The Christian Homemaking Podcast: Simply Convivial with Mystie Winckler

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comEspecially as stay-at-home moms it can be so hard to know how we're doing because we look at the standards and the definitions of success that come from the business world or the personal achievement world. We know those are not our worlds, yet we don't know where else to go for an understanding of how to get more done, how to better influence our people, and how to measure our successfulness.Let's look at why we feel like failures and why we feel discouraged, and why that's all part of the package of actually being faithful in our roles as mothers at home. Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comThere really is no such thing as time management. There’s only self-management. You don’t use your time better and end up with more. Usually it seems less time because of how we spent it, though there are things we can do to maximize what we get out of the time we have.Time management is all about the decisions we make regarding our time, decisions for ourselves and not the time. Time is external from us. It is not something we can control, manipulate, or change.When we’re talking about time management, what we’re actually needing to manage is ourselves. To maximize our time we must practice self-control and self-management. We must make better choices and decisions.We all feel like there's too much to do, but with the right perspective and realistic expectations, we can use our situation for growth instead of discouragement because we know neither ourselves nor our situation is stagnant or permanent.  Get help figuring this out in your own life with Simply Convivial Continuing Education: https://www.simplyconvivial.com/membership Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comHow to menu plan 6 weeks at a time.Take stock of what’s in your freezer already. I had a ham, some pork, and beef soup bones in addition to the chicken breasts and frozen meatballs I usually have.Fill in any special days coming up: birthdays, eating out, friends over – if you already have plans on certain days, mark those.Decide on some standard day-of-the-week dinners. We do chicken on Mondays. I can do chicken a lot of ways, but every Monday morning, I know I need to go grab some chicken out of the basement freezer. Wednesdays are crockpot days at our house. Assign a certain type of meal to some of the days of the week.Fill in variations those assigned dinner types for the next six weeks. If you spread out your different options for chicken or crockpot dinners, you’ll not feel like you’re cooking and eating the same thing every week.Start filling in other dinner options. Think about how much time or energy is usually left by the end of the day on certain days of the week. What days are you more likely to feel like cooking and what days are good for pulling out the frozen meatballs? I usually alternate weeks on some meals – Tuesday one week might be a tortilla meal and then rice the next. Planning in six weeks chunks helps make rotations like that simpler to plan.Make sure you plan the vegetable and side if you need one as well as the main dish. See my post on Menu Planning: Think in Threes for more about planning a complete meal.Each and every dinner will not happen as planned for the next six weeks, but the plan is in place so that I don’t have to think about it anymore. If I need a dinner plan, there’s one on my calendar. If I feel like getting creative, I can just move the dinner to another day or simply delete that day’s plan. But having the plan in place means I don’t have to panic at 4pm that I had forgotten to think about dinner.And that’s why I did it.Plan ALL the meals!Mystie Winckler explains how she stays on top of cooking dinner every day without becoming overwhelmed. The secret? Take half an hour of your day to plan out ahead of time what this month's meals will be. After that, just create your master pantry list so that you don't get sidetracked shopping and you will have all the materials to cook delicious dinners every day. Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comDinner happens every day (or at least I think it's supposed to). So what can we do to make that process easier, simpler, faster? Today, we're going to talk about a few techniques that will help you get dinner on the table with less effort and in less time.We want the “making of dinner” to be easier, right? When we're looking for kitchen tips and shopping trips and menu planning ideas and meal planning strategy is really a lot of what it all comes down to is the goal of making dinner easier. And one of the reasons why we feel that need or desire to make dinner easier is that it feels like it's harder than it needs to be. And I think that part of what's underneath that feeling of it being harder than we expect it or want it to be is that we think of dinner and just cooking the food and putting it on the table when there are really all these other pieces that have to happen before that can happen and we aren't taking into account the whole process and when we do take that it into account then it seems overwhelming. There are so many pieces and so many parts and they all relate and affect all the others and where do I even start and how do I even make all of this work together? And that's why you get services that will just give you the recipes and the shopping list and plot It out by day and say this is what you're going to do (or even that show up on your doorstep with the groceries and the recipes and the meal plan) because it feels like magic or some crazy skill that we just can't figure out to get all of those pieces and parts to work together, but we don't need those kind of solutions when we simplify. And if you choose a kind of subscription service