How We Run the Archibald Home

I made an app! This summer I organized all of our family systems and organization into one app to help teach my kids skills, manage our home, distribute labor, and keep track of fun things like traditions, favorite things, and bucket lists. In this episode I talk about how we run our home and how this app reflects our evolving systems and routines.  

You can sign up for a free month at https://familylab.lovable.app. After that month, it’s $3 a month. 

Transcript

How We Run the Archibald Home: the App Edition 

17 years ago, I sat in my toy-strewn living room, and opened my laptop. My three and one-year-old were napping, and I was finally emerging from the morning-sickness stage of my third pregnancy. Instead of using that precious naptime to clean up from the morning mayhem, I decided it was time to take control of my life. I created a folder called Archibald Inc. and started adding folders: Culinary Arts, Janitorial, Facilities, Finance. It was my first stab at a high-tech…ish solution to create some systems and routines. I decided to spend one month tackling each of the departments. I started with janitorial—the thing that was bugging me the most--and I started developing step-by-step systems—the kitchen first. If you’ve been here for any length of time, you’ll know that this is still my holy grail—one day I will be good at keeping my kitchen clean. I toted those kids to the library and brought home a stack of books about housekeeping tips, tricks, and systems. I talked to friends and mentors about their systems. I chose one habit to focus on—getting all the dishes done before I went to bed.  

Then the next month I chose the next department to focus on. I ended up with lots and lots of Word documents in those folders, full of systems, advice, and ideas, and I just kept going. Along the way I added other tech tools as technology advanced and as our family grew. Color-coded digital calendars to keep our schedules straight. Several different project management apps. I started a blog in 2018 and turned it into a podcast in 2019.  I kept adding to those Archibald Inc. files and I created and printed worksheets for our family to use. I kept a bunch of random lists and notes in my notes app, but also in actual notebooks all around the house and car. I used a family banking app to keep track of my kids’ allowance.  

I started selling some of the worksheets I’d been creating. Thanks to my 20 loyal customers who bought them. Still, I was tired of using so many different apps to manage my home and my kids and sick of printing and losing and reprinting my worksheets. That’s when my amazing podcast manager, Kimberly, said, “Why don’t you just make an app?” And so this summer, I created the app of my household management dreams. I’m officially a vibe coder.  

Welcome to Season 9 of the Family Lab Podcast, where we celebrate the fact that parenting and home management are one big experiment.  

I hope you had a great summer like I did. Mine was busy with one son coming home from his two-year church mission to Cambodia, one leaving for his mission to Brazil, a family reunion, and a trip to the Olympic Peninsula—among other things. It was busy, fun, chaotic, and wonderful. We’ll talk my summer and the experiments my friend Andi Smiley and I tried in the next episode.  

But this week, I’m going to give you an overview of the framework our family has developed over the years to organize family systems, divide labor between family members, teach the kids self-reliance, make decisions together, and create traditions, memories, and fun along the way. You don’t have to use my app to use our ideas. I’ve been doing it for 17 years without it. But it sure is amazing to have everything in one place, now. And if it doesn’t have something you want, let me know. I can totally vibe it in. I’m still working on getting it into the App store, but if you want to be an early adopter, you can start now with the web version. You can sign up for a free month at https://familylab.lovable.app. After that it’ll just be $3 a month. I’ll put the link in the show notes.  

So now I'm gonna just give an overview of all these systems and if you're following along on the YouTube version, you can see the app along the way of how I've kind of adapted this into the app. So we'll start with kind of what I've already talked about. I've I already talked about the whole Archibald Inc. thing with the s the household systems. So I put all of these departments into one of the pages on the app.  

Home Management 

When you open the home management app, here are the categories: strategy, operations, career, and income, finance, child care, parenting, food, technology, housekeeping, home organization, facilities, purchasing, education, health, history, recreation, events, community, spirituality, and pet care, something that I don't really know anything about, but we will start to get some more content on that because I know a lot of you do have pets.  

So anyway, within each of these categories, then over the years I've just been creating different systems. And when I create a system, I always think about what I do daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. And then I give those a time frame.  

So like say we're talking about laundry, I always use that as an example 'cause it's easy and contained. you know, so maybe like you wash all the towels on Monday and maybe on Tuesday you put those away. So you specify which day you routinely do that. And maybe once a month you wash all the sheets in the house. So you'd put that in the monthly and you would say, I do that on the first week of the month, whatever. so that just allows you to in each of those areas, you can create different systems.  

