Family Command Center for Your Home
What is a family command center?
To me it’s just a fancy way of saying the hub of all things important in your home. Typically it should be a place the whole family can easily and naturally access. It provides a landing spot for keys and mail and informs family members of tasks. It also stores resources such as emergency contacts. A popular place is a corner of the kitchen or in an office used by everyone.
It’s a great concept if set up and used properly. So if there is only one thing you’ll take away from this post, I hope it’s this. More effort should be placed in maintaining it than creating it. Otherwise, it looks pretty for a week or month. Then it becomes another eyesore in the house showcased for all to see.
To create one, I often think it starts with a goal. But realistically, it always starts with a problem
You need to assess your family’s specific issues you’d like to address with the command center. For example, do you lose important documents before you file them away? Feeling challenged with tracking who is doing what chore and holding kids accountable? Or do you just need a central place to store important information so people don’t keep asking you for it? Like birthdays or wifi codes for guests.
If you lack an efficient and visible way to hold your kids (and yourself) accountable for doing chores each day, then you’ll realize you simply need a communication center. From that decision, you’ll plan to purchase clipboards or a big calendar or cork board. You’ll create your accountability system and make sure your family knows to check it everyday. Then you’ll put it to the test and continue to tweak it until you’ve evaluated that you’ve met your goal. Remember that the goal is holding everyone in your household accountable for chores and tasks.
That’s one example but there are others.
4 Essential Problems a Family Command Center Can Address
- Need a place to park things until you can sort and file. Paper clutter ends up everywhere primarily from snail mail or notifications from your kids’ school.
- Need a place to communicate rotating or ever-changing information such as family events, meal plans, grocery lists, chore lists (mentioned in the example above).
- Need a place to hold static or evergreen information for everyone in the house to be able to access. These would be neighbors’, babysitter’s, plumber’s phone number or trash collection information or friends’ birthdays.
- Need a solution for all of the above.
Temporary Drop Zone or Holding Center
Let’s start with the first problem. You’ve assessed you need a place just to park things temporarily. A constant influx of paper always seems to make its way into your house through the mail or your child’s backpack. When it’s not immediately clear if it’s “junk mail,” you’d like to take a minute to figure out what to do. Will you file it? Where will you file it? Or are you better off placing it in a binder for everyone to be able to easily access?
For this solution, you need a “inbox” system such as bins, buckets, or paper holders. These bins can sit on a desk or kitchen counter or be affixed to the wall. You can have several sorted by “kids”, “bills”, and “urgent.” Or something similar.
Pro
The idea is to collect all the items you want to deal with at a later time in one place so you don’t lose them. You can even neatly stack the items in an interim file system or an unmarked box at your command center. That would also accomplish your goal of not losing things before you can address them.
Con
You’ll notice a drawback if you don’t have a plan or method to review the items frequently and regularly. Items just pile up and become unsightly. What you will have created is a very visible area in the house of paper clutter.
Also, if other family members do not understand the intent of the buckets and paper holders, you may find extraneous items mixed in with important items.
Tip
If you have no time to keep up with maintaining order and organization, then use a cabinet or drawer. It may fulfill your goal of not misplacing things all over the house. But it also invites you to procrastinate. So you may feel challenged staying organized since you’ll be conveniently hiding the mess.
Family Communication Center
What if you identify instead with the second bullet point above? You need to figure out a way to communicate to everyone in the family what’s for dinner, who is on dish duty, etc. There are solutions for that as well.
Solutions include a large calendar, a cork board, clip boards, a white board or chalk board.
Pro
The calendar is self-explanatory. Actually, all the tools are. If you maintain sole control of this area of the command center, things should remain neat and standardized. You can also color-code this communication center by family member or chore or day and get really fancy. But don’t make it too ornate that it looks confusing.
Con
These solutions require more work on your part. All these tools serve a function only if you put relevant information on them. A drawback if you make this too complicated is that it becomes unsustainable. Especially if you’re changing things daily or even weekly. Also, if the information is all over the place and unclear, people will ignore it.
All it takes is a few times for people to go to the communication center to find it’s not updated. Believe me, they’ll learn quickly to not rely on it. Then all your sporadic timeliness and hard work would be useless.
Tip
Depending on what it is you want to communicate, this will be an area that will require more frequent attention and pre-organization on your part. If you want things to be accomplished by Monday morning, like take out the trash or move the car for street sweeping, then you need to have it ready by Sunday evening the latest. Otherwise your family member who is assigned to those early Monday morning task won’t know.