you're simplifying because you're removing your decision-making from the process and that's simplifying and that's helpful because it's really decision-fatigue that wears us down if we have to decide what we're going to make for dinner, then look through the pantry and see what we have, and so decide what we have to buy, decide when to go to the grocery store, have that list, and get the right things, then decide to do what's on the plan—that’s a part of the decision-fatigue decision and it all becomes messy and involved and requiring a lot of initiative and mental energy from us and a lot of times we feel like that's not where my best energy and best work needs to be right now. Like, I've got these other things spinning, does dinner really have to take this much? And the answer is that it does not. At least not long-term, maybe a little bit in order to set it up and get some habits and systems in place to simplify it so that moving forward and practicing it it doesn't have to take all that out of us.Are you overwhelmed by the daunting task of cooking dinner for your family every single day? Learn how to plan & cook dinners without all the fuss by just taking stock of your pantry and making a list of favorite dishes.Cook Dinner With Less Stress Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comIt's easy to slip into feeling like dinner is a drag, like it's an interruption, like it's something we just really rather not do. But since we do need to serve dinner everyday, why not learn how to enjoy cooking more? It truly is possible!Of course, there are times where it just doesn't happen or it doesn't work out or we don't have the time, and so we have plan B meals. We have takeout—there’s pizza (whatever) sometimes that happens. But as a general rule if we are walking into the kitchen and feeling downcast and downtrodden because we have to fix another meal it’s really not the kitchen work that has to change or a new plan we have to make unless that plan is about our attitude. Today I have three tips to help us learn how to enjoy cooking more:Plan and reserve enough time to make dinner without rushing.Intentionally cultivate and practice cooking skills.Understand that cooking is relational and meaningful.We need a plan to fix our attitude, not a plan for fixing dinner. We've got to fix dinner. We have to fix our attitude first and even while we fix dinner. And when we can repent of our bad attitudes about our responsibility to feed our people we will find not just that we dread making dinner less, or we are resent the obligation on our day, or the mess in our kitchen that dinner makes, instead of looking at all those things as impositions on us, we can take it in stride as a part of our responsibility and duty and not just do it out of drudgery, but actually enjoy it.  Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comI had a dream. And in this dream my pantry always had everything I needed. I never ran out of ingredients to make dinner. I would go to the pantry, pull out what I needed to make dinner that day and it’d be there—no surprises. I had achieved well-stocked pantry perfection.But it turns out that making this dream a reality was much harder than I thought it would be. Still, it’s worth the effort to keep a well-stocked pantry. So, let’s talk about how to do just that.So, you go to make spaghetti and there’s no tomato sauce. You go to make soup and there’s no chicken broth. You think you’ll make tuna noodle casserole and then there’s no tuna or no noodles, or neither. This is frustrating. And it illustrates one of the troubles of menu planning.Menu planning isn’t just coming up with ideas of what’s for dinner. It’s managing this whole magic of having the idea of what’s for dinner, having the ingredients for that dinner on hand, starting dinner at the right time, on the right day, and of course, keeping it all frugal and within budget. There’s a lot that goes into keeping a menu plan. It takes practice. And with practice comes skill. But we need to practice—not just making a list and following that list, the menu planning proper—we also have to manage that pantry ingredient, grocery shopping side of things that makes the meal planning possible.It’s really this whole separate piece that if we aren’t aware of it, managing it, keeping track of it, then that menu plan that we’ve worked on doesn’t work. And we’re thrown back to plan B, or takeout, or frozen fish sticks (if those are in the freezer). So, what does it take to keep a well-stocked pantry? What is in a well-stocked pantry? What should be in your pantry? What should be in my pantry? How do we know that? And then, how do we keep our pantry well-stocked while feeding people three times a day?There are four important steps to keeping and using a well-stocked pantry.Know what your family actually eats and keep a master list of those items you actually use.Determine how much your family consumes of each pantry staple in a week or month.Check your pantry stock before grocery shopping – every time.Keep what’s in your pantry rotated so you use the oldest items first.The Pantry Stock ProblemI know when I was newly married and stocking our pantry for the first time I felt at a loss. There’s so much food at the grocery store. There are so many options. How do I even know what to buy?Sometimes we solve that conundrum by making a menu plan first and then buying the food that we need for those meals that we’ve planned for and that works. But it actually takes a lot longer to make that menu plan, to grocery shop for that menu plan, to follow the recipes, and to just make it all work.We can cut down on the time and energy that it takes to make our meals if we become pantry cooks. If we keep a regular stock on hand and then base our meals off of those things that we just always keep on hand. It’s