There’s a common feeling many of us share – especially if we’re overwhelmed overthinkers – that sense you can never truly relax at home because there’s always so much to do. I know that I often feel guilty when I put my feet up at the end of the day to enjoy an episode of my favorite television series, and I’ve heard many others express similar feelings.
Sometimes getting rid of that guilt involves a mindset shift, but sometimes there’s a reason for those guilty feelings. If that’s the case for you, let’s talk about how to simplify your home so that life runs a little more smoothly and you can enjoy your favorite relaxing activities guilt-free.
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Moving Beyond Constant Chores Toward ‘Balance’
Obviously, we can’t spend all of our time relaxing in front of the television or browsing our favorite social media sites. But spending hours every. single. day. doing household chores and taking care of everything involved with supporting our family is just as bad for us.
How do you even begin to find balance and harmony in this area?
First, let me say that I don’t believe perfect balance is ever possible. There’s always easy vs. difficult, busy vs. relaxed, etc. Depending on your season of life, these things shift, and fighting against that natural shift in an attempt to ‘balance’ your life at every moment is an exercise in frustration.
But no matter what season of life you’re in or what your current ‘balance’ looks like, simplifying your home is a piece of the puzzle that can help everything feel more even.
Getting to that point and making more time to relax usually comes down to routines, processes, and priority goals. Not every day will be perfect, but if you can simplify the basics of how your home and family operate, it often makes a serious difference in your stress level and how much time you REALLY have every day for relaxation, creative outlets, and pursuing your passions.
Embracing more of a simple living lifestyle starts with understanding what needs to change…
Get Real Before You Start: What Needs to Change?
Before making any changes, it helps to do an honest assessment. This lays the groundwork for genuine simplicity.
- Understand Your Time: Take a few days to track your time. Where are the hours actually going? This insight is invaluable.
- Be Honest: Look around your home with fresh eyes. Be honest with yourself about the state of your house. What areas cause the most stress? What isn’t working?
- Picture Your Ideal: Think about your ideal day. What does a simplified home look and feel like to you? Having a vision helps direct your efforts.
- Get on the Same Page: Have a family meeting. Talk about how to simplify your house together. Get on the same page, or if needed, be the parent and set clear expectations about how things will operate moving forward.
11 Practical Actions to Simplify and Organize Your Home
Once you have a clearer picture of what you want and need, you can start taking action. These ways to simplify your home and life often have the biggest impact.
1. Clear the Clutter: The Foundational Step to a Calmer Home
Doing your best to create a (mostly) clutter free home is HUGE. Your surroundings have a massive impact on your mental state and how well your home operates. Reducing visual clutter and the amount of stuff you own is absolutely the most effective first step.
Depending on the level of mess in your home and how much energy you have, you may want to approach this in different ways. Here are a few decluttering ideas:
- Exactly Where to Start Decluttering Your Home
- The Slow Declutter: A No-Mess Method to Declutter Your Home
- How To Declutter In Layers: An Easy Decluttering Method To Tackle The Mess
- How to Quickly Declutter a Room Every Day (The SPRINT Method)
I’ve found that learning to think like a minimalist REALLY helps with this process. Even if you never intend to go full-on minimalist, figuring out how to want less stuff is incredibly helpful when it comes to simplifying your home.
2. Organize: Give Everything Purpose and Place
Although some people lump decluttering and organizing together, they’re really not the same thing at all. Organizing is designating a purpose and a place for every item and space in your home.
But here’s the thing… the more stuff you get rid of, the faster and easier it is to organize – and the more likely you are to actually do it in an effective way. Storing useless items in pretty bins is NOT helpful, which is why I recommend that you stop organizing until AFTER the excess is gone.
Part of organizing your life is making your remaining possessions easy to find and use. And it doesn’t always have to cost a lot. Try this 3-step framework to organize without buying anything.
3. Plan Your Days and Meals for Less Stress
Feeling constantly reactive? Planning can help. Take time each evening to plan the next day, especially if you hit the ground running every morning and don’t have a moment to really think about anything. If you’re more of a morning person and like to take a little time to linger over your beverage, use that morning energy to do your planning.
Either method will help you keep track of home and life things and help you feel like you at least know what’s going on most of the time. Try this printable daily planner page to get started.
Along with daily planning, try to implement a Sunday reset routine. Part of that includes planning your meals and doing some meal prep, which is also incredibly helpful. Knowing what’s for dinner eliminates daily decision fatigue and makes evenings smoother. Look for simple dinner recipes to make planning and meal times even easier.
4. Limit Activities for More Breathing Room at Home
Nobody can do all the things. A packed schedule often leads to a stressed home life. While personality and energy levels play important roles in how much you and your family can handle, a good basic rule is one activity per child (or adult) per season.
If you have a large family, that might still feel like a lot. You may find your stress level necessitates allowing fewer activities or not personally attending every single practice and game or event.
Learning to be more intentional with your time commitments supports a slow living lifestyle, and it’s something everyone in the family can benefit from.
5. Simplify Decor for Easier Cleaning
To be completely honest, I would probably be okay with having a little more stuff in my home if nothing ever got dusty. However, the amount of effort it takes to maintain a fully decorated – yet clean – home is just not feasible for many. Every decorative item on a surface is one more thing to pick up, dust, and put back down. When you multiply that across shelves, tables, countertops, and dressers, it adds significant time to your cleaning routine.
One of the most effective ways to simplify your home visually and practically is to reduce the amount of purely decorative stuff you have sitting out. This doesn’t mean your home has to be bare or lack personality, but it does mean being more selective. Maybe choose fewer, larger statement pieces over many small knick-knacks.
