Customer Reviews

The Family Manager's Everyday Survival Guide

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The Family Manager's Everyday Survival Guide by Kathy Peel

What a wonderfully refreshing resource Ms. Peel's book is! The Family Manager's Everyday Survival Guide is not only filled with useful, practical effective tips for managing your home, but the author's philosophy is so REAL. She immediately provides the reader with "10 Reasons to Get Organized", followed by "10 Reasons Why You'll Never Get Organized and Stay That Way Forever" - how true to life! So many books on organizing and time management teach just one way of doing things, and when this style does not match the reader's personal style, a sense of failure is created; but not so with Everday Survival Guide.

This book is well written, easy to follow, and (dare I say it) well organized. It is a guide, reference book, and primer all in one. Reading one of the basic principles in organizing early in the book is a big plus for the reader: "Organization is an ongoing art, a process, not an end product." This is exactly what organizing professionals teach their clients, and a lesson not to be dismissed lightly. By stating this right up front, Kathy Peel has tuned the reader in to the fact that there is nothing wrong with them, and the quest for finding balance in their life is shared by all women.

I particularly enjoyed the home management exercises, such as looking through rooms in your home for "secret" storage space, and not taking anything for granted in uncluttering your home. Using checklists as a time-saver is a wonderful idea, avoiding being disorganized on trips, for parties, etc.

I've added The Family Manager's Everyday Survival Guide to my recommended reading list for my workshops and teleclasses, and encourage readers to buy two copies: one for themselves, and one for a friend. Happy organizing!

This book is wonderful! It is down-to-earth, practical, easy to read and thorough. All of her tips are very do-able, and she never implies that her way is the *only* way (or even the *best* way, for that matter). The author encourages readers to take their own personality, family size, lifestyle, etc. into account and work from there, instead of trying to achieve some Martha Stewart (aka Impossible) ideal. I highly recommend this book.

First the positive:
This book is full of useful information to help you in organizing your home, your time, your life and more. There are many hints and techniques as well as a encouragement. If you are just starting down the road to organizing, this is a good book to begin with.

However, if you already have a fairly well run family and need to fine tune your organizing this is not the book to get.
Much of this can be read in any women's magazine in any given month. Many of the ideas are very simplistic (not that this is all bad).

Overall, I'd say that there are other better books out there that deal with organizing a home. I prefer Confessions of a Happily Organized Family or others by the same author.

Kathy Peel is person who's been there. Can't find soccer uniforms, socks, and overdue library books. She's learned by experience, and her ideas come from her experience. The book gives you ideas, and leaves room for you to use your own management style. Good tips for geting the kids to help around the house, and getting the family to work as a team. I think the main idea here is for the home to be a reasonably clean and pleasant place to be. A comforting place to be after a stressful day. She includes a reasonable plan for organizing your life day by day, as well as some good solutions for things that happen once or twice a year. I found the book to be helpful without alot of suffocating rules to follow. Try it, you'll probably like it!

I am organizationally challenged. I admit this. My home is an explosion of toys, cracker crumbs, laundry and paperwork. Our bills are regularly late because we can't find them or worse forget about them. I would like to say this book re-invented my life, I have to be realistic though. After almost 30 years of disorganization nothing will change over night. The author does offer some very practical simple solutions that I was able to implement with almost no effort. This was great for us. I created an organization system and rearranged a few items of furniture to find that I could use the space and things I already owned to my advantage. I try to look through the book weekly to find something new I can add to our routine to see what we can do to improve things. If you are just starting out with organization or you are to the point I was where you were ready to explode this is an excellent resource.

It's so easy to feel like we stay-at-home moms do so little in the world. Everyone else has titles at their job: "assistant product developer", "marketing coordinator", "research and design engineer". We're simply "Mom". And often as we sit around in our jeans with banana mash stuck on them juggling a baby and figuring out when we need to leave to pick up our older ones from school, we wonder whether we're really that important.