actually in limiting our choices that things take less effort, energy, attention, time. Not only that, but when we function within limits, our creativity is called into play. It’s needed. And so choosing dinners based out of a pantry system is not only more efficient, it’s also more creative. But the question still comes down to what is in the pantry? And it’s certainly something that takes experience to build up, experimentation to figure out, and iteration and flexibility in continuing it. One of the things that I tried to do the first time I was stocking a pantry was look up that Martha Stewart list of what belongs in your pantry. I didn’t know what should be in our pantry but I figured someone else knows what I should buy, and so I took Martha Stewart’s list and stocked our pantry with the things she said that we should have.And you know what? A lot of that I didn’t really use. I had to be creative and use what I purchased, but I quickly realized that a lot of what Martha Stewart considered pantry basics I did not and I was not going to use and I was not going to restock. We all need to go through that process of figuring out what belongs in our own well-stocked pantry. There is no single definition, single master pantry list that we can all use as a standard, and as long as we follow this list then we have a well-stocked pantry. No, a well-stocked pantry simply means that our pantry has on hand multiples of the items that we consistently use in our cooking.There’s going to be a lot of overlap from what’s in your pantry and what’s in my pantry, but the identical lists, the master lists made by some expert, or my list used by you, or your listed used by me, is not going to work.We each need to go through that process of figuring out what we actually use regularly and keeping those things on hand A well-stocked pantry is not a full pantry. A well-stocked pantry is a pantry that has plenty of what you actually use. If your pantry is full of items that you don’t use, that you aren’t sure why you bought, that you aren’t sure what they’re going to go into, maybe you bought multiple something because it was on sale, or because this one recipe that you made for a special occasion called for it, so you bought several, now you don’t know what else to do with it.A pantry full of items that we aren’t sure about, that we aren’t used to using, that we are likely not going to use, is not a well-stocked pantry, even if it’s stocked. It’s not well-stocked. So we can brainstorm the typical, usual dinners that our family likes to eat, the lunches, the breakfasts, the snacks—all the food.What are the usual things that we make? And a lot of times there’s overlap and common ingredients. We need flour. We need eggs. There’s going to be a lot of similarities in the basics of anyone’s master list, but they’re going to vary for sure. Not only that but the amount of those basics that you need is something you have to figure out for your family, that I have to figure out for my family, and that can definitely change as our families grow in number and grow in size and change in eating habits.Those master amounts that we figure out, that work for us, overtime end up not working. A well-stocked pantry master list is not a once-and-done project. And this is another thing that threw me off for sure. I did this early on, made the master list—these are the items that I’m going to keep on hand in my pantry. I never want to run out of these. I want to always have them on hand and all of the dinners that I make are going to rely on these ingredients only, so that I know I can go to my dinner rotation list and pick any one of them and I’ll have the ingredients on hand because these are just the things that I buy. Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comWe need to stop striving for having ducks in a row and admit that ducklings actually waddle where they will, leaving sloppy footprints as they go. We need to stop believing the marketers who tell us we're only 5 containers and 1 label maker away from achieving the state of organization. Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comAn index card organization system predates blogs and word processors. It’s a thing, and it works because it uses a simple principle.Back in our first year or two of marriage, a good friend and I talked at least weekly about all things homemaking. We were figuring out our new role, and we wanted to do well in it.So, of course, we read the books.One of the books was straight off my mom’s shelf: Sidetracked Home Executives.I could relate to these ladies. They had ideas, they had things they wanted to do, and both the housework and the state of the house (because the work wasn’t being done) was getting in their way.They came up with a creative solution to break up the housework into manageable chunks and make sure they did it regularly without expecting themselves to recognize that it needed to be done or deciding each day what needed to be done.Yes, that’s right. They came up with a housework routine. Now, that alone is not creative or unusual, although there are points at which they seem to think it’s revolutionary.When you suffer from decision fatigue and a tendency toward procrastination or distract ability, however, a routine certainly can be revolutionary.What was creative in their approach was how they tracked their routine. It was an index card organization system.Pam Young and Peggy Jones were organizing their chores with index cards before homeschoolers were doing it with their memory work.In a day with apps and pretty planners galore, is an index card organization system out of date or still useful? Could this book so clearly from the ’80s still be relevant?If you want to accomplish your housework regularly without having the excuse to check your phone, you might consider their index card