Hi Reader,

I've been heads down all week working on my business after my soft launch wrapped up last week. Your engagement during my soft launch helped me learn so much (THANK YOU!!), and now I'm applying that in a new website, marketing positioning, and product offerings in the next couple of weeks.

When my work requires intense focus like this, home to-dos fall to the bottom of the priority pile. This used to be a constant source of anxiety for me—how do you juggle a huge pile of disparate things that are all urgent and important? When I would need to work, I would be thinking about what I was neglecting at home, and vice versa, causing me to be less efficient and more guilty that I wasn't being the mom, wife, and employee I needed and wanted to be.

Now though, we've developed ways to run our household mostly on autopilot. This practically means we:

• Simplify the list of needs to be done, deliberately saying "no" to things that aren't a priority for our family's happiness and wellbeing right now. Our pantry, closets, and other storage areas will be a hot mess until our youngest goes to kindergarten, and we're ok with that.
• Automate key repeating processes so that they happen largely for us without thinking. Things like automated bill pay and savings goal withdrawals are baseline for us, but it's also reminders like a repeating calendar invite on Friday. morning so we don't forget which week our every-other-week recycling service picks up.
• Outsource tasks that are time-consuming and we don't like to do. Outsourcing comes at a variety of price points; two we use are free (!!) grocery pickup for 95% of our grocery shopping and our $145 biweekly house cleanings.
• Operationalize chores that have to happen near constantly, so we can focus on what we have to do, instead of how we have to do it. Our whole family does the same morning routine steps in (roughly) the same order every morning, without fail, and we swap every other night which parent puts our 4-year-old to bed and which cleans up the living, dining, and kitchen areas.
• Experiment with new rhythms, routines, and habits to better support our family over time. Two recent experiments in tidying for us: Try a ten-minute tidy every day at the same time before or after the kids go to bed (big win!), or keep a basket handy for things that have to be returned to other parts of the house and empty it once every few days (epic fail -- it just sat there until it overflowed).

These five types of actions are what I'm forming into the concept of Home Strategy at Bright Violet Home. Just like it's...let's say unpleasant...to work in a company with a lack of strategic thinking, so it is downright harder than it needs to be to live in a home without a clear strategy. This isn't about spending a ton of money to hire a house manager or a virtual assistant (though you may decide that hiring help is part of your home strategy after working through it!)—this is about empowering your family to proactively decide how you want to run your home, as opposed to reactively letting your home run you.

If this sounds like something you need and want in your life, schedule a free 30-minute consultation with me. After understanding your biggest pain points in your home today, we'll define one experiment you can run to streamline your home over the next week. (And, you'll help a new business owner do some user research and get some practice in at the same time — win win!) I promise you it will be one of the most valuable 30 minutes of your week.

Cheering you on,
Leslie