How We Keep It Together – And Free Weekly Planner Templates!

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Do you need to add a little more structure to your day? Perhaps your family is floundering in all of the day to day activities? Today I’m sharing with you the free weekly planner template that our family uses along with other to-do lists that you can print and use!

Weekly Planner Template

Free Weekly Planner Templates

It seems like summer days (or most days) just go way too fast. It’s always one doctor’s appointment after another for our oldest son, I’ve been working on things with the books and the blog, and we usually have a large garden that takes a lot of maintaining. Plus of course, just the rest of life in general.

I’ve entered that phase of motherhood where I couldn’t tell you if I showered this morning or what day of the month it is…I just don’t remember.

But one good thing has come out of all of the craziness…one, very detailed, schedule. It takes a little bit to maintain but I usually welcome the sanity of sitting down on Sunday night and going over everything that needs to get done. Today I’m going to share our system with you.

I’ve tried various schedules, chore charts, lists….none of it worked for us and our family dynamic so that’s why we ended up creating our own hodgepodge calendar. It may not work for your family either but you won’t know until you give it a try!

Our system consists of 5 different printable pages, a calendar, and another small whiteboard. I’ll start with the 5 pages and why they are important.

To get all of these printables for free, scroll all the way to the bottom of this blog post or add your email in the form right under this and I will send them to you!


Daily Chores Printable Template

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Daily Chores Printable

If the daily chores don’t get done, things don’t keep moving around our house. This is a printable that we only print once a season (since our chores can change by the season).

It’s a visual reminder of what chores need to be completed each day and about what time of day they should be done by. Some of the things I have on this list are: Outside Chores (ie: feeding animals), washing dishes, filling up our Berkey water filter, making Kombucha, etc. Anything we do daily goes on this master list.


Daily Routine Printable Template

dailyroutine

Daily Routine Printable

The Daily Routine is another master list that we keep. Because of their background, our children do not function well without a strong routine. Having a crazy and chaotic day happens once in a while, but we like to avoid it if at all possible.

The boys love to know when it’s going to be lunchtime, when its bath time, or when they can expect to go to bed, all things that they can tell from what happens during our daily routine. I don’t assign times to things that we do during the day (ie: lunch is not strictly at noon). Its also not a schedule of exactly what we will do (ie: I don’t plan what happens during playtime! 🙂 ). It’s just a sequence of events that happen in order during the day.

Some days look a little different for us (like our day off). But we still keep this daily routine for a reminder of what we normally do when we are at home on a typical day.


Weekly To Do List Printable Template

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Weekly To-Do Printable

The Weekly Planner Template is something I print off each week and usually plan out on Sunday night before the week begins.

For us, the Weekly Planner Template contains the extra things that need to happen during the week like chores that don’t happen every day (dusting, washing towels, etc). I love this chart because these are the things I tend to forget about! I also use it to pencil in things that I need to make ahead of time to coordinate with my meal plan.


Shopping Lists Free Printable Template

shoppinglists

Shopping Lists Printable

I don’t know about you but I do not shop at one single store. I used to keep a shopping list for everything but it always got tattered (or usually lost) as I took it from store to store.

Now I keep this shopping list printable which is 3 shopping lists going at the same time for the places I generally shop. (For me, that’s one list for Azure or coop orders, one list for Costco, and one list for Walmart/Target). Before I head to the store I just cut off the list that I need so I don’t need to take the entire sheet with me.

So easy! I wish I’d done this a long time ago…


Weekly Menu Printable Template

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Weekly Menu Printable

A combination of living with allergies, sticking to a budget, and not living close to a grocery store means that menu planning is an absolute must. I’ve tried and even created several different menu planners for this over the years but then I finally realized…we need to plan out our snacks just as much as we need to plan out our suppers!

Each week I sit down on Sunday night and use my Favorite Meal Binder Method to plan out our meals for the week. I add anything we need to my shopping list and have my recipes right there in the kitchen thanks to the binder and this list.


