A couple of years ago, our homeschool routine was pretty simple. We had the work we needed to get done each day, we sat down, did it, and usually finished everything within 30 or 40 minutes. Then last year, I decided Mr Man was older and we needed to get a little more serious about this whole school thing. So I created a schedule with his input. We were going to spend half an hour on each subject every day. It was organized. It was structured. It was color-coded, because, obviously…come on…it’s me we’re talking about here.

It lasted about two weeks. The problem wasn’t that we couldn’t keep up with the work. The problem was that the work didn’t take half an hour. We’d sit down to do a subject, finish everything we needed to do in ten or fifteen minutes, and then I’d look at the schedule and think, “Well…we’ve still got 20 minutes before the next subject.” So I’d let the boys go play and forget to set a timer. Twenty minutes became 45…sometimes an hour. Eventually I’d look at the clock and realize we were supposed to have started the next subject ages ago, round everybody back up, get them settled again, do another ten minutes of work, and repeat the whole stupid process.

The beautifully color-coded schedule that was supposed to make our homeschool day more organized was actually making it take longer. Eventually I looked at the whole thing and thought, “Yeah…this isn’t gonna work.” So we stopped trying to fill half-hour blocks. The calendar stayed on the refrigerator, and yes, it stayed color-coded, but the blocks stopped meaning “we must spend this much time doing this subject.” Instead, they became a guide for what needed to happen and when it made the most sense to do it.

On Mondays, Mr Man had two hours of Catechism, so we’d look at the day and figure out what we could knock out before heading to Church. He might decide to start with Timeline, then Math and Latin. Three subject reviews done first thing in the morning. In the afternoon we’d handle Science, History, Geography, and Grammar, and sometimes all of that was finished in another half hour.

We weren’t doing less school. We had simply stopped stretching the work to fit the system. And something interesting happened once we did that. Mr Man started taking more ownership of it himself. There were mornings when he’d come out to the kitchen table before Bug and I were even out for the day and knock out a worksheet or two on his own. He knew what needed to be done. He didn’t need me standing there announcing that the 9:30–10:00 block had officially begun.

That routine worked well enough that we’re carrying most of it into this year. There will be changes, of course. Mr Man is getting older, so I’m adding more independent reading instead of doing all the reading myself with both boys. The schoolwork will continue changing as they do. But I’m not sitting here trying to invent an entirely new homeschool system just because it’s a new school year. What we have works. It isn’t particularly exciting. It certainly wouldn’t make a very impressive homeschool-planning video…there aren’t enough binders or whiteboards involved. But everybody knows what we’re doing, the work gets done, and I don’t have to spend half the morning managing a schedule whose only purpose is supposedly to make our morning easier.

I’m realizing more and more that some of the best systems in my life are like that. They’re almost boring.

Take our mornings. When I wake up, I don’t lie there contemplating seventeen possible ways to structure my day. I basically run through the same questions. What day is it? What’s on the calendar? Do we need to leave the house? What’s our usual breakfast today? Then I head to the living room with the boys, make breakfast, turn on the computer while they’re eating, check my email, double-check the calendar, and figure out the plan for the day. I choose my top three things I need to get done and share them with my accountability group. There are decisions in there, but I’m not deciding how to have a morning every morning. The basic structure is already there. I just need to fill in today’s blanks.

Laundry is even more automatic. Grab the plastic basket. Toss in the clothes from the hamper in my room and Mr Man’s room. Head downstairs. Soap in the washer, clothes on top, set it, hit start. I barely have to think about any of that. Now, remembering to go back downstairs and put the clothes in the dryer? That’s a whole different story. If I start laundry before we leave the house, there’s a decent chance I’ll come home, get distracted by something else, and completely forget there are wet clothes sitting downstairs. Even if they make it into the dryer (after having to rewash because they sat there, damp for 4 or 5 hours), I still have to remember to bring everything upstairs, fold it, and put it away, usually while one of the boys appears in the bedroom. “Whatcha doing, Mama?” “I’m folding clothes. Please get off the bed.” “Okay, Mama. Can I sit here and watch?” “Nope. Go back to the living room, please.” So no, the system doesn’t make laundry magically happen without interruption. It just means I don’t need to invent a laundry process every time somebody runs out of clean underwear.

Then there’s Parking Lot Protocol. Since the boys were really little, whenever we’re getting out of the vehicle or leaving a building, I say, “Parking lot protocol.” That’s it. Bug comes right next to me and holds my hand. Mr Man walks beside me. They’re looking around for cars, watching drivers, making eye contact when they can, and paying attention until we get to the vehicle. Then they get into their seats and buckle themselves in. Bug still needs a little help sometimes, but he’s almost got it completely on his own. I don’t give a fresh parking lot safety lecture every time we leave Walmart. They already know what “parking lot protocol” means. That system absolutely should be boring. I don’t want to make parking lots more interesting.

