No Typical Weeks - Routines and Logistics Meetings

Laura Vanderkam writes "There Are No Typical Weeks" and it's kind of fun to know two things are true: I'm planning a week, and weeks never go to plan.  This week was such a perfect rendition of a not-to-plan week, but I still made it to the office, we still ate food every night, and I still slept 7+ hours.  

Our general weekly routine is as follows:

Monday: Andy cycles with a cycling club
Tuesday: I do sport with my sport friend (Yoga/running/climbing... something else)
Wednesday: Logistics Meeting
Thursday: Andy runs with his running club
Friday: Grocery delivery and hang out at home

This was all fine from a hobbies and equity standpoint as I also had gym morning on Friday, but I've recently started running with a running club on Wednesday (on the few days we did logistics on a Tuesday) and I felt I was giving up 2 of 5 weeknights for family logistics/food which seemed a lot. 

The benefit of a Wednesday logistics meeting: 

• Friday evening grocery delivery worked well - we could get groceries just after the kids went to bed and put them all away so quickly (vs trying to put away groceries when kids are awake on saturday morning. Groceries need to be ordered by 9pm the previous evening). 
• Thursday was a great day to send some low key texts about weekend plans.
• Andy goes to the pub after run club on Thursdays and sometimes stays awake too late and is tired on Friday
• I sometimes get "that Friday feeling" on a Thursday and stay awake too late and am tired.  Friday is like a mini weekend because I have childcare (even though I'm in work, but that's easier than watching kids)
• Friday is tiring and we used to struggle to keep momentum to plan another week right at the tail end of an existing week

 Benefits of a Friday meeting include

• We already spend Friday evenings together so may as well do logistics
• I want to do run club on Wednesday (and another friend would probably do it with me, which would be great because I really like this person but haven't had space to actually make a viable "bid" for friendship, ie a thing we both like doing and works for both our schedules)
• One Tranquillity by Tuesday rule is Plan on Friday.  I can see how it's good - we could make a firmer plan for the upcoming weekend and a lighter plan for the following weekend.

I mean, on balance the Wednesday meetings work pretty well, but the balance is me not going to run club, so we are going to to switch to a Friday plan.  And grocery delivery on... Saturday night? Sunday night?  We haven't quite worked this out.

On a different note: here is a minor house improvement I made last weekend.

The upstairs landing was driving me crazy:

I know it's sort of cheating to just take down the drying rack, but we also were storing way too much in that space.  I've been trying to find areas of the house that we aren't using as much as we should, or where we are using it to store things that shouldn't be stored in valuable house floor space.  See the pile of boxes on the left? That's the Vinted packing shop.  It doesn't need to be out all the time.  I donated a pile of clothes to charity, put the boxes in the attic, but the gift wrapping things in our bedroom, put the Vinted "shop" in my office, and cleared out the entire back corner

When we first had kids we used Kallax furniture in every room.  The Black shelf on the right is our third to last Kallax and I think it's time for it to go to the charity shop as well.  It's just, bigger than needed.  Sometimes lots of storage just accumulates lots of stuff.

Does your week have a repeating flow of events and activities?  Do you have a structured time for personal or family logistics?

How We Organize Everything - the FLOM, 2024 Update

I know I mention our Family Logistics meeting (FLOM for short - Family Logistics and Operations Meeting) fairly frequently here, but my last FLOM summary was written in November 2022.  A lot has changed since then, with the addition of the twins (Oct 2023), the start of my maternity leave, summer holiday, Isaac starting school & various childcares, and more I'm surely forgetting.

After a few months hiatus after the twins were born we started our evening FLOM again.  It's great to get back into planning our week, because there is now a lot more to plan, and a lot less headspace for planning.  Our current FLOM agenda is as follows:

1 - Look at Week ahead and Food plan.

    We used to look at the week and then plan the food, however we've now realized that we can't just plan the food, we also need to plan HOW the food will get made.  When I was working from home I knew I could have a 30 minute lunch break to prep food, one parent would do kid pick up while the other cooked dinner. This worked well, but now there are a lot more kids, so we have to figure out exactly how and when meals will get made.

The first step for food plan is to make a list of 5 or so meals we want to eat in the week.  This can be things we have in the house, things we meant to make the previous week but didn't, or things we thought of and noted down on the calendar.  We also have a list of family favourites, and we try and fill the following meal matrix:

• 1 Pasta thing
• 1 thing in buns served with chips 
• 1 thing cooked in the oven (tray bake or casserole) 
• 1 slow cooker thing
• 1 mac and cheese or pizza dinner.  

Once we have our meals we then assign them to the day, including who is going to make the meal and *when* they are going to make it.  I'm on maternity leave, so I have two naps a day in which to make food.  Maybe some people can make dinner while watching 9 month old twins... I cannot do this.

2 - Grocery Order

We get a grocery delivery on Saturday morning, so we do the online order as soon as we have made the meal plan.  The order has to be final by 9pm for morning delivery.

3 - Look at sport

Andy and I both love exercise, so we try to make sure we can both get some excercise in the week.  Usually I get to do exercise during baby morning nap once or twice a week, but when the kids are home that means the other parent has to watch a lot of kids.  We try and find times where one parent can get out without detracting too much from family life.  Andy likes riding, I enjoy running more at the moment.  I also can do exercise during baby nap if the big kids are in childcare... but not if I'm using baby nap to make dinner.  It's tricky, but I am definitely getting my sport in now.  Light evenings help too, as Andy does a weekly mountain biking night.

