LifeHackMom.com

Breakfast cereals are one of the more expensive items on our grocery list. To save money, we buy them bagged instead of boxed. Generic brands of cereals often come in bags, as do bulk bags of brand-name cereal at places like BJs and Sam’s Club.

The problem is that these bags are hard for my kids to handle. There isn’t as much structure to a bag as to a box, so more cereal often ends up on the counter than in the bowl. Also, they don’t stack or stand up well in a cupboard.

Tupperware-type cereal bins are fairly expensive. I had several plastic drink pitchers that weren’t being used, so I poured the cereal into them. The spouts allow the smaller cereals to pour through. For larger cereals, it is easy to just pop the top off and pour. This has been working fairly well for the kids. Both my cereal cupboard and the cupboard where I kept my pitchers are now less cluttered as well.

Small, simple hack but I hope it works for someone else.

Okay, maybe “hate” is too strong a word.

I know that to many people, Moms especially, Flylady is a goddess. Flylady advocates a shiny sink, getting dressed “to your toes”, and “blessing your house” with a purple feather duster.

But she makes me want to barf.

There. I’ve said it. Flybabies, flame away.

I am a former flybaby, although I would never use that term in public. I even used to quickly get out of Outlook on my laptop if my husband came around and might have glanced over my shoulder to see one of her purple saccharine emails encouraging me to go organize my Christmas ornament tote. Frankly, I was embarrassed to have to turn to a Betty Crocker-type woman to tell me how to clean my house. This is something I should have known innately.

She has great nuggets of wisdom, I’ll admit that. But I came to resent the 15-20 or so emails that poured in each day, most of them religious testimonials from flybabies . To me, these endless emails were clutter. And some of the most important things I had to do each day weren’t addressed in her emails.

Yes, my house was clean, my closets were organized, and no longer did spare change and popcorn lurk under my couch cushions. But my invoicing wasn’t getting done, employees weren’t getting hired, work projects weren’t getting done. So I created my own Flylady system specifically tailored to ME. I used Yahoo calendar to send myself emails at key times during the day, week, and month to remind myself to do important tasks I tend to otherwise forget. I kept the important home ones, like laundry, and added several others. I even created my own zones. I will detail this plan soon in a future post for anyone who is interested. Most importantly, I didn’t send myself a single religious, flowery, inspiring message. I just don’t have time to read them!