organization system.However, whether you use index cards, a list, an app, or any other implementation, you certainly can and should use the principle behind this method: Loop scheduling.The index card organization system developed and popularized by Sidetracked Home Executives is, at heart, a loop schedule for housework, just like Sarah Mackenzie’s housework routine – only Sarah uses a plain list instead of a box of index cards.Indeed, index cards can be rather fiddly. They can easily get mixed up, lost, or ruined. However, there are also advantages to running a loop schedule housework routine on index cards:1) You can decorate the cards.2) You can take notes on the cards.3) You can easily reassign the cards.4) You can easily delegate the cards.The index cards are not really the point, though, nor what makes the system work.What makes an index card organization system work is that it relies on three strategies:1) It eliminates decision fatigue.2) It holds the information you need and makes it easy to find and grab.3) It keeps track of what’s next for you.You can accomplish the same outcome with an app like Home Routines or even ToDoist, you can get the same benefits by keeping the same information in checklist form, and you can simply add your recurring chores onto your weekly dashboard.But what won’t give you this same peace of mind and effectiveness is simply printing someone else’s master cleaning list. We are tempted to shortcut the decision making process not by writing down and figuring out (through trial and error) what will work for us, but by finding someone who will tell us what to do.Even this index card organization system will do that if you buy the book. They’ll tell you which chores to write on cards and what frequency to arrange them in.We search for the “ready to go” plan not because we want to avoid decision fatigue, but because we think that our past inconsistency and failure disqualifies us from making our own workable plan.If this other lady – whether in a book, real life, or on the internet – has a plan that works for her, then I know it works, right? If it works, I don’t have to take responsibility. I can just adopt her plan and get her results – right? I haven’t removed decision fatigue at that point; I have removed personal engagement with the problem.Unfortunately, too often we don’t want to go through the process of getting organized, changing both our mindset and our methods, we just want a quick fix solution.Most likely, someone else’s plan will not work for you in a cut-and-paste sort of a way. It might be a great shortcut to developing your own workable system – even one with index cards – but you will have to mix with brains and practice before it actually works for you.Ready to make a housekeeping routine, a housework loop schedule, or even an index card organization system that works for you? Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comThe daily card is a term that we use from Work the Plan for your daily to do list. So, you might have a planner and the question is whether or not you use the planner correctly; if we actually use what’s written in the planner to direct our days? And the daily card can be just a card, just a post-it, an index card, or it can be a section in the planner. But the point of it is to keep a very truncated, limited, small set of tasks for that day alone. So, you make a list of the top priorities for that day. And you re-do that every day. You might make it the night before, or you might make it the morning of, but you’re not making a daily card for every day of the week during your Weekly Review. Every day you’re renewing your task list and adjusting because sometimes the needs and the priorities of where our attention needs to go for the day do really adjust on a day-by-day basis, and I think now more than ever, we recognize that. How do you decide what your daily three are? Can it be in all different kinds of formats? Are the tasks typically habitual things? How do you keep wishful thinking off the daily card? People often say, “Mine turn into a daily brain dump so I struggle with knowing which three.”Knowing what to put on the card—that is the hardest part for everybody. And so, what we have to remember is the reason why we do a daily card every single day is for the practice so that we keep iterating, we keep learning, we learn from the previous day, and implement that the next day. So, the more and more we practice, the better and better we get at knowing what needs to go on the list. If you’ve made a daily card before and you find at the end of the day that really what you put on your list was wishful thinking and not what actually was important to do today that’s something to think about. That’s what you adjust moving forward. And what I found when I recognized that as well, was that I make a better daily list when I do it the night before rather than the morning of (and that’s not a universal thing.) It really depends on person to person. But, for myself, when I stop at the end of the day and I look at the list that I made for that day and see what did and didn’t happen, I make a more realistic plan for the next day when I’m tired and wishing I had accomplished what was on my list. And also recognizing the wishful thinking or how things changed that day that made the priority shift. Or recognizing, ‘Okay, I put that on my list and I didn’t do it, I’m procrastinating that. It needs to keep going on the list and I’m going to put it on there.’ In the morning, I feel more like, ‘Oh, fresh start, everything’s possible!’ I tend to be more energetic and optimistic in the morning and my to do list will reflect that. So, I make a more realistic to do list if I do it the night before. Your mileage may vary, but the point really, is to try it out. Try different times, try different formats, try different ways to write out your list, and learn. So, think of each daily list as an experiment and you can apply what you’ve learned to the next day’s card. At Simply Convivial we do not believe in one-size-fits-all solutions, plans, or check lists. I’m all about teaching you the principles and the skills that you need to figure out what’s going to work for you in your particular situation with your particular needs. If that’s what you need then make sure to subscribe and check out some of my other videos, including my series on Getting Your Life Organized in One Week. Check those out here. Always remember that your attitude is the most important part of your organization project. So, repent, rejoice, repeat. See you next time. Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comWe all know the feeling. There’s just too much to do. Do you ever feel like the more you have to do the less you actually get done? That’s a real thing. There’s a reason for that. And it’s decision fatigue. The first step that you have to do to prevent decision fatigue and then to get started is decide what to actually do next. It seems simple but it can be hard. The more options there are, the more that’s rattling around in your head, the more thought and energy it takes to come to a conclusion and just get started. Let me show you how to streamline the decision-making process so you can do what needs to be done no matter how long or short your to do list is. Let’s dig in.So, let’s figure out how to make our to do lists short and simple, so we can actually get them done each day.Step one is that you actually need two to do lists. One is your master list. A running list of all the things that need to happen; big or small, routine or not. Everything that needs to happen needs to be written down and kept. But that’s not your to do list that you actually work from day to day. Think of it like the safe-keeping place so that you’re not keeping track of everything in your head—you’re keeping things safe and written down where you can refer to it as needed, jog your memory, where you’re not afraid you’re going to lose something or forget something.Then, you need the actionable daily to do list. You can choose from that master list what goes on today’s list, but the list that you’re making for today is short. It’s prioritized. It’s a list of what’s most important today. Sometimes that’s going to be something that’s not even on your master list. Days are like that. Keeping a daily to do list allows you that flexibility you need to adjust to real life as it unrolls. Your daily to do list then is a prioritized list. It is not even all the things that you will do. It is your top three things for the day, the three things that, if you do those it’s going to be better tomorrow. The three things that are going to make a difference. It’s easy to get distracted of the little things that pile up but then we end up never getting to those important things that aren’t necessarily urgent. This short daily to do list is where we make sure that we do not lose sight of what’s important in our days. Now, we need to keep this to do list short because we don’t have unlimited time, we don’t have unlimited energy either. So, we have to choose. We have to make tough choices and then we need to write them down so that we can stick with those choices. And we make this list every day because every day our time is a little bit different—the time we have available, the kind of energy that we have available—and so we can look at what we actually have by looking at our calendar, looking at our commitments, and we can choose what’s most important. Sometimes, appointments might take up all day and so we don’t want to write a list that assumes we’ll be able to get a lot of home projects done. Or maybe even any of our routines done. Our daily to do list is made in light of the reality of today. It takes practice and experience to know how to pick a viable, realistic top three. It’s not something that anyone can tell you what you should pick. It’s something that you have to think about, figure out, try, experiment, iterate, and continually learn from your own experience by evaluating how it went, making observations, and moving forward in light of what you learn. In this way, with this daily practice of learning how we work, learning what our real responsibilities are, recognizing what we tend to procrastinate on, and seeing what’s really important. In this practice, over time, we make better and better choices. And, because those are self-determined choices that we know are realistic and necessary, we also grow in our self-motivation and momentum and follow through in actually doing them. And that’s really what we’re after. So, you need to identify your priorities. That’s hard to do but you’ll get better at it with practice. So, practice every day and write three to do’s down on a daily index card. You will, of course, do more in a day than the three things written down on your index card, but if you start with what’s most important, you’ll feel better about how you’ve used your time and you’ll probably even get more done in the long run because you’re focused and clear. You’ll see you’re spending your time well. We tend to waste more time in distraction and indecision when we aren’t working from a clear list. So, give it a shot. Try it out. And let me know in the comments below how it’s working for you. At Simply Convivial we do not believe in one-size-fits all plans. I’m all about teaching you the principles and the skills that you need to figure out what’s going to work for you in your particular situation with your particular needs.Always remember that your attitude is the most important part of your organization project. So, repent, rejoice, repeat.  Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com