Anchoring: An Organizational Tool

Written by Simple Homeschool contributor Renee Tougas of FIMBY.

We all have tasks in our days that are important and require diligence. Homeschooling, homemaking, family life, health, creative pursuits, and employment are just a few priorities that you might be juggling daily.

Consistency in some of these areas might come more naturally than in others. My strong suit is homemaking. Maybe that’s because I’ve been at it for well over a decade. Staying on top of meals, laundry and bills is nearly second nature.

But homeschooling is harder for me–especially now that I am making a more disciplined effort to build a foundation of reading, writing and math for our elementary aged children.

This year I am challenging myself, more than ever, to stay on top of our daily homeschool priorities. We are now a couple months into our school year and experiencing success with a particular technique that is helping us meet our goals.

I call this technique anchoring.

What is anchoring?

Anchoring is simply attaching the most important tasks or those most difficult to do (sometimes these are one in the same) to the foundational pieces of our daily life: getting up, meals and bedtime.

Have you noticed that no matter what else happens in a day we always get up, we eat and go to bed?

So what I’ve done is attached or “anchored” important tasks to those daily immutables.

Photo by Renee Tougas of FIMBY

When to use it?

I think anchoring is a great organizational tool to use in the beginning stages of turning a discipline into a habit.

Maybe you are new to homeschooling and need a system to help you structure your day. Or maybe you’ve got a good homeschool routine going but need help tackling that mountain of laundry.

Anchoring helps you turn ideas into concrete actions. Whether they be homeschool, self-employment or homemaking related.

For me, it is most useful to anchor the following:

• important activities that are easy to let slip
• a new routine I am trying to make into habit
• personal growth and development that is otherwise shoved to the bottom of the mommy-do list

Photo by Renee Tougas of FIMBY

How does it work?

I’m going to use an example from my own life to illustrate.

Our day has a certain structure that happens regardless of my mood or the weather. We get up, eat three meals and go to bed.

All together that makes five cornerstones in our day.

So I attach five prioritized activities to those cornerstones. Yours will vary depending on your natural strengths, interests, and circumstances.

Here are the five activities I’ve anchored to our cornerstones:

1. Get up – My personal quiet time to journal, meditate, read, and pray.
2. Breakfast – Immediately following breakfast, often before we even clear the table, we sit down and do reading practice. My number one homeschool priority right now is consistent, daily reading practice for my nine and eight-year-old.
3. Lunch – After lunch I write for one hour.
4. Supper – My husband takes the initiative and leads the family in scripture reading.
5. Bedtime – Before the kids go to bed I read to them. We also read in the morning but this is the pre-bed snuggle and so very important before they outgrow this.

Photo by Renee Tougas of FIMBY
Do these happen every weekday? No. But this structure is the standard and gives us something to aim for and is very doable.

A lot else happens during the day of course. You can read how I organize the blocks of time in between these anchors to do other homeschool and homemaking work.

What it will not do

Anchoring will not solve the problem of too much on your plate to begin with.

I believe in living by priorities and if you have too much going on you will have to simplify. Anchoring does not do that for you.

But once you have defined your priorities anchoring can help you achieve those, whether they are homeschooling or lifestyle related.

Photo by Renee Tougas of FIMBY

What kind of techniques do you use to help you turn new behaviors into habits? Or to keep you on track with being diligent?