In this blog post, I’m sharing my journey of automating my home to save time and reduce mental load. I’ll walk you through the strategies that have made a huge difference in my daily routine, from avoiding last-minute store runs to managing household tasks with ease.
Key points we’re going to cover:
Mental Load: I’ve discovered how small, recurring tasks can drain mental energy and how automation can help.
Automation Pillars: I focus on automating consumables and maintenance tasks to save time and reduce stress.
Effective Strategies: I use Google Calendar for reminders and auto-shipment for regular supplies. Here’s how these systems work for me.
Personal Insights: I’ll share my experiences with automating items like paper products and dog food.
Listen Below For The Entire Episode On The Systemize Your Life Podcast
What Is Consuming Mental Energy In Your Life?
There are certain things in our lives that consume our mental energy that truly don’t need to. Like whether or not we are out of toilet paper! Over the last year I have implemented so many great resources while challenging myself to become more effective and efficient. I’m going to be sharing the two main pillars I’ve worked really hard on, as we’ve been gearing up for back to school season. There’s just a lot more on our plates now than there was in the summer. Both seasons present challenges and they both present a lot of beauty.
On any given day I’m analyzing the inefficiencies in my life to see if there is a way to reduce the mental burden of unnecessary tasks or bottlenecks I’m experiencing. Nothing bothers me more than wasting time. Time is so precious. I personally have to be careful because I get so bent out of shape about wasting time. And sometimes it really is just okay. What we need to be looking at are the things in our lives that are consuming so much mental energy, that if we just made simple changes and automated a few things, it could be so much better.
Read more automation tips: 12 Reasons Why You Need To Automate Your To-Do List Today | Back to School Series
Let’s Talk About Mental Load
Mental load is one of those tricky things that’s completely invisible. And I think we often have a hard time communicating this to our partners. We don’t even recognize the draining mental burden as a working mom that we are harboring at all times. There’s a significant cognitive burden caused by managing all of the tasks and responsibilities involved in running a household. Then for so many of us, we’re managing a career or business at the same time. The constant behind the scenes planning, organizing, and remembering all the things. Everything that allows our families to be successful and run smoothly at home. We need to be strategic about trying to relieve some of that without getting upset or resentful towards other people. When we don’t reduce the mental load, it takes a big hit on our productivity, stress levels, and our overall well-being.
Fragmented Focus And Decision Fatigue
This is where I believe so much of the ADHD diagnosis is coming into play in our world. I’m sure it has always been around to some extent, but it seems to have wildly taken over in recent years. It’s that fragmented focus… there are so many pieces of our lives that are in so many different places. So many things have to be juggled on any given day and automating it, having systems for it, is absolutely vital.
Decision fatigue is another big part of it. Constantly making decisions, whether they’re insignificant or not, can exhaust your mental capacity. When we look at our stress levels and our overall well-being, there’s an emotional exhaustion. We talk about this all the time here on the blog. By nature, we tend to put our needs on the back burner. I have always advocated for this for myself but I still have to be really really careful. I have to look at if I am really taking care of myself.
How can I create more time to take care of myself without just saying I need help?
How can we get smart about reducing our mental load?
Automation Pillars To Decrease Mental Load
I want to share with you these two major areas (or pillars) in your home. It’s just the way that I’ve categorized it. There’s a long list of things that we can automate every single day or week. There’s a lot we can outsource. What is causing major bottlenecks? What is really holding me up? If we look at how much time we waste – 15 minutes here, 5 minutes there, sometimes even an hour… Putting all those small chunks of time together, you’re losing actual hours a day of time.
So I related that back to these things that are extremely taxing on my mental load. If we take all of these tiny things throughout the day, week and month and we put them all together, I would give anything to get all that energy back. So about 6 weeks ago, I started looking at all the things and I categorized them into two main pillars.
This is where you’re going to want to start taking notes and these are the things that I highly suggest you start looking at applying some kind of automation to. Automations can vary since there are different ways that that word can apply to your home.
Learn more about Transforming To-Do Lists: 8 Tasks To Eliminate For A Streamlined Life
Pillar One: Consumable Products
The first main pillar is everything we run out of.
How can we automate all the things that we run out of or that we consume?
How do we avoid having to stop by the store because we ran out of toilet paper?
Yes, we can create bulk storage, but at some point you’re either going to run out or have too much. There’s a balance of life patterns and behaviors. I personally want to run a really effective and efficient house for my family. So when there’s no toilet paper in the bathroom, and people are running around the house trying to find toilet paper; that’s just not necessary.
How many of these things are actually happening in your house?
Let’s talk about paper products. As you know we are a paperless family, but we just re-introduced paper towels because of a dog situation we had recently. Our dog has been eating pre-formulated dog food because every other food we tried was making him sick. So when we ran out of dog food and had some kibble on back up, long story short, it made him very ill and he ended up in the emergency room. So to be sure this never happens again, we got it set up on auto shipment. I can’t handle mistakes like this that are completely avoidable, so I sat down and evaluated everything.
