I first discovered The FlyLady many years ago, before she even had her own website, and have been a follower off and on throughout the years. I’ve read her book, Sink Reflections, and at various times signed up for her email reminders. I’m currently working on getting my household cleaning routines in place for the fall so I’m revisiting my old friend, The FlyLady.
The FlyLady can be somewhat polarizing. Some people almost worship at her feet (which are firmly ensconced in lace-up shoes!) while others find her and her numerous emails quite annoying. I fall somewhere in between.
Some of her methods are excellent. I’m especially fond of using a timer for certain tasks and the daily bathroom “swish and swipe” is a great idea.
I’ve shared my thoughts about the pros and cons of her methods on a post I wrote for The Glamorous Housewife.
*note: The Glamorous Housewife website is no longer online (sadly). I have republished my article here:
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. Read more here.
Yesterday I wrote about using my Happy Planner and mentioned that I was working on creating a housekeeping schedule:
I don’t plan to follow every aspect of The FlyLady “flight plan” but I am embracing the spirit of it. I’ll have short morning and evening cleaning routines, certain tasks for each day and follow her “Zone Cleaning” system.
I’ll share more details about my personalized version of The FlyLady routines as soon as I get them all set up and working. I may even create downloadable routines and checklists if anyone is interested. Leave me a comment if you are.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering…I WON’T be exchanging my Birkenstocks for lace-up shoes, no matter what The FlyLady says.
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Here are some helpful resources if you need help setting up housekeeping routines:
FlyLady phone app:
The FlyLady has also partnered with Cozi, a shared calendar app:
“This is a web-based calendar and organizer program that will allow you to schedule, plan,
have time-zone-specific reminders, shopping lists, to-do lists,
a family journal section that you can even opt in to post to Facebook, and more!”
I signed up for Cozi years ago although I never used it. But David and I now find ourselves in need of a shared calendar system so I revisited Cozi yesterday. I think it’s going to work beautifully for us – I’ll let you know after we’ve used it for awhile. David, of course, won’t have any interest in the FlyLady lists but since we both end up booking bands for events we absolutely have to have a place where we can see what the other one has booked. Plus we can input our meetings, travel schedules, appointments and anything else that we both need to be aware of. Like date nights, for instance! Speaking of which, we are reinstated a weekly date night. I’ll share more about that later.
Sink Reflections by Marla Cilley
Getting Started With The FlyLady
Note: I led a 31 Day FlyLady challenge in my Facebook group, Make Over Your Life With Dee. You are welcome to join the group. We started Friday, April 13, 2018 but you can still access the information. I put each day’s task/lesson in the group files so you can read them at any time.
I’m so glad you are revisiting the “Fly Lady.” I’m going to do that too! I’ve been swishing the kitchen sink every morning for some time now. I have started using timers to break up parts of my work day. I am tutoring two homeschoolers in English, Writing, American History and Humanities. Then after school, I have one precious and bright sixth grade girl who has mild dyslexia and ADD… and rapidly approaching puberty. My father lives with me and he has my old iphone4. He doesn’t use it for a phone…he has his trusty flip…he uses the iPhone to keep his music playlists. He belongs to three singing groups–the church choir, The Hale Center Senior Singers, and The International Chorale. He his 86 and we share a car. I am only teaching one class for Osher USF for six Tuesday afternoons this fall. My tutoring students all get dropped off and picked up from my home office. So the car schedule mostly revolved around Dad’s Activities– rehearsals, performances, and a costume party or two! Now, this summer my Dad met Bernadine, a younger woman of only 82 to this 86. She plays the ukelele and shares his love of singing and weekly movies…together they have discovered swimming. We MUST have a Cozi! The only thing that would make it better would be some sort of large wall-hanging electronic calendar…Do those exist?
Wow, your schedule sounds complicated! I’ll bet Cozi will help. I just got David added to mine yesterday so we haven’t really used it yet but I’m hopeful. As for a large wall electronic calendar – I don’t know that they exist but they should. As soon as I get my home office set up I’m going to hang a large white board in there. I’m then going to write a three month calendar on it so we can put all our music events there. This will be in addition to our digital calendars but I’m so visual that I think that will be helpful.
I always enjoy learning what routines and rituals others come up with. Sometimes I just read them, and none of it has any impact on my own, but sometimes I’ll see something I think will work for me in my daily life. Either way, I enjoy reading about them.
OK, that was weird… I just had a weird message come up that said I had to ask permission to access the ability to post comments, but now my comment is there anyway… Strange!
That truly is odd. Sometimes the cyber world makes no sense.
Some days I’m not sure the real world does either… Make sense, I mean. 😉
I’m the same way. I love to see what works for others then take the parts that fit my lifestyle.
Please post your schedules and routines once you have them. I like the idea of Flylady but the emails are all ads for her products. AND I love in South Mississippi and ain’t no one taking my flip flops away. I. Just having a tough time making it work for me.
And I’m not giving up my Birkenstocks – ha!