And I suggest systems that you could create, so that you don't have to start from scratch, and then you can delete them if you don't want to do that system. Anyway, within each of those departments, there's different systems.  

Routines 

Then the cool thing is that all those routines you set up go into like automatically feed into the routines page. And so you can see like how all of your routines come together. and maybe you put way too much on a Monday. So you have to reevaluate, like, okay, maybe I need to move this to a different day. 

That's what I've always wanted. I have all these separate systems, but it's like so tedious to then compile them into one place or even one calendar. Because I don't want a calendar that's so busy with all these routine things.  

But in this routine section, you can see what you've scheduled for what time and if it's even humanly possible. Maybe something that you thought should be weekly is actually more realistically a monthly job. As much as you'd like to vacuum the whole house every week, maybe it has to be once a month. And you know, this is all going to change in different seasons of your life. But this is one of the things I'm most excited about because I am the queen of setting up these ambitious, crazy schedules that no one can humanly ever make happen. So so this is a way to like have a little check-in. 

But it's also a way to be like, okay, what are what is my weekly routine? And then you can track it there separate from a to-do list because you don't need to clutter your to-do list with all of the routine things that you do every day. You don't want your like bedtime schedule on your to-do list. Those should just happen and be more automated. And that's what this routine section is for. 

So I would suggest doing one system a month and they add up and pretty soon you have a more ordered, structured life. And this allows you to try it out and tweak it and get it to where you want it. So this that's one of the the coolest parts. I'm kind of slowly going in and filling my own families in. I haven't finished it, finished our routines. but it's been fun to just kind of go in one by one and fill those in and see what we're actually doing, how things have changed over the years, that kind of thing.  

To-Do List 

So that kind of brings us to the to-do list. to me a to-do list is those extra things that aren't part of the routine that you just have floating around in your brain that you need to get on paper. And these can be like high-priority things like I need to take a lunch to my kid who forgot it at school by this time, whatever. Or it could be you know, low-priority things like someday I need to fill in all those nail holes and repaint, you know, the things that aren't urgent. 

So you there's kind of a triage system built into this to-do list so that you can you can say like what's the priority level? you you can also put actual due dates and sort by that. You can sort it by the department. 

 So you can be like, Okay, today I'm gonna add every facilities thing. That's a big thing that I'm doing right now, like all the things in my house that need taken care of, like all the handyman projects. Painting is one that I just talked about. But you know, just e from little to big, like, I need a new stove, you know, things like that. So you can do it by department too. Like what are all the financial ducks I need to get in a into a row? Let's put those on the to-do list. Then they're there, they're on paper. They may be low priority, so they're gonna be kind of at the bottom of the list, but at least they're there and downloaded from your brain.  

Then there's also a ta-da list at the end of that because just crossing them off or having them disappear all the like on a digital way, is kind of sad because we want to celebrate what we've been doing. So everything you do, as soon as you check the box, it moves automatically to the ta-da list and then those are archived by month so you can see what you've done for the whole month. Like, my gosh, I did way more than I thought I did. I thought I did nothing all day, but look at all these little things I accomplished and I don't know. It makes me feel good. And maybe it will make you feel good. otherwise just ignore that part.  

Family Org Chart 

So the other thing with that home management thing is as you're going through those routines, you can assign each element of those routines to specific people. So say that part of your weekly routine is taking the garbage out, and there's one child that's in charge of taking the garbage out. You assign them to that within your routines and it's color coded and that then that that goes on to that person's responsibility list. This is a way to really easily divide family labor and just take a look at what everybody's doing.  

So now when you do that, once you assign these jobs and that you can assign the to-do items as well. So that these don't have to be just something that the mom or dad is putting on the to do list. This can be things that you need to make sure your kids do, all of that. and you can assign that all by person.  

But then there's a place, there's a page called the family org chart that then shows you it lists every family member. That's where you add your family members in the first place. And then you can show every family member what their responsibilities are as they've been added in the other things, or you can just add it in there if you know, if you want to be just like, okay, this person always clears the table. I haven't made my official system yet for kitchen cleaning, but I just want to add that to this person's job list. So all of the job lists are there. it shows who manages each department, it shows who does the different tasks in there. It's just all laid out so that it's takes the ambiguity out of it. Everything is assigned. 