So just a recap of those printables….the first 2 I only print once every few months (daily chores and daily routine). They are master lists. The other lists are printed weekly and planned out on Sunday nights. (With the exception of the shopping list which is an on-going thing).

 

schedule

What does all of this look like at our house? The picture above is our “Family Management Wall“. We have it in the kitchen so it’s easy to access and easy to edit and add to when needed. I keep all of the printables on a corkboard. As you can see, there are 2 other elements that we have in addition to the printables to make our schedule complete.

One is a dry erase calendar. This helps us keep track of the month as a whole. We write our appointments on the calendar. As you can see from the picture above, they keep us VERY busy!

The other element is the small dry erase board. On this, I write our daily goals that don’t fit anywhere else on the schedule. They can be work-related goals, goals for our family (ie: make time to take the kids to the park). I even sometimes add baking goals if I didn’t fit them in on another to-do list.


Will It Work For You?

This is the planner that works for our family. It keeps us sane and reminds us of things to get done when we get busy. As I’m sure you can tell by our month of appointments above, things can get hectic in a hurry. Especially when we are rushing from one town to another for a different doctor or therapist. Life is hard and stressful and this calendar helps us maintain the simple life when we come home.

Some parts of it may work for your family, maybe even all of it! If you are trying to get into a routine and a schedule I would encourage you to try out some of the printables above and see what will work for you. Then customize it to make it fit your family’s needs. I’d love to know how you end up making this schedule work for you! Make sure to come back and share details with us in the comments section!

Need to work on more organization in your home? Here are some articles I recommend:

Do you have any kind of plan or schedule that you follow right now?

merissabio


31 Days to Simpler LIvingWant to get even more organized and simplify your life further? I highly recommend checking out my workbook, 31 Days to Simpler Living! It will help you, step-by-step, to move towards a more organized lifestyle.


This blog post with Free Weekly Planner Template was originally published on Little House Living in July 2015. It has been updated as of February 2020.

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21 Comments

  1. What a great family ‘command center’ you have there!
    I’ve let our routines and schedules go for some time now and need to get myself in gear. These printables and seeing how your family uses them is very helpful. Thanks so much!

  2. Hi Marissa thanks for sharing this! It came at the perfect time for our family as I have been going a little crazy trying to balance working full time and managing our household with a 2.5 y/o and a 18 mth old. We don’t have family or friends close by to help us and my husband is home w them FT to save on childcare costs and bc we feel strongly that we wanted to be home with them until school age (those early years are so important!) So… it is very very challenging to get anything done now that my 2.5 y/o no longer naps. Your system seems manageable so I’m going to give it a whirl. I like that you have broken out projects separate from household chores and have a way to set it up so you (and everyone else) can see everything at a glance!

  3. Nothing beats free! Thanks so much for sharing at Thursday Favorite Things. Can wait to see what 3 links you’ll share this week 🙂

  4. Thanks for these lists. I have just started to go through the house de cluttering and deep cleaning and needed something to get it all a bit more organised and these are ideal.

    I have recently discovered you and love reading everything on your site having grown up with the Little House books and the TV series which was broadcast here in the UK during the 70’s and 80’s and is being repeated now.

  5. I’m new to staying at home and homeschooling. I am struggling with keeping the house clean and organized and meal planning. We are a family f 7 and live in a 3 bedroom. I’m looking forward to learning ideas on how to manage it all.

  6. Just downloaded these as we try to do some new habits for the new year, and meal planning is a big new goal of mine!

  7. Are these not downloadable via mobile? Having a hard time finding a link and I’m drowning in our new school/therapy routines

  8. I, too, cannot find how to download these. I am not on a mobile and I arrived here from your recent email.

  9. You have so many great printable lists and organization needs. As a senior I was wondering if you have final directive lists for the family. Like insurance lists, utilities, bank accounts, passwords, contacts. All the things a family would need in case of loss. We need to organize all that as we get older. Thank you.