My bookkeeping process is pretty boring too, at least when everything is working the way it’s supposed to. I open QBO, look for transactions already paired to something in another account or matched to a rule, verify the information is correct, and post them. Then I work through everything else. If I don’t recognize a vendor, I research it. If I can’t figure something out or don’t have enough information, I take a screenshot and send it to the client. Next transaction…Next account…Next client. I don’t need that process to be exciting. In fact, the fact that it isn’t exciting is part of why it works. But that doesn’t mean a good system should never change.

For about a year and a half, I handled most of my clients’ monthly bookkeeping during two weeks of the following month. I’d go through the entire previous month’s transactions, categorize everything I could, send clarification emails, wait for clients to get back to me, finish everything up, and get their reports done. It worked…until it didn’t. As I added more clients, those two weeks got tighter and tighter. Once I hit ten bookkeeping clients, I was trying to cram too much work into the same window. Then I’d bring on a new client whose books needed more than regular monthly maintenance. Maybe I needed to completely rework the previous year, figure out what somebody had done before me, understand how everything had been categorized, fix what wasn’t working, and somehow fit all of that around the regular monthly work. (This is where some people would say “Why don’t you hire someone, or outsource some of the work?” That’s not happening. If anything, I may expand the business with my husband in the new year, with him helping me with some of the work. It’s something we’ve talked about for a while, and are getting ready to figure out how that division of work, as well as the incorporation process of the business, would look like.)

Here’s the thing…I wasn’t always getting P&Ls out within the timeframe I’d promised. Clarification questions could go out weeks after a transaction happened, which meant the client now had to rack their brain trying to remember what they bought six weeks ago, search through their email, or hunt down a physical receipt.

The system hadn’t suddenly become bad. The circumstances had changed. So in July, I changed the rhythm. Now I pop into each client’s QBO twice a week and handle whatever has come in. I categorize what I can while it’s fresh. If I need clarification, I collect those questions and send one email at the end of the week. The client is much more likely to remember what happened a few days ago than what happened six weeks ago, and I’m not sitting down in the middle of August staring at an entire month of July for ten different clients. Most of the old system is still there. I sure as heck didn’t burn everything down and start over. I simply changed the part that no longer made sense.

That’s usually how I know something needs another look. I start getting frustrated with it. I keep delaying it. Or I get this feeling that something just isn’t “right.” Now, I can’t define “right” particularly well. It’s more like a feeling…a “This doesn’t make sense. Why am I doing it this way but NOT actually getting stuff done?” When that happens, I don’t immediately fix the one little thing that’s irritating me. I sit back and look at everything. What’s changed? Do I have more clients now? Is the schoolwork more detailed? Are there more activities on the calendar? Are we spending more time driving around the county, which means there are fewer hours available for everything else? Is this a temporary weird week, or has something actually changed about how our lives or my business work?

Once I can identify that, it’s much easier to decide what stays, what goes, and what needs to work differently. If the solution makes sense and it’s simple, I’ll usually just try it. If it makes sense but it’s complicated, I’ll stew on it for a while. I’ll workshop it for a week or so and see whether this thing I’ve designed is something I can actually maintain once the excitement of having a shiny new system wears off. And if it doesn’t work? Well, now I know one more thing that doesn’t work.

I don’t think a system needs to stay exactly the same forever to be a good system. In fact, I’d argue the opposite. Our lives change. Businesses grow. Kids get older. Work gets more complicated. Calendars fill up. A system that worked beautifully two years ago may make absolutely no sense today. But I also don’t think we need to constantly reinvent everything just because we’ve gotten bored with it. Sometimes boring is the goal.

There are plenty of things in my life that I don’t want to think very hard about. I don’t need an exciting new way to get everyone safely through a parking lot. I don’t need to reconsider my laundry philosophy every Monday and Friday (yep…I’ve got 2 dedicated laundry days and it makes life so much easier…especially when you’ve got small closets like we have.). I don’t need to reinvent the first hour of my morning or come up with a creative new process for categorizing routine bookkeeping transactions. I want those things to be predictable because there are plenty of other things that aren’t.

Sooner or later, a client is going to send me an email that basically says, “HELP!!! The state says this hasn’t been reported or paid! What do we do?”

A new client will show up with books I’ve never seen before and a problem I’ve never had to solve. One of the boys will reach a point where what we’ve been doing for school no longer works for him. Something unexpected will land on the calendar. Life will do what life does and throw something interesting (like a broken arm) into the middle of my nice, boring routine.

And I actually like that. I need the puzzles and challenges. I need the occasional adventure that makes me use a different part of my brain for a while. I don’t want every day to look exactly the same any more than I want every day to be complete chaos. Maybe that’s part of what the boring systems are for.

Life is easier when there are fewer unnecessary decisions or forks in the road to manage. If I don’t have to spend mental energy deciding what happens every time I open QuickBooks, start a load of laundry, walk through a parking lot, or sit down to homeschool, that leaves more of my brain available when something actually requires it.

A good system doesn’t need to impress me. It doesn’t need to be new or require seventeen steps, a special app, or a beautifully color-coded schedule telling me to spend 30 minutes on ten minutes of work. It needs to make sense for the life or business I actually have right now. If it works, I’m perfectly happy to let it get boring. And when it stops working, I can figure out why, change what needs changing, and then hopefully get right back to not thinking about it very much.