And just because a space is empty, doesn’t mean it NEEDS to be filled. Open spaces have their own beauty and calm. I think this is especially true when it comes to floors – random tables or baskets on a floor are a magnet for dust and pet hair that will take extra time and effort to clean.
This is part of adopting a minimalist mindset – being intentional about what earns its place in your home. Does that collection of items truly bring you joy, or does dusting it feel like a burden?
Opting for clearer surfaces not only makes achieving a clean and organized home easier but also contributes to a calmer visual space. It’s one more way to simplify home life and free up time for things other than constant dusting.
6. Smarter Cleaning: Find Your ‘Clean Enough’
Practice smart cleaning routines. This will vary somewhat on how clean you think of as ‘clean enough’. If your standards differ significantly from your partner’s or family’s, there may always be a bit of struggle. Focus on expectations and compromises.
Try some new routines and tidy house tips that keep things manageable without causing burnout. Here are some ideas:
- How To Make Cleaning Easier When You’re Overwhelmed By A Dirty House
- 2-in-1 Daily and Weekly Home Cleaning Schedule {Free Printable}
- 4 Fast + Simple Habits to Keep a Clean and Tidy Home
7. Share the Load: It’s Not Just Your Job
This is crucial: It is NOT YOUR JOB to clean the house while everyone else relaxes. Everyone living in the home should contribute.
Set up a realistic cleaning schedule and allow everyone to practice being responsible for themselves and the home. Just make sure each person knows what is expected of them, otherwise everyone will sit around waiting for ‘someone’ to do the work. You don’t need to be that ‘someone.’
Aim for a clean and organized home through teamwork. A nightly 10-minute tidy by the entire family really helps to keep the clutter and mess under control.
8. Put the House to Bed Every Night
Let’s face it, you’re probably never going to ‘let go’ of the household tasks completely. One satisfying thing you can do every evening is putting your house to bed. This helps calm a little bit of overthinking – like wondering if the doors are locked AFTER you’re in bed – and helps you mentally close out the day before turning in for the night.
Think of it as a simple closing routine. It might include some basic tidy house tips like making sure the dishwasher was started (I can’t tell you how many times I get everything ready and then walk away without pressing ‘start’, so this is always on my list to check before bedtime), wiping down the kitchen counters, fluffing the sofa cushions or arranging your throw blanket, closing the blinds, or maybe even doing that quick 10-minute family tidy we talked about earlier. Maybe it involves prepping the coffee maker or setting out breakfast bowls to make the morning rush smoother. It’s also the time to do that final check – making sure doors are locked and unnecessary lights are off.
This habit doesn’t need to be complicated or take a long time, but incorporating it can make a real difference in how calm and simple your home feels. Establishing this end-of-day routine is a small act of intentional living that helps you truly simplify home life, one evening at a time.
9. Create a Family Command Center
Set up a command center with a weekly menu plan, project list, and family calendar of all upcoming activities. If you’re a digital family, share your calendars and home-related lists. Even then, it’s still a good idea to have one physical place where you can post important family information… that way nobody can say ‘I didn’t get the message.’
Here are some ideas for inspiration:
- The Simple Refrigerator Command Center You’ll Actually Use
- 9 Kitchen Command Center Ideas For Smart And Simple Organizing
10. Plan for Maintenance
Plan for periodic home maintenance, vehicle maintenance, and all other appointments. Scheduling these things proactively prevents them from becoming urgent crises later.
Not only do you want to get these things scheduled, but you’ll also want to budget for them. Unexpected repair or replacement bills can bring a lot of stress into your home. Regular maintenance can help prevent those bills, or sometimes at least give you a heads-up about bigger expenses looming down the road.
Knowing what might be coming allows you to plan financially and mentally, reducing that feeling of being caught off guard. It’s another practical way to simplify home management and keep stress levels lower.
11. Maybe… Just Maybe… Hire Outside Help
Hiring help isn’t always as crazy as it sounds, and could be a part of your simplifying home plan. This might look like bringing in a weekly or monthly cleaning service, a professional organizer, or even lawn and home maintenance support. If there are tasks that consistently cause stress and eat up your limited time, outsourcing them might be one of the smartest ways to reclaim your energy.
Of course, I’m not suggesting you go into debt or wreck your budget in order to pay someone to do those things. But if it’s financially practical, yet you’re holding off because you feel like you ‘should’ always clean your own home (or whatever the task might be), well… perhaps it’s time to just give it a try and see how things go?
Your First Step Toward a Simplified Home
For today, ask yourself, ‘What are two things I can do to simplify my life at home?’ Don’t try to overhaul everything at once. Pick a couple of manageable ways to simplify your home and start there.
When your home and routines are organized, most of the time your home seems to sort of run itself. Yes, of course you have to keep up with those routines, but that is FAR less difficult than running around trying to keep on top of everything when it feels like you’re living in a disaster zone… or doing all the work of an entire family YOURSELF.
Implementing great routines and simplifying your home has plenty of benefits, such as:
- You’ll feel less guilty about watching those favorite shows or diving into that new book by your favorite author… because you’ll know the time you’ve set aside for relaxing belongs to you and all of the ‘jobs’ are already done.
- You’ll catch little problems before they turn into huge headaches, especially with house maintenance.
- Your family members will be proud of their skils… or at least HAVE skills that will serve them well in life.
Focus on enjoying sustainable simplicity as you Build Your Best Life, one step at a time. You’ve got this!
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