How Using a Planner Reduces Stress

Planning is a mom’s best friend. There are so many different facets of homemaking, mothering, and being a wife that without a plan it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and hard to remember everything. That’s why I love writing things down in my planner! Today I’m talking about how using a planner reduces stress.

I’ve been using a household notebook off and on for years. In fact, here at A Virtuous Woman, I’ve offered free printable pages for a household notebook for almost two decades! Two decades is a long time!!

What’s even more crazy is that this March I will have been a mom for 30 years – that’s 3 decades. I don’t even know how that is possible! If you are new here, I have five kids of my own and my youngest is now 17 years old. It goes by so fast!!

As a busy mom of five, I needed to wake up every day with a plan. Between being a pastor’s wife, homeschooling five kids, and running A Virtuous Woman, if I didn’t plan for it, it didn’t happen.

Planning is a mom’s best friend. If you do your planning at the beginning of the day or even better – the beginning of the week – that means you don’t have to really think. It’s already been done for you.

So, having said that, today I wanted to talk about why I use a planner (a.k.a. homemaking planner, household notebook, mom life planner).

For instance, I like to plan all of our meals for the week (21 meals) plus snacks. My days are generally very busy. And even when they aren’t all that busy, I find that trying to come up with a healthy meal, that tastes good – fast – is a lot harder an hour before we eat.

That’s why chore lists and menu plans and reminder notes come in so handy. It saves my brain some work. I don’t have to remember everything because it’s written down for me.

But a planner only reduces stress if you actually use it. That’s why it’s important to have a planner that makes you happy, that you enjoy using, and that makes it easy for you to plan.

3 Ways a Planner Reduces Your Stress

#1 You know what expect (most of the time).

When you plan your day and write down everything you need to do and remember, you know what to expect for the day. Obviously, there are days when things don’t go according to plan. And that’s okay!!

But having a plan can help you know what’s happening over the course of the day from the moment you wake up. Planning your day can take as little as five or ten minutes but it saves you so much time and sanity!!

Writing down your to-do list, appointments, and other reminders in your homemaking planner reduces your stress by volumes.

#2 You know what to prioritize.

Not everything on your to-do list is created equal. Some things are just more important than others. When you write everything down in your homemaking planner or household notebook, you can clearly see what you need to prioritize that day. For example:

• Paying bills is decidedly more important than washing the windows.
• Making sure your husband’s suit is clean before he preaches on Sabbath is more important than decluttering your nightstand.

#3 You stay on top of household chores.

It’s easy to get behind on household chores if you aren’t doing them regularly and on schedule. However, when you use one of the Purpose 31 Homemaking planners with my proven system for keeping your house tidy, you’ll always know what needs to be done.

Using a planner to help you stay on top of all the things you need to do on any given day as a wife, mother, and homemaker helps reduce your stress and make life easier. You can learn more about the Purpose 31 Homemaking Planners here.