Do you often find yourself overwhelmed with endless piles of laundry? Or, do you avoid doing your family’s laundry until the laundry piles become so much that you don’t even know how to proceed without getting overwhelmed? It is possible to get your laundry off of the bedroom floor and out of the basket. Additionally, it is extremely possible to prevent your family’s hampers from a constant state of overflow. In order to maintain control within your home as a busy, work from home mom, I have four quick laundry tips to help you manage your family’s laundry.
Listen below for the entire episode on The Systemize Your Life Podcast
How to Tackle Laundry as a Busy Mom
I’ve had so many moms reach out to me and ask for tips on how to handle laundry. In all fairness, I don’t handle all my laundry. Even though this isn’t one of the quick laundry tips that I’m going to share with you, I truly believe it would be super awesome if you also had a grandmother that wanted to do your laundry, just like my grandmother does. Although my 88 year old grandmother doesn’t do mine or my husband’s laundry, she does love to do my girls’ laundry from time to time. Now, I still do some of theirs but my grandmother truly loves doing laundry. She loves to take the socks and lay them out. Additionally, she makes them smell pretty. It just lights her up to do my girl’s laundry so she does that.
How to Manage the Laundry – Tips for the Whole Family
However, I still have to manage my own laundry. All my life I saw my mother’s laundry get washed well. Then when it was dry it would sit on the chair in her bedroom forming a five foot tall tower. Then, I did the same thing. Now, my husband is the king of laundry. He is so good with his laundry it makes me kind of sick. Therefore, I have been determined to step up my laundry game. And these four quick tips have taken our family and our entire laundry system from organized to overwhelmed. My hope is that these four laundry tips can do the exact same for you!
4 Quick Laundry Tips to Help You Tackle Your Laundry
In order to help tackle laundry as a busy mom, there are four easy tips to implement within your weekly schedule to make laundry easy. Because the truth is, I hate laundry just like you do. Recently, over the past couple months I have dedicated myself to working through the systems in our home, especially when it comes to laundry and these FOUR quick laundry tips are the very things that have made a huge impact for me and on our family’s laundry.
Laundry Tip #1 – Reduce The Amount of Clothes You Have
The first quick laundry tip to help you manage your whole family’s laundry is to reduce the amount of clothes you have. You don’t need all the clothes that are in your closet, or piling out of your dresser drawers, preventing you from actually being able to close the thing. In order to handle your family’s laundry in a more easier and manageable way, reduce the amount of clothes you have.
Seriously, set aside time to declutter and sort through your clothing and make a pile of excess socks, shirts, workout clothes, t-shirts, and every single thing else. Make a donation to your local Goodwill. Additionally, do this for your entire family as well. In fact, do this with your children, it is such a great practice to let your kids in on and to do with you.
Laundry Tips – Simplify Your Wardrobe
If you are looking for ideas on how to simplify your wardrobe, I am a big fan of incorporating a capsule wardrobe and share my favorite tips on building a capsule wardrobe here. But truly, by reducing the amount of clothes you have and the amount of clothes you wear regularly, is essential to staying on top of and in control of your family’s laundry.
Laundry Tip #2 – Do Not Wait for Your Laundry Hampers to Fill Up to Start Your Laundry
The second quick and easy laundry tip to help make laundry easier is to not wait for your laundry hampers to fill up to start your laundry. Seriously, don’t wait for your laundry hampers to fill up before you start doing your laundry. Personally, this was the one thing causing me so much trouble with laundry. I would wait for my laundry hampers to be so full and then would do everything I could to shove the clothes further down in order to fit even more. Eventually, I became my hamper’s own personal compact machine, simply to just get the pile of clothes off the floor and into the hamper. I thought I was winning, simply by not having the endless clothing piles in visible sight, however, my hampers were overloaded.
Laundry Tips – Do Smaller Loads of Laundry
Therefore, a quick laundry tip is to not wait until this moment to do the laundry. Start doing laundry when there’s just a little bit in the basket. This makes keeping up with laundry so much more manageable and easier. Easier to move through the entire laundry process from start to finish. A great tip is to have smaller hampers throughout your bedrooms and closets to force this process to happen on its own. In order to manage your family’s laundry easier, start your laundry loads BEFORE the hampers become completely overfilled.
