If you're striving to have a more organized home and family think about adding what is sometimes known as a homemaking journal, also known as a home management binder, a home organizer, and (before my time) a household receipts book to your routine.

Whatever name you choose, it is the key to organizing your life. Truly...

A homemaking journal these days is a home organizing binder for all the things related to you, your home, and your family. It carries within it lists on maintaining your home and belongings, schedules to keep all the members of your immediate family organized, and reminders of things you need to do from day to day, month to month and even year to year.

We like call them Homemaking Journals because by keeping all these details of your home and life it is like a journal of how you and your family live. How you keep house. It is also a way for us to be reminded of the past and how women kept home.

Homemaking Journals are nothing new. Women in our history might have kept a daily journal, a household receipts book, or some such collection of what she meant to do in her daily homemaking life. A dear friend of mine holds within her treasured hands the homemaking journal of her grandmother. Detailing her daily life with fade-outs whenever a new babe was born this precious piece of history is in the right hands, those of her soon to be wed granddaughter.

Today's Homemaking Journal or as we know it, home management binder, tends to be a bit more organized, a little less in personal information and sometimes more in personal style. It usually has calendars and daily planner information along with all of the household details. There are sections to organize each part of home life and that fact makes it an easier one stop shopping place for all the information regarding your day, your home, and your family. This way if any member of your family needs to check out what is for dinner, what mom would have cleaned had she been home from her well deserved vacation, or what the phone number for the babysitter is they can check the notebook.

My own home organizer is set up this way and it makes it easier to take with me and also to flip through the necessary sections while I go from meal planning, to cleaning, to my home business and/or childcare. All I did was purchase a classic sized binder and fill it with the sections needed in our home.

Update: Lately I've been feeling a need for change and a desire to have a bigger Home Management Binder also with a few other add ons. I also wanted it to be very cute so stay tuned for a new article.