You can use this to like analyze like what are what are every person's strengths and what should they be in charge of? What makes sense? who has too much on their plate and how do we redistribute that? it really allows you to do this.  I don't wanna use the w word fair because I don't super believe in fairness, but I just believe in what makes most sense and what helps your family run the best. So anyway I think that is a great tool. Just because then there's no there's no defaulting. I hate the idea of default parenting or default home management where somebody just thinks they're when nobody else will do it, they'll do it. This way it's spelled out, so there's no defaulting and we don't have to worry about that nonsense. So so that is the family org chart. 

Self-Reliance 

There is also a whole section on teaching kids self-reliance. So these are the charts that I've done, and I've done workshops on this. There's podcast episodes. this is where you can designate whether your kid is a helper, a worker, or a manager in all of these different areas. I'll list some of those. so, like hygiene and grooming, sleep, food, fitness, time management.  

So each one of those has specific tasks and you can select whether your child is the helper worker manager. So like in grooming, is your child a toothbrush manager? where they just do it on their own and you don't even have to remind them, or are they a worker where they'll do the brushing but you have to remind them. So you can designate that on all of these little tasks, brushing your teeth, showering, even clipping your fingernails and toenails, you know. 

Each child has their own section and they can go through or you can go through with them whatever and they can mark what they think they are and then then it kind of just keeps track of how far along they are on each of those, like percentage wise even like you're seventy nine percent on the way to being a manager. it's pretty cool. these are the ones that I had on a worksheet before and now it's a digital version so that you can see where you were the last time. You're not gonna lose the paper. That was my problem. I always kept losing the paper. So now you can see this is this is where we were last time we checked in. It looks like you've graduated in these these areas, and which ones do you want to work on next time that kind of thing.  

So that allows you to check and then once they become a manager that goes on their list of things that they manage for themselves in the family org chart. so they can see that they're kind of becoming more and more capable along the way. So I love this. I've been sitting down with my kids to do this as a new school year has started. it's always nice to see how they've grown over the year. So this isn't something that, you know, I would do more than that. Like maybe once or twice a year is checking in on this. But then you can use it throughout the year to just tackle individual skills and say, like what where's a place where you wanna level up? Let's let's work on this. and so that's just a fun tool. 

Experiments 

Then the next one we have, I'm super excited about it's the experiments page. And this is a really exciting place. As you know, I've been doing quarterly experiments episodes where I talk about all the things we're trying. but sometimes it was hard when I went to record that episode to think of like what have we been trying this month? So I wanted to have like one place where I kept all the experiments that we're trying and that's this. So so I have a log and then you can archive it by season. 

So once you finish an experiment, you can like write in what what your conclusion was, like what you whether you're gonna keep doing this or not, kind of think that through, and then you can archive it and then it'll it'll save and you can go back and look at past experiments. but this is a fun place to just keep track of those things that you're trying and working on and just help you think that way. like here's our problem, what's an experiment we can try to resolve this? 

So now here's the other exciting part. There's an experiment library. I have been going through all of my past episodes and extracting these experiments. And I've made this huge list of all the advice that all my wonderful guests have given over the years and the experiments that we can try. So you can look through by topic if you're struggling with bedtime, for example, you can go look, what are some of the experiments about bedtime? And then you can look at my the experiments from the episodes. You can then click on a link and watch that episode.  

Then if you have one you like, you can click on it and add it to the ‘want to try’ section so that you can, you know, maybe they're not something you want to do right now, but you want to do sometime. Or you can add them to your current experiments. that this is just, I hope it's a great resource. I've really enjoyed looking at these ideas, some of that I had totally forgotten about. Anyway, I will keep adding to these and I think it's gonna be a huge resource. I have like over a hundred episodes. There's lots of amazing advice there. I think this is kind of a treasure trove and it's one of the things I'm most excited about. Might even turn it into a book one of these days 'cause people are geniuses.  

Culture 

Okay, another really fun part is the culture section. And this is because I this especially my notes where I'll just like have all these lists like movies we want to watch, movies we love, funny sayings that the kids have said. This is a place to put all of that. You can make any kind of lists. I have some pre-programmed in there that you can use or not. things like traditions. So, like, here's our birthday traditions, here are our food traditions, here are our Christmas traditions. then I have a favorites section where you can put like here are our favorite read alouds, here are our favorite movies, here are our favorite games. 

