You need a launchpad

0:03Speaker 1:Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.

0:10Speaker 2:This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is that to get out the door painlessly and quickly, you need a launch pad. Whether you are in a household of seven people like me, or you live alone, or anywhere in between, you need some place where you corral everything you need for leaving the house. This is true even if you don't have a mudroom or obvious place to put this stuff. You can solve that problem and life will be easier if you do. I hear from so many people that getting out the door is a chronic challenge. You're close to exiting when you realize that something necessary is still far away, or you can't find your keys or someone's backpack or shoes. This is incredibly frustrating. The solution is to have a.

1:11Speaker 1:Launch pad, a place in your house where there is an architectural queue to leave and store all the things you need to leave the house. This could be your sunglasses, a purse, a work bag, coat and gloves, umbrellas, and shoes. If you've got kids, it might be the place where you put the diaper bag, backpads, sports equipment, sunscreen, et cetera. When the launch pad has everything you need to get out the door, there is no ending up late because you are searching for mittens or soccer cleats or keys.

1:44Speaker 1:You know exactly where they all are. Because everything is in the launch pad area. You can also give yourself an easy visual queue to remember one off items. If you need to mail a letter, you can put it by your shoes in the launch pad area and you will see it. Since most people exit and enter through the same door most days, the existence of a launch pad means that when you return home, it is obvious where stuff goes. Ideally, there is no trail of items leading to people's rooms. Everything gets dumped in the launch pad, so it is there when you need it now. If you have a reasonably sized family, this could be a lot of stuff, but that is okay. A mudroom or a laundry room by a frequently used interest is the obvious place for all this. You can put bins and hooks and shelves to get some of the stuff off the floor. But if you don't have an obvious room that provides a queue, you need to make one. Identify where you usually come in and out of your house.

2:53Speaker 1:Maybe this is a foyer. Maybe it's a door directly into the living room. Maybe it's the kitchen. But either way, put something there to store the obvious things that go in and out with you. Maybe it's a bin for shoes, a coat wreck for coats, and a table where you can put a basket for keys, a basket for umbrellas, a basket for sunscreen and bug spray, and so forth. And you can certainly try to make this all look nice. Some people like to construct a cabinet where they store bins with pretty colored fabric to hold everything. The baskets on top of the cabinet are all coordinated to match.

3:30Speaker 1:It doesn't have to look chaotic just because it is not an official mudroom. I will note that if you have a garage, you can probably put a lot of the launch Pad stuff in your garage. Coats could likely stay out there, and shoes and sunscreen. You probably don't want to leave your purse in the garage, so maybe that goes somewhere else near the door. But for a lot of stuff, the garage is fine, and that means you don't have it cluttered all over the interior of your house. But honestly, even if it does look a little cluttered, we are interested in efficiency here. If your keys are not by the door a reasonable number of times when you are trying to leave, you will have to go back to get your keys. Same with shoes and coats. Getting out the door takes longer when stuff isn't by the door, so store stuff by the door in life will be more efficient. It might look a little messy, particularly if people just drop their shoes and coats by the door haphazardly, but you know what, it doesn't matter. They are in the right place, which means you are actually more organized than someone who has stored

4:45Speaker 1:stuff neatly but out of the way, and for whom getting out the door is a longer and more stressful process than it needs to be. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.