My 45 Minute Sunday Routine to Prep for the Week

Sunday is an intentionally slow day for me–I try to balance productivity with rest. So, I spend about 45 minutes getting ready for the upcoming week so Monday through Friday aren’t anymore hectic than they already are. Here’s my 45 minute Sunday routine to get ready for the week.

Pack the baby’s clothes

Getting a baby dressed can be time consuming, and no one warned me! There are so many articles of clothing–diaper, onesie, outfit, socks and the extras like shoes and, in our case, a cute bow. This might be a good place to complain about how much harder doing laundry is now but I’ll save y’all some time.

To eliminate the morning scramble, I put one outfit for each day of the week in a gallon zip lock bag and put all of the bags in her drawer. We still get her dressed on the baby changer so having everything in the drawer makes it easy to grab everything without stepping away. When she gets older, we’ll hang her outfits in the closet but for now, this saves us a lot of time. Here’s another system I found on Pinterest that works well for older babies or kids.

Related: Harper’s Nursery Tour

Review my calendar

Looking over my calendar for the week brings me so much peace of mind because it rules out surprises. I can see what’s coming up and if there’s any extra prep I should do to get ready. Big work call on Tuesday? I’ll write out my notes on Monday. Baby’s doctor appointment on Friday? I’ll pack her diaper bag Thursday night.

Reviewing my calendar is a big part of my 45 minute Sunday routine to get ready for the week. Why? Well, it pours over into two other things I do: jotting down my to-do list and prepping my clothes.

Sketch out a to-do list for the week

As I’m checking out my calendar, I start a to-do list for the week that captures any upcoming commitments I need to prepare for. I also take things a little further and sketch out some tasks for each day of the week. I found that if I do my lists one day at a time, I can get a little too optimistic and slam my list with to-do’s that just aren’t realistic to complete in a day. If I map everything out for the week at once, the tasks are more evenly distributed throughout the week.

Organize and hang up my clothes

Next, I pick out my outfits for the week and hang them up. But, I take an extra step here that also saves me a bunch of time: I include my undergarments too. I can’t tell y’all how many mornings I would have an outfit ready that required something like stockings. I’d dig in my drawer for a pair only to find out the pair I needed was in the hamper. So, the next 20 minutes would be me either finding a totally new outfit or trying on tights until I found a pair that worked. Stressful!

Putting everything together keeps me from scouring the earth for a certain garment. It keeps the process of getting dressed confined to one space–gone are the days of leaving a path of clothes all over my room (pajamas here, towel there, scarf over there).

Write out dinner menu

Finally, I map out our dinner menu. I have a white board in our kitchen from IKEA and every Sunday I write out what’s on the menu for lunch and dinner (breakfast is a free-for-all). Of course once the pandemic ends, I’ll scale back and only highlight dinner but for now, I’ll keep both.

One thing to note here: I handle grocery shopping on Saturdays so by Sunday, I already know what we’re having. But, I write it all out on the board so I can designate meals to specific days. This is helpful for a few reasons. That step above where I look at my calendar? If I notice Monday is an extremely busy day, that’s probably not the night I’ll whip up a five-course meal. Instead, that may be a crockpot night (before Harper, those would be cereal night sometimes, lol).

That’s my 45 minute Sunday routine to get ready for the week. It keeps me organized and sane so things run a little smoother. Is there anything y’all do on Sunday to get organized for the week? Drop me a comment below!