Kathy Peel wants you to know that everything she has learned about family management she learned the hard way. "I was not born with organizational genes. It's taken me 27 years to get where I am."She kept going to time management seminars and organizational workshops, "and the rosy glow would last about 18 hours. Then I'd be back to my old ways."
It got so bad that when her oldest son (he's now 24) was in kindergarten, she bought a radar detector for her car. "I was always running behind, and I had to speed to get him to kindergarten on time. That's when I realized something had to change. It was not fair sending him out into the stressful world in such a stressful way."
That was when she decided there had to be a better way. Peel grew up with a business background; her parents ran a retail store and she had spent a lot of time working there. "I realized that some of those same strategies would work with the family, too. Things like having standard operating procedures, relying on task forces and working as a team."
That was when she became a Family Manager.
Family Management is home economics for the new millennium, she says. It more accurately describes the job that more than 57 million American women -- and a number of men -- do every day. "And with 40 million women working outside the home as well as inside, the role of Family Manager has become more complex than ever," she says. "But with a few appropriate, well-used organizational ideas and plans, you can make life much simpler, more rewarding and a lot more fun."
And that's what it is all about, she says. "That's the end goal of everything I try to do: to free up time and energy for what matters most: making memories, taking care of ourselves, growing physically, emotionally and spiritually."
Too many families today are coming apart at the seams, she says, because of little things. "They waste a lot of time arguing over things that don't matter." A home should be a place where you like to be, where you can rest from a stress-filled world, she says, a place to find an anchor in a stormy world. "Too many homes aren't like that. They're places where people rush in and rush out, where there's a lot of bickering."
A Nashville mother of three boys (now 24, 20 and 13), Peel is the author of 14 books on family management and was in Salt Lake recently to talk about her latest one: "The Family Manager's Everyday Survival Guide." She is a contributing editor to Family Circle magazine, has traveled around the world to speak at conferences and seminars, has appeared on numerous TV shows and has been featured in magazines such as Business Week and Working Mother.
Yet, she says, "the greatest honor I have is that my family is a good family. They like each other. The kids want to come home. They want to go on family vacations. They encourage each other to be all they can be."
But they are not perfect. "Even now we're always looking for recurring stress points, looking at what drives us nuts and trying to fix it." Most recently, it was a new system for handling mail.
Managing a family is an ongoing process, says Peel; it's not something you do once and are done with. It's also something that gets better with practice. You will not create a perfect family overnight. "It's a lifelong pilgrimage. You live, you learn. But, like a sign that hangs in my office says, 'If
you aim at nothing, there's a good chance you'll hit it.' "
The place to start, says Peel, is with yourself. "You have to see yourself as a true manager. You are managing the most important organization in the world. You have to see yourself like that."
A family manager, she says, is not a housewife or a martyr or a dictator. She -- or he -- is a team leader. And the job requires balance and teamwork. Peel divides the work into seven departments: home and property, food, people, finances, special events, time, and personal. Everything you do each day falls into one of those categories.
And then, she says, you have to learn to delegate. "I've never met a woman yet who is proficient in all seven departments. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. You have to learn to delegate or work around the things you're not good at."
Too many women, she says, try to get their self-esteem from being "superwoman." They want to do it all. No one else will do it to their specifications. "But what's more important, having a floor that's clean enough to eat off, or having a family team that can enjoy spending time together?"
You have to have a family consensus of what level of cleanliness and organization you can live with. "This is different for every family, and extremes at either end can cause stress. Too much order can cause stress and turn you into the chief nag. Too little can mean you're always in a catch-up mode."
And you need to be true to yourself, says Peel -- not to your mother's ideas or your neighbors'.
What does your family stand for? You need a mission statement, says Peel. "That's the basis for making lots of decisions -- from what you watch on TV to what things you will participate in." It's amazing, she says, how professionally we can approach our jobs, but how haphazardly home and family are treated.
The Peel family motto is: Life's too short not to have a good time. That doesn't mean they spend all their time playing. "There's a lot of mundane work that has to be done," says Peel. But some simple strategies can help you get it out of the way.
For example, there's the seven-minute school-night work-frenzy. On every school night, set the timer for seven minutes, put on some rousing music, have a list of chores to do and have everyone see just how much they can do. Maybe one child will clean all the toilets. Another may vacuum the living room. "But if you spend just seven minutes each night, then you won't have to spend as much time on Saturday doing the big cleaning."
Another strategy: the five-minute segment. Instead of waiting for large blocks of time to accomplish tasks -- say cleaning out the medicine cabinet -- do it in pieces whenever you have five minutes to spare.
Another important thing -- maybe the most important -- says Peel, is for the family manager to see herself as a resource worthy of care. "You can let some of the other departments go from time to time, but if Mom hits the wall, that affects everything else in life." This was something else Peel learned the hard way. "I wasn't eating right, taking care of myself and I ended up in the hospital."
Every family is going to have a different definition of what's going to make a home a great place to be, says Peel, "but here's the bottom line: A home is where human beings develop. The choices we make about our home involve a lot more than carpet color, window treatments and number of closets. Home isn't just a place to hang a hat; it's a place to restore souls, find shelter from outside pressures, grow support for talents, receive inspiration, comfort and aid. It is a place where family members learn to love and be loved."
It won't always be perfect. Kids will mess up. Problems will develop. But, she says, a family is also where you need unconditional love.
And here's another thing Kathy Peel wants you to know: You never have to do it all alone. "We can all gain from each other's successes and failures. A successful businessman once told me the key to his success was believing he could learn something from every person, whether gardener, banker, doctor or plumber. I took that message to heart." Family, friends, co-workers, books, magazines -- there are a lot of resources out there.
In addition, Peel says, when she gets discouraged she draws upon her faith. It helps, she says, to always keep the big picture in mind. "God sees the whole parade when I can only see one float at a time."