I am curious about those things you do in your home to organize or clean that are essential to your happy home and make life a little more efficient.

For example, after reading flylady.com a few weeks ago, I now take a paper towel and windex and clean the bathroom sink, mirror, and toilet every morning, and then I use old shampoo and a toilet brush to clean out the toilet bowl. Something about having a clean bathroom every single morning makes me productive the rest of the day!

At someone else's suggestion on here, I now slice up veggies as soon as I get home from the store and put them in Tupperware to make cooking so much easier! I also divide up chicken into freezer baggies (slicing them if I am using them for cubed chicken or nuggets), label them for the meal I will use them for, and put them in the freezer till I'm ready to cook with them.

Another one of my "hacks" is the way I do meal planning. It's taken me a while to figure out what works for us, so I am excited to share. In my home binder, I have a section for meal planning. I have a meal chart for the week in a page protector, so I can write the meals down with a dry erase marker (and I can erase things too if I decide to change out a meal for a particular day). I absolutely hate reading recipes, so I have typed up my own simplified shorthand version of recipes spanning about ten pages and divided them into categories such as chicken entrees, vegetarian entrees, soups and salads, desserts, breads etc. Then to do my actual meal planning, I scan the pages and write all the meals I will make for the next two weeks and all the ingredients I need from the store on a piece of paper. Then when I get back from the store, I put the store/meal list in the page protector on the back side of the meal chart. This way I can write the meals from my store list onto my meal chart and cross them out on the store list. Since I often have two weeks' worth of meals, I can continue to refer to my store list as I update the meal chart. Hopefully that made sense! It sounds more complicated than it is :)

There is a high probability much of this is common sense to some of you, but these are not things I ever witnessed in the home growing up and thus haven't learned them till now! So I'm curious, what other homemaking "hacks" do you do and love?