There's a section for bucket lists where you can list the things that you want to try. So if you hear of a great movie suggestion from somebody, that's where you can put it. So it's all on this app instead of through all these different notes and things like that. So all your bucket list things can be together, vacations you want to go on, books you want to read, restaurants you want to try, parks you wanna visit, hikes, I have all sorts of things. And then I have one for each season, fall, spring, summer, winter. that was out of order, but whatever. that so you can say like have your family meeting and be like, what do we want to do this spring? What do you know, and put those all those ideas in there. But then it's all still in one place and in a predictable spot. then I included an experience log too, because sometimes you just want a record.  

For years and years, like probably since we've been married, we've been keeping a log of all the concerts we go to. this is a big part of our family culture. So we log all of our concerts that we go to. And it's super fun to go back and see what we've done. So you can do that with vacations, the states you've visited. That's a fun one because you can also color code this with the people. 

Same within movies, all those things. You can say, like, this is so-and-so's favorite movie. Take my name off that. I don't want I don't like that movie, whatever. so with this the states, we have like everybody chimes in on which state they've been to, and you know, so you can see. and then races we've done together. even I have even have one on like miracles that we've seen in our family just to remember those. You could do one on things we're grateful for. You whatever you want to do for your family. So you can add lists, like I said, to customize this to your family. I have suggestions in there. but this is really fun and it's been fun. Just like one at a time filling these out with the kids. Like we just recently did the states that they visited and it was fun to see like where everybody's been.  

People just log in on one account because you want it all in one place. So there's like a family login, you can log in and everybody can chime in and add their the movies that they love or the states that they've been to, whatever. so that is fun.  

Monthly Check-ins 

And then there is a place to do monthly check-ins. So I've been doing this with my kids. I think I've talked about this. So we just check in on on six different areas: physical, intellectual, spiritual and emotional, social, financial, and media. So we check in on those every month when I give allowance. And this allows me to take notes during those conversations in that section. And then I can archive that by the month. So we can look back, okay. Last month you were working on this. How did that go? Do you want to keep working on that? Do we want to work on something new? 

You know, how's that situation with your friend going? All of those things. So it's just kind of a way to keep track and keep a log of that. So I love that aspect.  

Family Bank 

Then we have a family bank. The beloved app that I've been using for years and years called Bankaroo is kind of not supported anymore and it's I don't know, hard to use now. So sometimes it doesn't come up, sometimes it does. 

Anyway, so I just made a very simple bank page on this where there's basically like a ledger. You can make deposits and withdrawals. I tried to make it look as much like a bank app as I felt like I needed to anyway. and this is where you can track for those of your kids that don't have a bank account yet, and that you kind of just use a family bank bank. This allows you to keep track of how much money they have. 

They can go back and see what they've spent it on when you've given them allowance or money for doing chores or whatever. it's just a great, great way to have it all again in one app. So you don't have to have a separate money tracking app for your family.  

Podcast Archive 

And then the last thing is just a whole archive of all of my podcast episodes by topic. So if you are just struggling with something, you can go look in this list. And you can even watch the episode right in the app, or you can go off to YouTube. But it links to all of the episodes. and hopefully that's a really good research source for you.  

I am just thrilled to kind of have every part of my home management in one place to be able to use this. maybe you just take one little element of how we do things and just try it. Maybe you just have a month where you try to archive your culture. Like talk about your favorite movies, your favorite books. That could be a really one fun way to spend a month, especially going into the fall and winter cosier seasons, you know, talk about just the things you love to do together and make some lists in your notes app or in my app or whatever, however you want to do it. But anyway, this is how we basically manage and run our home in the Archibald household. And it works for us and I hope it works for you. Very customizable, very modifiable. So you know, my whole mantra is that there's no one right way to do this. So take the parts that work for you, disregard the rest. I hope this app is helpful for more people than just me. And go ahead and try it out.  

The rest of the season I will be just like going more in depth about each little section and how to use it in mini episodes. So watch for those. probably every other week. That's my plan. We'll see. I should be able to make that work. It'll be like more of a tutorial and then those tort tutorials will then go in the app so that people can kind of watch a little tutorial if they want to know how to work different sections. There's also like information boxes. There's explanations along the way. I also hope it's self explanatory. But anyway, I hope you enjoy the baby that I've been working on all summer and give it a try. 

 And thank you, as usual, to my podcast manager, Kimberly, for all her help. And to my mother, Susan Singley, for recording the theme music to this podcast. She used to play this song all the time when we were growing up, and to me it's the soundtrack of motherhood.