FIVE WAYS TO BE MORE INTENTIONAL IN LIFE

Have you ever felt like life is chaotic? Does it feel suffocating to be dealing with problems you made for yourself yesterday or earlier today? This post came out of writing a post about ways we wanted to be more intentional in 2024, which you can read here. It quickly made sense to write out some steps about how we become more intentional in life and change the chaos in your home. These have become natural conversations in our home, but we do have a free printable at the bottom the post if you are new to this idea.

NOTICE

Take a moment and list a couple (or all) places of chaos or discomfort in your day. If you have some broad times, like “morning rush” try to define the different areas that make it chaotic. It might the clothes, shoes, breakfast, wake ups… whatever the different problems might be – try to be specific.

IDENTIFY

Out of that list, you will need to choose ONE small issue in ONE defined time that you have control to change or are able to create a better structure. So this might be… Lost shoes. Right before everyone is out the door someone or multiple someones are not able to find the right shoes.

PLAN

What is a better way? How can that be implemented today or this week to change the chaos?
This is where you are going to think of a couple ways to fix this one identified issue. Maybe kids wear shoes in the house during breakfast. Maybe they set out shoes the night before. Maybe there is a school shoes basket at the door.

MICRO HABIT / SIMPLIFY

Add one small habit or simplify (remove) something that makes this new change much easier. A habit you might add is to do a five minute check that everyone is ready. Or someone verifies all shoes are in the basket at bedtime. Perhaps you need to simplify by removing out of season shoes. We are guilty of leaving winter boots in the shoe bin until July – it always makes the shoe search a chore.

REVISIT

Make sure to revisit this change in a few days or a week.
What has been working well?
What is another step forward in this process?
If the shoes are not longer a problem, check another problem moment in the morning. Maybe you only have one type of cereal so there are no fights. Perhaps you need to set clothes out the night before or plan a week at time with a hanging organizer in the closet.

YOU CAN’T DO EVERYTHING PERFECTLY,
BUT YOU CAN BE HIGHLY INTENTIONAL
AND DO A FEW THINGS WELL.

Meg

EXAMPLE : SUGAR

For our family we have been talking about removing white sugar and using natural sugar for YEARS. Quite honestly, white sugar is a budget issue for Meg – which is why we have not moved to all natural sugars. However, we fasted with our church recently and decided to only use natural sugars. So noticing happened and identify the change we wanted to make also happened.
I planned by adding coconut sugar to our grocery order. Then I removed all the powdered, white and brown sugar from the baking drawer. In the container that had white sugar in it – I put the coconut sugar. It was not a hard change. We have been enjoying the change for the last couple weeks. Honestly – we have hardly noticed the change because it is the only option and an easy replacement.
It is making us live a little more intentionally than we were in December.

PRINTABLE and resource

RESOURCE
The Common Rule by John Early, it is a book that has helped us understand how the micro habits of our day affects everything we do. find out more at the website The Comm Rule Book.

Click the link below for a free printable of this change the chaos process.
Let us know in the comments how it is going for you!