Organized Home

Unlike a personal planner, which is designed for use by one person, a household notebook or family organizer serves as "command central" for an entire family. Designed to be used by everyone in the household, it's a repository of information useful at home.

While each family's organizer will be unique, most are simple three-ring notebooks with several divider sections.

Most household notebooks include a telephone and message section, a divider for church, clubs or volunteer activities, travel, home management and finance. sections, medical information, and personal records like gift list and clothing size charts. 

At-home and homeschooling parents often add personal and family schedules to coordinate life with young children.

Because they're infinitely expandable, household notebooks become as distinctive as the family that uses them.

A family with school-aged children involved in dance, music and sports will include organizer sections for rehearsal and practice schedules, summer activity ideas and video to-rent lists.

A two-career couple with pre-school children may add babysitter and day care dividers and an emergency telephone list to their household notebook.
Empty nesters will rely on packing checklists for vacations, home repair records and gift suggestion lists for far-flung adult children.

Professional organizers recommend the concept. Deniece Schofield, author of Confessions of a Happily Organized Family, points out that the "purpose of the family organizer is to hold and organize all of the papers that anyone in the house has to look at or refer to."

In Bonnie's Household Organizer: The Essential Guide for Getting Control of Your Home, home organization writer Bonnie McCullough advises setting up a planning notebook, with sections for "calendar", "telephone", "money" and "people."

These organizing professionals know a good thing when they see one! By compiling and storing family information in a central location, life at home benefits. No more searching for scraps of paper or mislaid permission slips. They're always right where they belong: in the household notebook.