Kathy Peel helps us in two ways: first, she encourages us that what we do truly is important. In fact, it's the most important job there is! And if we're going to do it right, it requires some organization.

The Family Manager doesn't just teach us how to organize our homes, it helps us make sure that the main priorities don't get lost in the shuffle of driving to gymnastics, to Boy Scouts, and the grocery store. She reminds us to plan family activities, to make everyone feel special, and to take time just to enjoy each other. And to keep stress to a minimum, she reminds us to do the "preventative maintenance" in all areas of our lives, so that we don't have to spend precious time putting out fires.

When I wrote To Love, Honor and Vacuum, I didn't repeat what Kathy Peel did, because she did such a good job. I focused on how to change our relationships so that we don't feel so taken for granted, but I recommended that everyone also read The Family Manager to learn how to do that housework quickly, efficiently, and to everyone's benefit.

If you're down in the duldrums and feeling like you're running off your feet, this book will help you to remember that you are important and that you can make a difference.

This is a pretty decent book. What confuses me is why this author has so many books out that seem to be variations of the same thing. I happened to pick up this particular one but I'm not sure why she has authored so many different ones that seem to be all the same topic. This book is pretty jam packed with lots of great ideas on how to be organized. Of course it's full of pretty much the same stuff other books are full of too. That's because when it comes to being an organized mom much of this information is going to be the same no matter what book you read. If you are looking for something really simplified and very hands on with exact steps on what to do then I prefer Sink Reflections by Marla Cilley. If you are already a pretty organized person then this is going to be a nice addition to your library. If you are already overwhelmed then this will probably just be another book to fill your shelf.

Kathy is my hero and over the years has helped me organize my life and my family is less stressed as a result.

But we also needed a financial stress-reducing strategy. My sister bought me a book she had read about in Family Circle, called "SIMPLE MONEY SOLUTIONS: 10 Ways You Can Stop Feeling Overwhelmed By Money and Start Making It Work For You."

Both books are reader-friendly, time-savers and blessings for hard-working families.

I have a couple of bookshelves in my home dedicated to homemaking and organization books, this is one that gets pulled out and skimmed over on a pretty regular basis.

I like that I can just flip around and find good reminders and quotes just about every page I end up on.

I like her "tone" -- meaning there are some books out there with an annoying tone (i.e., the kind that sound too bossy and haughty, and then the kind that you feel like they are speaking to a toddler or puppy: "good girl! you can do it!" - blech...).

Just an overall good book. I don't give it 5 stars b/c I reserve that rating for those I consider the absolute best.

I Have read many books on the subject of home organization and review them on a regular basis on my blog http://organized4life.blogspot.com/

This is a fairly old book and one of the first additions to my organizing library, and still one of my favorites. Kathy divides the home into 7 departments and shows you how to run each one smoothly.

* Home and Property
* Food - Planning & Preparation
* Special Projects, for example, holidays, vacations, birthdays, remodeling etc. Anything that falls outside the normal family routine and that requires a fair bit of time and effort fall into this category.
* Family & Friends
* Finances
* Time & Scheduling
* Personal Growth - this is often the most neglected area for busy moms.

Then throughout the rest of the book she shows you how to manage each department effectively as well as how to balance it all sanely.

Although it doesn't say so, this book is geared more toward the stay-at-home-mom, rather than the working mom. That said, the ideas are practical, doable and realistic.

There are no Martha Stewart type of standards - not that I have anything against Martha Stewat, it's just that for somebody domestically challenged like me, trying to be like Martha Stewart makes me feel like I'm trying to eat with chopsticks while my hands are tied behind my back.

There were so many ideas to help me create that warm, fun and cozy atmosphere that I want in my home. There are no unrealistic standards and impossible ideals, just great advice that works.

Kathy Peel is the real thing!

Like I said earlier, this is quite an old book, with the first edition published in 1998, but the information and advice contained in it is as relevant to your life today as it was a decade ago.