Philosophy of Homemaking
As a homemaker, you are a career professional. You may not get a paycheck or a promotion, yet your vocation is so important, no monetary value would ever compensate its contribution to the world. And the rewards for a job well done come in the form of some of the sweetest experiences life can bring.
The goal of your profession is to raise a happy, healthy family. You do this by creating an environment where a diverse group of personalities can come together in love and unity to help each other fulfill our capacities for good. The importance of this career has been attested to by leaders in politics, religion, and the profession of household management for centuries. Consider the following statements:
The goal of your profession is to raise a happy, healthy family. You do this by creating an environment where a diverse group of personalities can come together in love and unity to help each other fulfill our capacities for good. The importance of this career has been attested to by leaders in politics, religion, and the profession of household management for centuries. Consider the following statements:
“All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”—Abraham Lincoln
“As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path. Of all those acquirements, which more particularly belong in the feminine character, there are none which take a higher rank, in our estimation, than such as enter into a knowledge of household duties; for on these are perpetually dependent the happiness, comfort and well-being of a family.” –Isabella Beeton, author of The Book of Household Management, 1861
“No other success can compensate for failure in the home.” –David O. McKay, 9th President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1935
A successful homemaking career requires the homemaker to be proficient in a dizzying array of disciplines and tasks. Interpersonal relationships, parenting, nutrition and cooking, organization and financial management, medicine, and hospitality are only a few of the many necessary areas a homemaker needs expertise in. Those who think of homemaking as a boring, menial, or secondary responsibility relegated to those who can’t do anything worthy of a paycheck have clearly never attempted a professional approach to homemaking or tried at all to learn what it takes to do the job really well.
This course will not attempt to cover all of the disciplines that homemaking encompasses, but will instead focus on basic time and materials management skills to create a home that is organized, clean, and easy to use. Your home is a tool to use in supporting your life, and like any tool, it must be in good working condition to get its job done. When your home works for you, you have time and energy to work for yourself and others. When your home is a constant source of problems, embarrassments, frustrations, and unfinished tasks, you’re either a slave to your own home, constantly putting out fires and scurrying in never-ending loops, or you just don’t spend time at home: usually an expensive alternative both in money and in family relationships (how much can you really foster your relationship with your family if you’re always shopping or visiting people to avoid your mess, making you nothing but a visitor in your own home?).
Since I’ve gotten more of my own home in order (an on-going task, I’ll admit), I’ve had more time for what I see as the truly important aspect of my profession as a homemaker: my family. I’ve also had more time to make good food, I’ve had more control of my finances, and I’ve had more time for myself to pursue my interests. I’ve grown personally and spiritually. I feel closer to God. My husband often comments on how nice things are around the house, and it’s not hard for him to pitch in and help because maintenance is simplified. My home is working for me and facilitates the lifestyle I want, instead of me trying to conform my lifestyle to a home that always demands my attention right now or else.
You can do this too! I’m so excited for you to start on your own journey to achieving a more ideal home and lifestyle—your ideal home and lifestyle. This course will help you do just that in a step-by-step process based on the four principles of home material management, or what I call HMM4 or "hum four": acquiring, using, maintaining, and discarding. Because most of us struggle with the last two principles--maintaining and discarding--this course will focus on making these two tasks much easier as the first step in achieving the home and life you want.
Some day, a 102 course will hopefully cover the other two HMM4 principles: using and acquiring. The 102 course would cover using our homes well by learning how to beautify our homes (decorating!) and increase our skills in basic home uses (such as cooking, parenting, hosting, and recreating). We'll also hopefully cover how to acquire well with some basic principles of personal finance, home purchasing, emergency preparedness, and so forth.
In my lessons, I draw on research (books and articles on the subject of homemaking from 250 years ago to the present) and my own experiences working in food services, clothing retail, customer service, academia, and my own home. I’m still learning all the time, and I hope this course will reflect my desire to share my failures and successes in pursuing a homemaking career and learn from yours as well.
Some day, a 102 course will hopefully cover the other two HMM4 principles: using and acquiring. The 102 course would cover using our homes well by learning how to beautify our homes (decorating!) and increase our skills in basic home uses (such as cooking, parenting, hosting, and recreating). We'll also hopefully cover how to acquire well with some basic principles of personal finance, home purchasing, emergency preparedness, and so forth.
In my lessons, I draw on research (books and articles on the subject of homemaking from 250 years ago to the present) and my own experiences working in food services, clothing retail, customer service, academia, and my own home. I’m still learning all the time, and I hope this course will reflect my desire to share my failures and successes in pursuing a homemaking career and learn from yours as well.
The course is outlined with the following objectives:
- Envision: Get personally prepared to improve your home management skills by developing a life plan and vision of how your home can support that plan.
- Discard: Unbury what's important to you by using either a pure or a modified approach to the KonMari method of tidying (discarding) your stuff. Make improvements in your home’s organization by properly decluttering and storing your stuff
- Maintain: Organize only your most useful and meaningful posessions for ease of use and care, and establish cleaning and maintenance routines that require the minimum possible time and effort.