When it comes to things like paper towels, napkins, toilet paper, supplements, air filters, and dog food – I started looking at how often these things are being consumed. When you first set up these automations, it can be a good idea to double up while tracking your patterns. That way you won’t risk running out at the end of the cycle. Here’s an example with the dog food. We’re feeding a pound every meal, so I had to figure out how long one case lasts. Then to calculate when the next case needs to be ordered by so it gets here a week early. Essentially, we might double up on food at first but then we’ll never run into that problem again.
Having toilet paper in the house isn’t quite as serious because you could just run to the store for more. But how annoying to have to make unplanned trips to the store to get toilet paper. You’ll need to figure out how often to automate toilet paper, paper towels, napkins or whatever your consumables are. I don’t know how often you are changing your air filters, but these things are very easy to automate.
To learn more about how my family has gone paperless, read The Crunchy Mom’s Guide to Creating a Paperless Kitchen
Two Effective Strategies For Decreasing Mental Load
One simple way to put these automations in place is with Google Calendar. Create actual events in the calendar, set on repeat. This is especially helpful for the dog food and our supplements. This way, I know when they need to be reordered so they end up on the to-do list for that week. I’m also giving myself a week of buffer time so I no longer have to keep it in my head! It’s just automatically popping up for me on my calendar.
The second way is to utilize auto shipment options from the companies who now offer them. Amazon and Walmart both have them, and they’re really cool. We have our supplements on auto-ship for the companies who will do that. Just making the list, sitting down and doing the exercise, is absolutely amazing and brilliant.
Pillar Two: Automating Maintenance And Appointments
This one is not as needy but it’s still very important. The second pillar is making sure you automate things that need to be kept up with. Obviously, systems are important and there aren’t many things on my list in this category because of my home management system. We’ve recently had a shift in who’s doing what, so I had to relook at how we keep up with certain things. My list includes: laundry, dishes, and appointments. These are my specific three. I’m sure this would be great for you to start with, but you may have other ones that are more pressing to you right now.
The way you’ll know is by looking at where the problems are continuously coming up for you. For me, it’s the dishes. I’ve had this obsession with not starting the dishwasher until it’s absolutely full and organized, and it’s to my detriment. I also learned that my dishwasher has a “top rack only” wash setting and it’s brilliant. So now I feel like we can actually run the dishwasher every morning and every night. That’s the automation my family needs to be able to keep up with the dishes.
What Automations Could Help You Keep Up?
So you’ve got to look at what you’re not keeping up with. It might be everything right now and that’s okay. But what’s the biggest thing causing you the most headache?
For us, we’ve kept up well with everyone’s individual laundry, but I’m looking at when to automate doing the linens. This includes all of the bath towels, sheets and the cloth I’ve used to replace paper towels and napkins. I don’t like to mix all of mine so I have three different loads that aren’t very big at all. So I just sat down to play around with it, and for me that’s really fun! After looking at our patterns, it seems to be once a week that I want to be doing this load of bath linens. If I do it any sooner than a week, it’s not really effective. Then if I wait any longer, we’re backed up on them and it’s not super helpful.
Automating Appointments
The other thing we need to keep up with are appointments. This is a doozy for me, especially now that we’ve got one kiddo who’s online schooling from home. It’s just a lot between my work appointments, my husband’s appointments, and the kids normal appointments. I have really analyzed how often are we supposed to be doing these things and I set them up to repeat in our calendar. This includes routine health appointments and all of the extra curriculars for anything I know is going to repeat. I just sat down for 30 minutes, got the phone numbers, addresses, appointment times, and I booked them all out in the calendar. Doing that has allowed me to take so much off of my regular to do list.
If your to-do list has something repeating itself over and over again, that is taxing your mental load unnecessarily.
Start Your Journey Today!
Okay, I just gave you a lot to chew on and a lot of homework to do. I hope you’re excited about taking this on, because it was such a fun exercise for me. It has helped tremendously to be able to support a really effective and efficient home for me and my family.
If you’re ready to take action towards reducing your mental load and bringing more peace into your home, start by implementing these steps. You don’t have to do it all at once—just pick one thing and build from there. For more support, check out my program, Systemize Your Life, where you’ll find all the tools you need to master home management, including to-do lists. This comprehensive system will guide you through creating routines and systems that work for your family, with ongoing support throughout the entire year.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do you use instead of paper towels?
I use Norwex Glass Polishing + Microfiber Cloths from Amazon. They are incredible and it has helped us cut back so much on environmental waste.
Where can I read more about your paperless household and automations?
Check out these other blogs: The Crunchy Mom’s Guide to Creating a Paperless Kitchen and 12 Reasons Why You Need To Automate Your To-Do List Today | Back to School Series
