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Christian homemakers need encouragement and motivation to stay the course. Homemaking and homeschooling can feel overwhelming, but they don’t have to be. If you’re a Christian mom longing for a well-ordered home, a peaceful homeschool, and a joyful heart—without the stress or burnout—you’re in the right place. Moms can be productive and peaceful when grounded in Scriptural truth.
I’m Mystie Winckler, homeschooling mom of five, founder of Simply Convivial, and your guide to managing both home and heart with faith and focus. Here, we talk about biblical homemaking, sustainable homeschooling, and cheerful productivity—all through the lens of organizing your attitude and embracing your God-given calling.
In each episode, you’ll find practical homemaking systems, homeschooling strategies, and mindset shifts that will help you manage your home without perfectionism or frustration. We’ll tackle topics like:
✔️ Christian homemaking routines that actually work
✔️ Productivity, mom-style
✔️ Homeschooling with peace—even when life gets messy
✔️ Time management for moms (without rigid schedules)
✔️ Decluttering your home & your attitude
✔️ How to be diligent, not just busy
Motherhood is a marathon, not a sprint. You don’t need more willpower—you need a grace-filled, biblical approach to managing life at home. Let’s cultivate faithfulness, embrace joy, and build habits that make home a place of peace and purpose.
👉 Subscribe now and start organizing your home and heart—cheerfully.
Speaker: I have spent more time
than I care to admit looking
for the perfect planner.
One that has enough space,
but not too much space.
Structured, but still flexible.
Pretty, but also very practical
Basically, I wanted a planner designed
specifically for my life, my brain, my
family, and whatever mood I happened
to be in on that particular Tuesday.
And yes, I have spent countless
hours designing my own planner pages
trying to attain planner perfection.
And you know what?
Every hour that I spent comparing
layouts was an hour that I
was not actually planning.
After years of using planners, teaching
planning, designing planning methods,
and watching other moms struggle
with this exact same problem, I've
come to a fairly unpopular conclusion
99% of moms do not need a better planner.
They might not even need
a real planner at all.
What you really just need is a simple,
cheap notebook and a consistent
practice of writing things down.
So I'm gonna show you why planner
shopping often becomes productive
procrastination, why messy notes work
better than the perfect layout, and
three simple planning steps that can all
live inside one cheap spiral notebook
Or smaller, cheap composition notebook.
Or even a little tiny
composition notebook.
Cheap, small, easy.
This is the exact system that has
helped me stop treating my planner
as the solution, and start using
planning as a practice that actually
makes a day-to-day difference
So if we haven't met,
hi, I'm Misty Winkler.
I like purple.
I'm author of the book Simplified
Organization Learn to Love What Must
Be Done, and also the book How to
Use a Planner Without Wasting Time.
Because that's what a lot
of our planning really is.
A lot of our planning is wishful
thinking, or our planning is spent trying
to find the perfect planner, where if
we fill in all the blanks provided as
if it was a worksheet, then we will
have some kind of done-for-us system
that will suddenly make our life work.
I'm sorry, that's not gonna happen.
But here is what we can do instead
in a cheap and easy notebook.
So grab a basket of laundry
to fold and let's dig in
So here's the deal.
A planner is not a magical household
management device The best planner
is a collection of notes to myself,
and that's really all it is.
A calendar is a note
about where I need to be.
A weekly plan is a note about what matters
this week and maybe what we're eating.
A daily list is a note to myself
about what I need to do next.
The format can help, but the format is not
the practice the problem is that buying
a planner feels like we're taking action.
It's fun to set up a new
planner, and it feels like
we're finally getting somewhere.
I can spend an entire evening watching
planner reviews, comparing the weight of
the paper, studying weekly layouts, maybe
spending hours designing my own, trying
to figure out if I'm a vertical layout
person or a horizontal layout person.
And at the end of it, I still haven't
looked at next week's calendar
or decided what we're eating for
dinner, maybe even that very day.
The search for the perfect
planner becomes a way to avoid the
imperfect, messy work of making an
actual plan for our actual lives
Now, I have homeschooled five
children, managed a busy home, a
couple businesses , written books,
we have people over for dinner.
I've used plenty of planners, notebooks,
index cards, printables, digital
apps, miscellaneous scraps of paper.
I've pretty much tried it all And the
tool that works is the tool that I will
actually write things in, look at what
I wrote, and adjust and use on the fly
If you've been overwhelmed with all
the planner options out there, my
workshop From Overwhelmed to Organized
might be the perfect fit for you.
You can go find that at
simplyconvivial.com/organized
if you need a little help getting out
of that overwhelm mode, which sometimes
happens when we're shopping for planners.
'Cause the thing is, searching
for the ideal tool is just
delaying the uncomfortable work
of actually committing to a plan.
A new planner creates a rush
of hope and possibility.
It directs us and tells us what to do.
Just fill in the blanks.
Write three things that
you're grateful for here.
Track how much you're
sleeping or drinking water.
The pages are clean.
It feels so full of potential
But what happens when you
have to cross something out?
When an appointment
gets moved or canceled?
When you misspell a word
or your pen smears ink?
When you have to rewrite
tasks again and again
So often what I'm trying for in achieving
the perfect planner is a visual creation
of what I wish my life was like.