4 - Look at weekend and weekend ahead & kid plans

We try to make a solid plan for the impending weekend and a rough plan for the following one.  Including thinking abut who we want to see, and how to get the kids and babies some time apart and time together (and, ideally, give the big kids some time apart from each other, although that is not always possible)

5 - AOB (Any Other Business)

Our AOB right now can be HUGE.  We collect all the things we need to review, or that we think of during the week, and write it down for the meetings.  This bit can take upwards of an hour, depending on the list.  Sometimes we move items into future AOB, sometimes we agree no action is needed, and sometimes we delegate to one person to followup.  AOB can be little (should we get our oven cleaned?) was an AOB a few weeks ago, and sometimes AOB can be big (Do we need to move the kids bedrooms around and what is the timeline for this?).  

6 - Date of Next Meeting

And that's it.  Usually the meetings are friday nights.  before the Twins, and when kids were in the same nursery, FLOM took about around an hour.  It currently takes 1-2 hours.  We still miss things.  It will surely change when kids are back in school, when I'm in work, when the Nanny starts.  But without this check in I know our life would run worse.  We wouldn't get to do the sports we do, and we wouldn't eat the food we eat.  I am fairly confident two hours of weekly planning saves us many more hours of weekly chaos.

Plus, now that the babies sleep better, FLOM can include beer or wine again.  Cheers to that.

How we organize everything: the F.L.O.M. (Family Logistics and Operational Meeting)

I wish I could ask every person how they organize their lives.  I am so curious – how does it work? What do you do?  If you are in a partnership, what does your partner do?  Every single person lives a life every day of the same number of hours and yet has a vastly different experience of those hours.  When it comes to families there are fundamentals we all need to follow: we all get food ready, we all maintain a home to a liveable standard, we all clothe ourselves and our kids.  We think about school and leisure.  Every family has 70% of the same things on our plates and we spend almost no time talking about how we manage it all.

A year ago my husband and I started having planning meetings.  They’ve evolved over the month and will surely continue to evolve.  Our current agenda is as follows:

• Short review of the week – specifically kids and food plan.  Did the week go well?  Was it hard?  Why?  Can we improve things going forward?  Lots of weeks repeat – I’m in para-finance so my months consist of regular 4-5 week intervals of busy to less busy.  If a busy week went bad, what can we do to make it better next time?
• Look ahead to the following week
• Food plan: go through each day and decide who will make dinner and what we are having
• Nursery run: who is doing drop off and pick up at nursery? Usually whoever does drop off makes dinner.
•  Nursery Cover: Who answers the phone if nursery calls to send a kids home, and who can take time off work to watch any sick kids that week
• Sport/Hobbies: do each of us have enough time for our scheduled sport/hobby in the calendar?
• Family Adventure: do we have at least 1 family adventure planned in the week, or enough family time in general?
  
• Shops and Driving: Do we need to go food shopping?  Anything else we need to drive to?
• Any Other Business: We have a FLOM notebook where we write AOB items in the back, things we need to discuss that we don’t get time during the regular week.  Often this includes holiday planning, potential trips, division of labor (a few weeks ago my AOB was “I don’t want to do all the laundry anymore).  Sometimes we have AOB items that stay there so long we have to schedule a new time to address them, like “pick out cabinet unit for dining room” which has been on the list 6 months and we finally scheduled a time to do it together because no one had the energy for that on a Friday)

We have additional items during our End of Month and Mid Month meetings as follows:

Mid Month:

• Looking at the month ahead to see if there are any scheduling issues
• Allocating days we will be away with work (we both do one to two nights away per month with our jobs)
• Scheduling bigger events like Christmas fayers, long weekend adventures, playdates with friend we don’t see enough

End of Month:

• Reviewing the family budget
• Making monthly family goals / reviewing the month

And that’s our current logistics system.  I know it will change again, and it is a lot of work to maintain, but it also means that hopefully when things start veering off course (as they usually do) we can at least right it in a week or two rather than waiting until everything implodes.

Meal Plan Monday & Reading List Update

It's Monday again!  We are all tired and potentially ill, so hoping that this week goes OK and we can set our expectations low enough to get through.

We haven't done our Family Operations and Logistics meeting yet, which is a first for us as we always do it Friday, or if not Friday then Saturday, or if not Saturday then Sunday, but we are all shattered.   I will do a longer breakdown of our planning process, but the amazing Sarah Hart-Unger covered this is her blog/pod a few weeks ago when I submitted it to her: Best Laid Plans by Sarah Hart Unger.

We did get our meal plan done, because we have to:

Monday: Lentil Curry & Naan (A)

Tuesday: Chicken Tacos (R)

Wednesday: Leftovers (A)

Thursday: Sausage and Pasta Tray Bake (R) 

Friday: Pizza (R)

Still need to work on cultivating some quick recipes but excited to try some from the comments on this post.

I finished Soulful Simplicity yesterday.  Next on my reading list is Tranquility by Tuesday, and I'm not sure whether it's a good idea to start it now or whether it will make me feel worse about the struggle season we are currently in.  I'm aware that this struggle season is mostly situational (ie illness, work stress, illness) rather than systematic/structural, but that knowledge doesn’t improve things too much. Maybe it's time for some fiction to keep me entertained?  I'm keen to read Carrie Soto is Back - I loved Malibu Rising...

As if by magic the local library has just written to tell me they’re ordering me some books I requested. Yay! I love the library.