Laundry Tip #3 – Schedule Your Laundry in Your Planner
The third essential way to help manage your family’s laundry is to schedule your laundry in your planner. Yes, do it! Please. It is absolutely possible to stay in control of your laundry. Writing this down and scheduling it throughout your planner will help you get there. Laundry is something that has to be done and it has to be done regularly. Therefore, it needs to be something that you put in your calendar every single week. No, it’s not something that you need to put in your Google calendar because it’s not somewhere that you have to be. But it is something that you need to put into your written planner. Through writing it down, you are giving yourself the first tool for success.
“Through writing it down, you are giving yourself the first tool for success.”
In order for this to be a greater success, schedule laundry throughout your week when you know you have the time to actually start and complete the load. I understand that the actual process of getting the clothes into the washer and through the dryer hardly takes any time at all. The real challenge is in the act of taking them out of the dryer, folding them, hanging them up and then putting them away. Therefore, put laundry in your weekly planner so that you don’t have to hit the refresh toss cycle button 12 times when you finally find the time to fold.
Create Your Own Laundry Rotation – Your Essential Laundry Tip
Make sure that you put it in your calendar to start your laundry when you know you’re going to be able to take it out of the dryer and put it away. For example, this could look like doing a laundry rotation of two loads of laundry the same day 3 days a week. Perhaps, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. However, if you are doing laundry for your entire house you might have to do laundry every single day. In this situation, you might have to do more than one load, or break down whose laundry is done which day of the week to make it more manageable. The key here, in order to stay in control of your laundry, schedule laundry in your planner.
Laundry Tip #4 – Involve Your Kids
Finally, the fourth quick laundry tip is to involve your kids. There is so much power for us moms, when we actually involve our kids in things. We have lost sight of how helpful our kids can truly be because we put way too much on our to-do list and theirs. Instead, we want to hurry up and get through all the things instead of taking the time to teach them. But they need to learn. Your kids need to learn how to do these things and you literally get to spend one on one teaching them and educating them through doing household things together.
Do Things With Your Children
What an amazing learning opportunity for you and your children. Especially if you have toddlers, you can ask your child to sort clothing by finding the red clothes. Or when folding the laundry, have your young one pull out the socks and try to find the matching pairs. This can be so incredibly simple, yet so powerful. By involving your children in household things, not only are you teaching them, but you are also doing things together! What a great time to pour into them. Involving your kids in laundry is a great way to help tackle your family’s laundry.
Managing Your Laundry as a Busy Work From Home Mom
It is absolutely possible to maintain control of your laundry as a busy, work from home mom. You can go from overwhelmed, too organized, within the laundry system of your home. Therefore, a quick recap for you of the four major tips to help you manage your family’s laundry.
- Reduce the amount of clothes you have
- Don’t wait for your laundry hampers to fill up to start your laundry
- Schedule your laundry in your planner
- Involve your kids
Looking for More Laundry Tips & Household Cleaning Hacks
Looking for more ways to manage your family’s laundry? Be sure to check out the five steps needed to set up your very own laundry system for your household. Looking for more cleaning tips and tricks? Sharing 3 super simple tips to optimize your household cleaning and stay on top of laundry, the dishes, and that dreaded bathroom.
Even if your laundry situation is much more complicated than mine and you don’t have the sweetest grandmother that helps you do your children’s laundry, it is possible to maintain control of the laundry! Looking for more systems to manage keeping up with your household, while balancing all the things, check out our Academy for my entire home management system. Looking for more support as you work to systemize your life, come hang out with us in our free Facebook group! You got this mama!
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best way to plan out your week in order to have time to complete household tasks, such as laundry?
The best way to plan out and schedule your week in order to have enough time to complete the necessary household tasks, and balance everything else is through time blocking. My 5-block, time blocking method allows you to easily plan out your week in a way that is super manageable and efficient. By scheduling different tidy cues to manage your home throughout your time blocks, keeping up with tasks such as laundry becomes even more manageable. Download my completely FREE time-blocking guide HERE in order to learn how to set up your own time blocks for success!
