The Making of a Command Center: How to Prioritize and Plan as a Family
Last week I introduced the concept of a Family Command Center and the 5 Unexpected Reasons Your Family Needs One. This week I am going to help you create one. Let me start by saying Success and Fitness is not a “one-size fits all”. The important thing here is increasing your family’s communication and efficiency through planning and dialogue. So, if your family has a planning strategy that looks different and is working, keep it up and share below. I have broken it down into 9 simple steps.
1. Discuss Family Priorities
The first step in creating a command center is agreeing as a husband and wife what the family priorities are. Is keeping a clean house more important than spending time together? Do you have any major tasks you want to get done this year? Do you have family goals? Are there any non-negotiables, like Church, school and going to work?
You won’t be able to prioritize everything right out of the gate, but have this discussion and write down the big stuff. As you are creating your command center, keep these priorities in mind because they will guide your communication and efficiency when utilizing the command center.
2. Pick a Structure and Content
Now that you have discussed your priorities, it is time to determine what type of content and structure you want to have in your command center. The structure of your command center should help your family progress towards your goals/priorities and not be too busy as to distract you from the important things. For our family command center we included an array of things to help keep us on track, stick to our priorities and progress towards our family’s vision for success and fitness. We broke those things up into the following three sections:
Yearly Focus and Goals ·
In this section we wrote out what we call our family “Rocks” for the year. These are the projects that we want to get done for the year that we will focus on when we have free time. We also wrote out our “word of the year”, Efficiency, for us to focus on and a Bible Verse of the Month to go along with it.
Weekly Schedule and Tasks ·
This is the body of the command center and it is where the majority of the planning happens. When thinking about the structure and content of our command center, this was our #1 focus.
Free Space for Notes and Routines
This third space is really free space – Right now we have some new babysitters for the boys, so we put their daily routine here in-order to help the boys stay on schedule. It is a good spot for any notes as well or quick lists throughout the week.
3. Create a Space
The next step is creating a space. Your command center should be located in a space where everyone can easily see it and gather around it for discussion. The kitchen or dining room tend to be easy choices, as usually families gather here at least twice a day already - but the living room is also a great spot. Especially if you want to get cozy when planning the week out.
Based on our family’s goals, and the structure and content we laid out, we decided that we wanted a fairly large space. In our new home we decided to paint a small wall on the side of our fridge with white-board paint as it was centrally located and a perfect size. Then we added some metal strips to it so we could hang little reminders, our monthly calendar and a little bit of family artwork to it.
If you are not a fan of painting a wall you can purchase a dry-erase board that already has the days of the week listed out and hang it in a good central location. Just make sure you get one large enough to accompany all of the tasks and appointments in a given day. Get creative with this space so that it encompasses the structure and content that is important to your family, while being functional. Ideas include adding a family sign, tear-off grocery lists, or even an Alexa Show or tablet linked to your family’s google calendar.
4. Pick a Date/Time you will do your Planning
The next step is discussing a consistent time that you as a couple can sit down every week to do your weekly planning. The first few times it took us a couple of hours, now we have it knocked down to about 45 minutes. We picked Sunday nights after church. Typically, my husband cleans up the kitchen as I get started, then helps me create our list.
Consistency is important here – the Command Center only works if you actually utilize it, otherwise it is just taking up space on the wall.
5. Fill-in the Week’s Obligations
The next step is filling in the week’s obligations. We write the days of the week on our board with plenty of space under each – the very first items under the day are any appointments and non-negotiables. I write these in black as to me that shows the concreteness of them. Think church events, Dr. appointments, soccer practice, dinner plans etc. If you are in a profession where your schedule changes often you should also add your work schedule for the week.
6. List Desired Tasks and Time Commitment
After you are done with the non-negotiables, list out the tasks that you each would like to get done, get the kids involved here too and ask them if there are activities/tasks that are important to them. For us this includes things like – house projects, mowing the lawn, cleaning the fish tank and spending quality time together. (We now have a separate strategy for getting the routine house-work done, so we don’t add this in here, but for some families this may be a good time to start listing out the weekly chores too.) When you are listing these things out, put down the hour time commitment for each as well.
For example, our list on any given week could look like this:
Mow the lawn – 4 hours
Spend quality time as Husband and Wife – 8 hours
Spend quality time as a Family – 12 hours
Box in Basement posts – 4 hours
Mud Walls in Basement – 8 hours
Clean the Fish tank – 2 Hours
Give Dogs a Bath – 2 Hours
7. Rank desired tasks in order of priority
This is important – you then must RANK the items on the list in order of importance. This is what actually starts helping you progress on the things that matter most to your family. This is also the part that takes the most time and will help you grow closer to your spouse (and kids) through a new mutual understanding of each other’s desires.
8. Fill Tasks Into the Calendar
Now see how much you can actually fit into your calendar. Do this by first determining how much free time you each have, each day and label that time out. The first couple of weeks this maybe hard, and you probably will over-estimate the amount of free time you actually have, but it does get easier and you will get better at estimating this time.
Once you know how much free time you have, start by first scheduling the items ranked highest on the priority list and work your way down. You do not have to put the highest priority at the beginning of the week, schedule items on days where they make the most sense, just be sure the highest priority get on the schedule first at a time where you are most-likely to complete them and not get distracted from the task.
You may find you have more items on your list then you have free-time in the week. The good news is, you can start setting more realistic expectations and start de-stressing your weeks. In addition, it is ok to break tasks up. For example, we know it takes 4 hours to mow the lawn, so in the summer-time our board may have mow lawn – Anna – 2 hours under Monday, and mow lawn-Anna – 2 hours under Thursday. Be careful here, make sure you don’t put more tasks under a day then you have free time. I always like to leave a little buffer too, just in-case “toddler minutes” occur and we get thrown off track.
For us we have a pretty good idea on how much time we have during the weeknights – about an hour after bedtime routines etc., we usually use this for small tasks or for “quality time” together, as we both are tired and ready to relax. The majority of our progress has to occur on Saturdays.
9. Review and Stick to it!
This is by far the hardest step. Make a routine out of checking the command center each-morning and reminding each-other (and the kids) what the tasks for the day are, then check-it each night at dinner as a reinforcer of what needs to be done that night and a praise of the accomplishment.
Let us know how your family stays organized and prioritizes
So there you have it, the 9 steps on how to make a command center. And by all means, make this your own! If your family struggles with the weekly grocery list, add that list to the command center. Constantly forgetting to take out the trash? Add it to the command center. Frustrated that your spouse forgets your anniversary every year? Add it to the command center! White-board doesn’t work for you but office 365 is at your fingertips – set up a virtual command center with notifications pushed to your phone (don’t skip step 4-8 though just because its virtual, I highly recommend making a list together each week).
Have your own command center tips and tricks that you can share? Please comment below! If you want to discuss further how you can implement this with your family and help develop your family’s vision for success and fitness email me at annamorris@morrissuccessandfitness.com
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By Anna Morris
About the Author
Anna Morris is a CTNC, Personal Trainer, has a BBA in Sales and Marketing and is the founder and owner of Morris Success and Fitness, LLC. Her life revolves around God, her Husband Kurtis and her two Boys, Waylon and Rowan. In addition to God, family and friends, her passions include: nutrition, cooking, developing routines, mobility training, soccer, running, and camping, Her mission is to spread the knowledge that God has given her to help 2,000 individuals define and achieve their personal vision for success and fitness in the next decade.