Remember, this solution is only as good as you are with keeping information up to date and giving those who need to know time to review it.
Keep it as simple as possible and prioritize what you absolutely want to accomplish and stick with it until it becomes a habit. Some examples of information you’ll want to communicate are lists of carpool days, chores, groceries, and meal plan.
Resource Center
If your problem is that you’re the only one in the house with access to information, you’ll have to do a brain dump and create a centralized information hub. If you don’t, you’ll find your family depending on you first for the information they need to get things done.
Examples of this type of information include important resources. They are phone numbers of service people like the trusted electrician, guest Wi-Fi codes, warranties or insurances. Notice that most of these resources are “evergreen” or information that doesn’t change. Not like a meal plan or rotating chore schedule which would probably change weekly.
There’s also no specific call to action that anyone needs to pay attention to. It’s a resource that everyone in the house can rely on when they need it.
Pro
This may need the least amount of attention because often the information stored in it rarely changes. However, it requires attention at least once a quarter so you can update things as needed because change does happen. Or some things are more critical depending on the season.
Con
This resource center may be the most overlooked because it doesn’t demand constant attention. You may discover that many things in the resource binder easily become outdated.
Tip
The solution for this can be any of the solutions mentioned above—a box or folder of some kind or a cork board. A popular solution is a dedicated binder or binders with plastic protectors for loose papers. This is helpful for things that come in booklet form or something that cannot or should not be altered with a hole punches. It also keeps things separate from information in the communication center that is ever changing that you want your family to focus on.
Combination Family Command Center
If you find yourself nodding to all three problems, then you’ll need a combination of all the systems for your command center.
Pro
It takes care of having a drop zone, a communication center and a resource center all in one location. Your family can find all the information they need to accomplish day to day tasks.
Con
It will require receptacles for things you need to collect temporarily (for papers to file later). Then you should set up a communication portion for things that continue to change (chores list) and things that don’t (phone numbers etc). It will take a little more work to make your wall, or kitchen counter, or hallway corner look harmonious but practical.
Tip
A family command center that combines everything requires clear organization and flow. Your family should not have to guess what tool serves what purpose. Clearly mark your tools and organize “like things” in close proximity to each other.
For example, on a wall you can have a big calendar or cork board to write or pin the list of chores or soccer practice days. On a shelf or desk below it you can have your inboxes or temporary files to collect mail or important documents to later file. And next to that could be a binder for static information such as coaches’ and babysitter’s phone numbers. The simpler the better.
If you’d like to embellish the area, you can add a cool clock to match your decor, a small indoor plant, or art piece.
Location for Your Home Command Center
Centrality or high foot traffic is key.
If you can’t figure out where that place it, pay attention to where your family might be always dumping the mail, or keys, or fliers from school. Although you might complain that you find these things throughout your house, there is still usually one place that collects the clutter.
If that place does exist and you don’t like it because it is in a formal part of the house, you can always decide on a different area. The next step would be to retrain your family to go to the specific area you designate for all their needs.
Since we have two homes we use equally in this moment of our family life, we should have one family command center at each house. However, our primary house that we’ve owned for over 16 years doesn’t really have one. And we’re still discovering the best location for it in our mountain cottage as well.
To be completely transparent, I love the idea. But knowing us, the command center in each home would just attract random items for me to have to sort through and constantly determine if they belonged there. That does not appeal to me. However, I understand our need to stay organized as we divide time between our primary home in the city and our second or co-primary home in the mountains.
So what’s my solution for now? A mobile command center that travels with me from home to home and to whatever part of the house that makes sense for our family.
Our Mobile Family Command Center
Our command center for now happens to go with me from home to cottage and back. All the time without fail. Because it’s mobile, I use a great caddy that many planner bloggers and YouTubers use; it just so happens to be a diaper caddy. But it serves its purpose holding all my binders and notebooks and pens as well.
The mobile family command center for now helps to keep me and the rest of the family organized enough while we move from home to home. And until I figure out the best spot in each home, this is the way we continue to stay organized.
Our journey to a more organized life started a long time ago. Not surprisingly, it definitely continues to be something we work on. But the biggest lesson I’ve learned so far is that more effort should be placed in maintaining the family command center than creating it.
Progress, not perfection!
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