Adulting (never heard this word before? Well it’s a slang young adults these days use about what being grown up entails) can be tough. And adulting alone is even tougher. With managing everything at your workplace, to managing the many domestic chores (you didn’t even know existed), you might get dangerously close to a burn out every now and then. Even for the most disorganized amongst us, these hacks might help you make living alone easier. Give them a try!
1. Meal Organizer – Managing meals is probably the toughest thing to do when you are living alone. This is also the most important aspect for you to take care of, since your health depends on it. Spend time on setting up a meal organizer so that you can finally stop skipping meals, or eating out frequently. Put down a bunch of recipes, and categorize them under headings of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and according to the level of difficulty. Plan the dishes you would want to make for the week, a day before you do your grocery shopping so that the ingredients are ready. Make a list of ‘must-have’ ingredients at home, so that you can fix yourself an easy meal or two when you are absolutely broke and can’t afford eating out, or just when you are having one of your lazy days.
2. ?Laundry Schedule – Almost everyone who lives alone would empathize about how laundry just magically piles up. Unfortunately, it is anything but magical. Don’t keep your laundry to the last minute, i.e., only when you realize you are out of clothes to wear. Make it a part of your routine to wash your intimate wear during your bath time. Wash your whites as they pile up. And the rest of your clothes, on a weekly basis. If you can afford it, find an economical Laundromat in your neighborhood and arrange with them to pick up and drop your laundry – nothing like it if you can manage this!
3. ?Cleaning Schedule – To avoid being buried in a pile of dust bunnies (to say the least) when you finally decide to clean after weeks, set up a daily 15 minute cleaning schedule. If you live alone, you don’t have a lot of dishes to do anyway, so clean them right after you use them. That way you won’t wake up to dirty dishes. Dust your work space, and take out the trash daily. Make it a point to clean your bathroom weekly, and the floors of your house every 3 days (depending on how dirty it usually gets). You can probably set one day of the month aside to clean your entire house (which, again, if you live alone should ideally be a reasonably small space) to check on the pests and the spiders.
4. ?Tracking and organizing bills – The most annoying part about adulating – paying bills. Every month when it is time to pay the bills, you can’t help but feel you only just did pay those bills! And then the other thing that happens – procrastinating until the last day of payment, missing the date and then having to pay a penalty. Make a list of your fixed expenses – house rent, internet, telephone, newspaper, etc. so that you know how much you need to keep aside on a monthly basis. Apart from that, you can auto schedule certain payments from your bank account which you know are fixed, and are to be done on a particular date of the month.
5. ?Supplies and home shopping – While you lived with your parents, you probably didn’t even have to worry about refilling the soap dispenser (did you think it magically refilled itself?). Until, you move out, live on your own and realize one day that soap is over! There are many small things that you need to take care of, on the supplies front when you are living alone. While you will eventually get a hang of it, it helps to always have a backup of certain items that always need to be present at home. To name a few, toilet paper, hand-wash liquid, dish washing liquid, detergent, (you get the point). One way to go about it could be to buy extra-large or twin packs during your monthly grocery shopping, or you could maintain a checklist of ‘must-have items’ somewhere on your phone and keep revising it.
What are some living-alone hacks you swear by? Share them with us and we’ll be happy to put them out for all the SHEROES out there!