Tips For Adulting

Adulting is hard! Here are some tips for adulting we use to simplify, automate, and delegate to make life easier. This post is sponsored by Blue Apron. Get 60% off, plus free shipping on your first box. Terms apply!

Adulting Is Hard

And this time of year is especially busy! Not only are there holiday activities to do and gifts to wrap, but regular life keeps humming along in the background. What can you delegate this year to make your to-do list a bit shorter?

Whether you have a one person or 5 person household, there are tasks we all must do each week to make life happen. From laundry to paying bills to meal planning and cooking, we all have responsibilities to handle each week. 

I’ve been thinking about ways to make life easier and realized there are three main ways to lean into tasks: simplify, automate, delegate. 

Simplify, Automate, Delegate

Everyone can simplify, but only to a point. You’re going to have to wash your clothes eventually! Automation works well for some things (like bill paying) but not others (dish washing). I wish I had a way to automate or delegate doing the dishes! Having a dishwasher definitely helps and using our “cook once eat twice” meal cadence means you’re only doing heavy cleaning every other day! But when you can delegate tasks and outsource them to someone else, you’ll save the most time.

Blue Apron, the sponsor of this blog post, gets a gold star for being able to do all three! Read on to hear why it’s my favorite way to get food on the table. 

Tips For Adulting

Meal Planning

Meal planning gets the top spot because hunger is the hardest thing to put off! You can let your laundry pile grow, but you have to eat at least a few times a day. Most of us would love a few more hours in the day to browse recipes, head to the market, pick out the day’s ingredients, and cook the meal. But if you are not someone with loads of free time (99% of us!), you’re probably looking for ways to make planning, shopping, and prepping food a bit easier. 

We’ve loved Blue Apron for years because it makes putting delicious meals on the table as automated as possible: recipes and ingredients are planned for you (automate). They are shipped to your door so there is no extra grocery store trip needed (delegate). You’re only given the amount of ingredients you need for each recipe, so there is no wasted food (simplify). And if you get 3 recipes per week and enough servings for leftovers, you’ll only need to cook three times (simplify!) 

We love that someone else is doing most of the work, yet we are still able to prepare and customize the recipes so they are hot and fresh. I enjoy cooking! I do not enjoy the never ending task of meal planning and going to the grocery store. Blue Apron has been a lifesaver to save us countless hours while also keeping our meals unique and interesting. 

If this is your sign to take something off your plate (pun intended!), get 60% off, plus free shipping on your first box now! Terms apply.

Kimchi & Vegetable Rice Bowls with Fried Eggs and Spicy Mayo

Laundry

While I do know some people who outsource their laundry, we have done our best to automate and simplify by keeping our family members’ laundry separate. This dramatically cuts down time on the sorting and putting away step. Plus if you’re like me, you can choose not to fold most of your casual clothes and have your laundry put away in mere minutes! We do each kids’ laundry once per week and each adult’s twice (mostly due to the accumulation of sweaty workout clothes).

Linens get changed once per week (including towels) and our cleaning ladies do it for us every other week (yay!) 

Cleaning

Speaking of cleaning, delegating my floors to our robot vacuum was the best decision ever! The amount of time I used to spend vacuuming has gone from multiple times per day to maybe twice a week when we have an extra crummy kitchen. The robot is the hardest working member of the family keeping up with all the Gus fur! 

Handsome boy!

Also, automating our cleaning schedule and delegating to our two amazing cleaning women has been one of the best decisions ever. Before I had a cleaning team, I was always thinking “I should clean that” or “that is dirty when will I find the time.” Now that I know we have cleaners coming typically every two weeks, our house gets a deep clean and when I see something dirty I know it will get done. I know it’s a privilege to be able to have cleaners come, but 1 ) they do a WAY better job than I do and 2) I often joke that I would give up almost all discretionary spending before I would cancel our cleaners. 

Paying Bills

Simplify and automate apply here. I can’t think of a single bill that I don’t have on autopay, including our credit cards. When you can’t use an autopay, you can set up a recurring bill pay in your checking account. I am a very careful budgeter (read this post for more) and so I know that most of the pieces of our financial pie are accounted for when I do any discretionary spending. The rest is all earmarked and automated. I have my budget so fine tuned that I even save monthly for annual expenses, like car insurance that we pay once a year and Christmas! 

Paper + Digital Clutter

On the topic of digital clutter, I have a system for that too. Having good email habits is a very adult thing to do. Inside my course I teach to simplify, sort, and save inside a system that teaches you to prioritize the important and automate the rest. From paper that comes into your home inbox to having an organized cloud-based file system, we all have digital clutter that needs to know how and where to be stored. 

As for the most adulting thing you can do, pay taxes, I think delegating that task to an accountant is worth the time. My dad used to make me do my taxes by hand!

Annual Appointments

For remembering long term appointments, like paying estimated taxes or my state car inspection every October, I use my Google Calendar to set up a recurring reminder. When the date pops up I get an alert and write it on my everyday to-do list. You can use this reminder technique for home and auto maintenance, birthdays, scheduling annual well visits, taxes, passport and license renewals, and anything else you want to “set it and forget it” until it’s time to remember again. 

Brain Download

Sometimes there are just too many things to remember! Little things. Big things. And everything in between. I am a huge fan of my Notes and Reminders apps for iPhone (I’m sure Android has its own versions). Anything I want to download from my brain today to be reminded about in the future goes into my Reminders app. Thomas and I also share packing lists and grocery staples in the app. Any brainstorms or lists I need to quickly reference go in the Notes app. I know exactly where everything is, from coupons to concert tickets to details for an upcoming trip. 

What other tips do you have for helping your life to run like an well-oiled machine?

Thanks to Blue Apron for sponsoring this post. If you’d like to simplify, automate, and delegate your meal planning to someone else this year, consider taking advantage of this limited-time promo for 60% off, plus free shipping on your first box. Terms apply.