But once the planner starts reflecting
what I'm really like and what my life
is really like, I wanna ditch it.
But that is exactly the moment I need to
keep it and stick with it and appreciate
it for the reality check that it is.
What planner you use feels like a
significant decision, but it really isn't.
The significant decision is what's for
dinner tonight What needs to happen
in my home for me to run my home well?
The planner is only the place where we
write those real decisions down so that in
the moment when we need to make the choice
and do the action we don't have to start
from scratch and rethink those on the fly
because we know that's not gonna happen
What I have found for myself
and so many other women in our
community, Convivial Circle,
where we have hundreds of women committed
to excelling at their homemaking and
doing life cheerfully I have seen
again and again that the pretty planner
is more of a hindrance than a help
because we want it to stay pretty.
We don't want it to have any misspelled
words or the wrong color or crossed out
tasks or scribbles from our children.
But a cheap notebook
eliminates that concern
There is nothing expensive or high
stakes about a cheap spiral notebook
And sometimes the fill in the box method
of planning that a pre-designed planner
gives you is wishful thinking on paper
that is actually getting in the way
of you engaging with your real life.
And so what you do with a spiral
notebook instead, without any fill
in the blank options that make
planning feel like homework, we're
just writing down what we need.
Write down the next list that is
popping into your head right now.
Get it down.
If you don't need it, that's
fine, just turn the page
tear out the page if it's bothering you
Did your pen run out of ink or
did your toddler spill milk on it?
Oh, well, grab another one.
They're 25 cents at the
back to school supply sale.
Like, no problem.
Low stakes.
It can fit in your messy real life.
And a workable plan is actually just
your notes to self, the things that
you are thinking in your brain that
you need to get down on paper so that
you can move forward with decisions
you have pre-made, with those notes
to self, the meal plan for the week.
It doesn't have to be
in a calendar format.
It can be a list in a notebook.
I first learned about using a notebook as
a planner back when I was homeschooling
all five of my kids, and life was so busy.
And a new family moved to town and started
attending our church and our playgroup.
They moved from across the
country With five small children.
And what I instantly noticed at
our playgroup was that this mom
carried a cheap spiral notebook
with her wherever she went.
And if someone mentioned their
favorite park or what dentist they
used or any kind of new piece of
information that she wanted to
remember, she just wrote it down.
And she just had pages and pages of notes
and phone numbers and names and ideas and
lists of things to buy and unpack and do.
And she just kinda casually flipped
through it, looked at what she
had written down, crossed things
off here or there, and made the
next note to herself as she went.
It didn't need categorization.
It didn't need organization in a
kind of aesthetic sense where if
anyone happened to open up any
page, they would be impressed.
No, she was actually organized.
Not organized as a kind of aesthetic
attainment, but actually keeping
information where she could find
it, where she looked at it and kept
what she needed and crossed out
what she didn't and kept moving.
That's real organization.
It doesn't have to be
overcomplicated, And we shouldn't
be planning to impress others.
We should be planning to just
manage our own real life better
And you might do that better if
you used a cheap, basic notebook.
Maybe you say, "Well, a spiral
notebook is too big for my purse."
Well, fine.
Get a tiny little composition notebook.
Like, look how small that is.
But it's just paper.
Yours doesn't even have to be purple.
But mine will be
You can use these without feeling the
pressure to keep it perfect or pretty.
You can have different pens, whatever
pen or pencil is on hand, because you're
not going for an aesthetic creation.
It's not a creativity outlet.
It's not a scrapbook page.
It's an actual tool for
remembering what you need to
remember when you need to know it.
And so you write things down, and you flip
through and look at what you wrote down.
That's what a planner really is.
That's what an effective
working planner really is.
So whatever planner you
have, is it working?
That is, is it holding the information
that you need, and is it there for
you to look at when you need it?
What's getting in the way of you
either writing down what you need
to know or then looking at it
after you have it written down?
Maybe your planner needs a better home.
Maybe your planner needs some kind of
pen attachment so that it's always handy.
Maybe you need to remove all those
blanks and boxes and templates
from your planner and just go
with straight normal blank paper
writing things down and looking at it is
what will make your planner finally work
And you know, just writing things
down and then looking at it is why
the daily card works so well for me
and for the hundreds, maybe even at
this point thousands of other ladies
who have tried it in my community.
It's not impressive.
It's not necessarily beautiful, and it's
not a complete life management system.
It's the kind of thing
you can't overthink.
It's just a small place where I write
down the three priorities for each day
That's the practice that helps me move
from feeling overwhelmed with all that
there is to actually recognizing that
organization is writing things down,
looking at them, and doing something.
We need that bias toward action.
And I explain all about this in my
free training, From Overwhelmed to
Organized, which you can find in the
episode description, or you can go
to simplyconvivial.com/organized,
simplyconvivial.com/organized
And watch the free training because it is
possible for you to not feel overwhelmed
no matter how long your to-do list is.
You can have a full, busy, intense life
that you actually love and enjoy doing.
Overwhelm is optional.
Let me show you how to step out
of overwhelm and into organized
mode with this free training.
I'll see you there, I will
help you repent rejoice, repeat