over several weeks with helpful check-ups and reviews along the way.

A final goal for routine making is to design an elegant solution. The final process should account for many different criteria and be easy to implement and restart after a lapse or break. It ought not require intense bookkeeping or maintenance to keep it going. It should be easy to incorporate fresh input and to do routine evaluations of its performance. In other words, the vast majority of the time investment should come from Executive Oversight time en suite to develop the plan, not the everyday using of the plan.

We’ll be attending to cleaning routines over the next several days, but the routine-building goals are the same regardless of what is being designed. When you feel your eyes starting to roll back in your head, just remember, we are not designing a quick fix. We are setting up and habit-building a custom-made plan to cover both maintenance and deep cleaning responsibilities for a specific home, and we will be practicing it as we go, both to improve our skills, and to prepare to teach apprentices.