This course is organized into units (see the tabs at the top of this site) with several lessons per unit. Each lesson shares the steps you need to take to improve yourself and create a home that serves you. To really succeed, I recommend completing the units in order. The first six units are focused on the basic orderliness, cleanliness (there's a difference between orderly and clean), and functionality of you and your home. The seventh unit may or may not remain as part of this course (it may get saved for Career Homemaking 102), but it will focus on making things pretty. This may be optional to you, but for me, it's a must. I love beautiful.
Please know that making these changes takes time. Don’t worry if it even takes a few years to develop the habits and carry out ideas I’ll be presenting here. That’s the exciting part of a professional approach to homemaking: you can always learn more and get better at it. If seen in this light, homemaking, including doing household “chores,” is never boring.
The course is one that you can take again and again (though hopefully certain tasks, like decluttering, will only have to be done once). While I do recommend taking the lessons in order, if you find you’re already good at what’s contained in one section, feel free to skip to another section you want to work on. I’m here to present the material, be a homemaking buddy you can report to, and cheer you on. I won’t be grading your performance. You can do that yourself.
I will recommend readings and projects to help you assimilate key concepts and put them into practice. I’ll also include some video demonstrations of certain skills, like how to do dishes, scrub toilets, and fold laundry (without taking all day about it!). I’ll also occasionally request a “homework” submission—usually a before-and-after photo series—to help us both track and celebrate your progress.
Ready to get started? Good! Here’s your first assignment and recommended reading list!
Assignment: Create a book of personal organization (BOPO)
Meet BOPO. BOPO is a brain outside your brain in either paper or electronic format. If you don't already have an electronic task management and note-taking system that you're using, it may be helpful to start with paper format. Paper can’t distract you with text, email, Facebook, or whatever your personal social media weakness happens to be (mine is Pinterest). For a paper BOPO, some people like to use "bullet journals," others like binders. If you want to have the obvious benefits of an electronic BOPO (you can use it on your phone, it's less bulky, you can sync between devices and share with collaborators easily) some good electronic BOPO options out there include Evernote, Google Keep, and other similar personal organization apps.
BOPO does you the huge service of capturing and remembering routines, to-dos, ideas, and so forth so that you don’t have to keep everything in your head all by yourself. My stress levels and niggling thoughts of “oh yeah, I’ve got to do ___” have been significantly reduced since BOPO entered my life. Just as your brain is uniquely yours, your BOPO will be all yours. BOPO will grow with you throughout this course: don’t feel like you need to make anything fancy out of BOPO at this point. Just find a binder and put some paper in it, or determine which app you want to use. If you have some tab dividers, feel free to put them in, but you don’t need to label anything yet. Think baby BOPO here.
Here’s a picture of my BOPO:
My BOPO is a combination of what Marla Cilley (AKA the FLY Lady) calls her “control journal” and David Allen’s project management system described in his book, Getting Things Done. Your BOPO may start out like mine, then morph into your own unique system that works for you. That’s as it should be.
Note the zipper pouch. This is very handy. I keep thank-you cards, stamps, a pen and pencil, and scissors in it. I’ll also put small loose notes and papers in there so they don’t fall out when I stuff BOPO in my purse and run. The Fly Lady recommends using a binder that zips shut so that things don’t fall out. Do whatever sounds helpful to you.
If you want, you can find these kinds of nifty zippered implements later if you don’t have them on hand. You may find you don’t even need them. For now, just build a basic BOPO with paper in a binder.
Give BOPO a permanent residence somewhere easily accessible in your home. Maybe this is in the kitchen cupboard or by your bed. Mine lives on a centrally located desk in my living room. Just make sure BOPO gets to be at home when not being used.
If you're going with an electronic BOPO, just decide what platform you're going to use. I recommend something that allows you to create folders, tabs, or other larger organizational systems that allow for smaller content pieces to be categorized and located easily.
Once you've decided what form your BOPO is going to take and established some basic content and a storage location, you’ve built your baby BOPO and you’re done with this assignment. Congratulations. You’ve just taken your first step to a more orderly home life.
We will revisit BOPO again in a few lessons down the road. For now, though, feel free to start putting in any to-do lists, shopping lists, random thoughts, or whatever you want in your BOPO. We'll build and organize BOPO together throughout this course.
Once you've decided what form your BOPO is going to take and established some basic content and a storage location, you’ve built your baby BOPO and you’re done with this assignment. Congratulations. You’ve just taken your first step to a more orderly home life.
We will revisit BOPO again in a few lessons down the road. For now, though, feel free to start putting in any to-do lists, shopping lists, random thoughts, or whatever you want in your BOPO. We'll build and organize BOPO together throughout this course.
Suggested Readings:
These readings are aimed at helping you start thinking of yourself as a professional and your job as a profession. What do these readings share in common? What unique insights do they offer? Most importantly, what does being a professional homemaker look like to you?
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