When you walk through any aisle at  your local office supply store, you’re likely to be quickly overwhelmed by an enormous amount of gadgets, gizmos, software, and other tools that promise to help keep your business organized. Unfortunately, many of them produce the opposite effect once you get home and start trying to figure out how to actually put them into practice.  Keeping your home office easy to manage often takes nothing more than the simple tried and true basic methods of organization. The great thing about that is that they’re also inexpensive in comparison.

When you’re a work at home mom, you get the benefit of saving money of child care but you also have to spend money on your business if you want to run it properly and prepare it to grow and be successful. So, although you don’t need every new gadget under the sun, you will need a couple basic requirements to keep things running smoothly.

What you’re going to need is calendars and planners.

Ideally, you’re going to grab two calendars. One is going to be a calendar on steroids that you can use for the whole family, and not the one quarter page size that comes free in your mailbox with your local real estate agent’s face on every page.

The family style calendar will come with a section for every family member to update their appointments and activities. The kitchen is a perfect place for this one, since it’s the hub of the whole family in the sense that everyone goes through there at least a few times a day.

The second calendar will be for your own work schedule (which you should also sync with your family calendar as far as your time schedule for working hours) and you will keep this in your office. You can always choose to use an online or desktop calendar as well for tasks, but writing things down still seems to work well for most humans and helps to remember tasks.

Sounds good so far, right? Now add a planner to the mix, and you’ll be all-powerful.

When you’re choosing a planner, it’s important to take your time and choose one with features you actually need. many will have a lot of extras that may not apply to your business. If that’s the case those features can actually get in the way and work against your organization.

If you’re just starting your business from home, be sure to get these items and make it a priority to organize. It really can make the difference of success or failure. Your kids may think you’re old fashioned for using calendars and planners, but there’s a good reason they still sell like hot cakes to Moms and Dads.