3 Tips for Managing Decisions in Your Homeschool

Decision-making is mentally exhausting. How much more so with noise and interruptions? Minimizing decision fatigue will help in reducing stress and increasing joy in your homeschool journey.

What can you do to simplify? How can you plan ahead? How can you manage daily life decisions and shift responsibility to reduce decision fatigue? Here are a few tips.

There is no one ‘right way’ to schedule your homeschool but there could be some wrong ways. Ask yourself “What is your need for structure and what is your tolerance for flexibility?”

Planning

You need to find your own rhythm for balancing structure and flexibility in schedules but one thing is sure, planning ahead—school schedules, meal prep, chores and more—is a solid way to reduce daily decision making and decision fatigue.

Daily Living

It’s essential that children learn to help in daily household management without your constant input. Understanding their chores in advance helps children operate independently. Will it always be smooth? No— they’re in training. Do your kids know what is expected of them in the household? Do they have daily chores so that you can manage instead of ‘doing it all?’

Life is so busy, but if you can work at it when children are young it will pay off later. Now (no matter the age) is a good time to start. Make household management a team effort. Get the instruction and direction off your shoulders, and onto the kids’ through lists, charts and pre-communicated expectations.

Move Responsibility

Use daily student planners to move responsibility for schoolwork from you to the student. Fill out annual student planners (in pencil) with a rough schedule (4 days a week). When life happens and the schedule doesn’t quite work, it’s not a bad idea to double up or skip lessons.

Regardless, personal planners definitely reduced the number of daily decisions I needed to make. Whether you fill your planners nightly, or annually, the goal is to reduce daily decision making. Find the method that works best for you.

Turn Chaos into Order

Research shows, but we likely already know, that when we are mentally depleted we are more likely to take the path of least resistance, have less self-control, reach for glucose rich snacks, and be impatient with those around us. Ask God’s help as you assess where you can take charge, reduce decision fatigue, and turn chaos into order which is your God-given role as you continue the work He started at creation, of taking a barren desolate wasteland and creating an inhabitable, ordered place for humans to live.