What’s a Gentle Home Care Hub?

Earlier this year, I bought an insanely comprehensive Notion template to keep track of house chores and projects.

Turns out–much like the content strategy dashboard I bought and ditched in order to create a simplified version that would be more functional for chronically ill small business owners like me–it was a scooch too comprehensive. Which made me feel bad when I couldn’t keep up with it.

The chores were so organized in such an inflexible way, that as soon as a flare up hit or my energy went down, I’d fall behind the schedule and feel too guilty to even look at the chore tracker. So I decided to make one, with a gentler approach:

• transcript:

  Okay, this is the a Gentle Home Care Hub, basically like a chore tracker that I made for my sister and I, and I will be posting a template of it that you can get for free. I just wanted to go over the function of it, how I set it up, those sort of things.

  So here at the top, there's a reset all button, so when you've done all of your chores, you can click that and all of the checks will go blank. I'll show you in a second. The structure is there are opening tasks, daily tasks and closing tasks, opening and closing are also daily tasks, but it's an idea I got from KC Davis' book, How to Keep House While Drowning. That's something I've recommended before. It's linked in our affirming resources database, which you can get on our website for free. It's a great book for chronically ill or neurodivergent folks who struggle to keep up with their housework. And it's written in a way–I don't personally have ADHD, but I've heard a lot of folks who do say that it's very reader friendly to folks with ADHD, it's in really easily digestible sections.

  It's focused on not just giving you like, Oh, here's actually it doesn't tell you anything about what you should do, but it does focus on like, our mindset and the values and morals we put on cleaning and having a clean home and sort of challenging that, as well as giving, like, easy, actionable tips for people to implement. Like, one of her things is, you know, I my the clothes that go in my drawers. Why do I need to fold them? Nobody sees that. So a hack for me is, I'm just gonna, especially for kids clothes, just put them in the drawer and close it, and then it still is clean and organized, and you haven't added a bunch of labor that you don't need.

  But I really like the opening and closing list. It's for me, it's an easy way to be like, how do I want to greet my space each day? And how do I want to prepare my space for me greeting it the next day. So these are just small things like I like to start the morning making coffee. I have a bunch of chores that I like to do for my pets each morning. It feels like I'm opening up my space. My closing tasks are things that I think will benefit the next day me. I don't always get them done, but they are things that when I do, it improves the next morning. Like, if I've gotten my coffee pot ready for the morning, then I just need to turn it on when I wake up. I don't have to, like, clear out the coffee grounds from the previous day and get the whole pot ready, which, for some reason, when I wake up, feels like a huge task, and I don't want to do it. I like to start the day with an empty sink. And so if I've run my dishwasher the next the night before, that's that's a kindness to future me. Things like that,

  And then things that are like daily chores, that are like absolute necessities for each day. You know, we have cats. We want to scoop our litter boxes, and our grow tents we want to check on.

  But then once they're all done each day, you can click this little reset button. If you click Reset All, it will include everything in these lists, and I've grouped it by, okay, how much time do you have to clean? If you have five minutes, you can go here. If you have 45 minutes, you can see everything that would take 45 minutes or less. You know, if you have more than an hour, here's everything. And you can sort of choose how many want to get done.

  Or you I set it up so you could divide it by how much energy you have. This is okay, I have really low energy, so I can probably not do my laundry, but I can bring my dirty clothes from my bedroom to in front of the washing machine, and that way I've cleared some clutter from my room and made starting my laundry a little bit easier and not,you know, overdone it with how much energy I really have. This could be high energy. That way, you can see everything that is, like maximum amount of energy, and below.

  You can also we have, like a deep clean and a declutter and, you only have time to, like, declutter a few things. You can also see how much time each one takes, how many spoons they have. Everything is stored in this chore database here, and if you see click, reset all every all the squares are now empty. You can start all over again.

  And when you have chores, you can add them into the chore database. You can add them to as many lists as you want. I have more lists than I have categories here right now, because that's I wasn't sure how I wanted to set it up when I made the database. But it also means that as I need them, I can make more lists, like my as-needed list, or things like that.

  So this is my gentle approach to like a comprehensive chore chart. And currently, this is just my version of it, but we will, I will link the the free template once we have it ready to go.