Running a family is a full-time job. You already have one.
Staffed & Sorted is for women making modern family life work: the help, the systems and the household behind it, and the food, travel and small pleasures that make it all worth running. Written by a working mother who has lived alongside household help for four decades.
In recent letters
Staffed · EssayThe Real Reason I Hired a Night NurseHiring help at the worst possible moment, and what I was really paying for. Sorted · Travel · MembersThe Holiday Advice Nobody Wants to HearCall the hotel. Leave the cot. Bring the nanny. Staffed · HiringNobody’s Nanny Problem Is a Nanny ProblemAlmost every hire that falls apart was never a bad hire. It was a job nobody wrote down.Two halves of one life
Staffed is the infrastructure. Sorted is what it makes room for.
The help, the house, the systems
Staffed
The part of family life that nobody sees until it stops working.
Hiring and keeping good help. House rules, routines and handovers. The conversations nobody tells you how to have. And the quiet systems, AI included, that keep a home running while you’re both at work.
- Hiring
- Live-in help
- House rules
- Routines
- Handovers
- AI at home
The food, the travel, the good bits · For members
Sorted
The reason you wanted the house to run itself in the first place.
Wellness-led recipes, and what the children will actually eat. Hotels that genuinely work with small children. Personal essays about the life all this is in service of. Most of Sorted lives in the members’ letter.
- Recipes
- Toddler meals
- Travel
- Hotels
- Wellness
- Essays
From the Substack
Where the thinking happens.
One letter a week, on whatever is actually going on in a busy, well-staffed household.
Free to read. Paid members also get the full archive, the members-only essays, and the scripts, how-tos and templates that save you writing it all yourself.
Tools
When an essay isn’t enough, there’s a toolkit.
Some problems need more than a good read. For those, I make tools you can use on Monday morning. They start with the moment most families find hardest: welcoming live-in help for the first time.
Before you hire · Free
The Red-Flags Checklist
The short list of warning signs worth acting on, and the ordinary stuff you can stop second-guessing. Straight to your inbox.
Get the free checklist
Once she’s said yes
The First 30 Days Playbook & Toolkit
A week-by-week Playbook and 13 fill-in tools for working parents welcoming live-in help for the first time. Clear expectations from day one, feedback that doesn’t feel awkward, and a calm decision at the end of the month.
$127 · One-time · Instant PDF download
See what’s insideRead “Nobody’s Nanny Problem” and wished the trial agreement and the scorecard were already written? They’re in the Playbook.
Why this exists
Most of what makes a household work, nobody writes down.
I’ve spent close to four decades around household help, on three continents, and I now run a team of three of my own. Before I ever wrote a brief for a nanny, I wrote them for five-star hotel staff. It turns out a hotel and a busy household run on the same problem: nobody performs well against a standard that was never written down.
Staffed & Sorted is me writing it down.
“Privacy isn’t the absence of other people. It’s the absence of anyone needing an answer from you.”From “The Holiday Advice Nobody Wants to Hear”
Alexandra
More about me- Having help is not the same as having it handled.Outsourcing the work doesn’t outsource the management. Someone still has to run it.
- Every calm household runs on a system you can’t see.It’s rarely luck, and it’s never the perfect hire. It’s things agreed, written down and revisited.
- A well-run home should be a good place to work, too.Kindness and clarity are the same thing here. Good help stays where expectations are fair and clear.
- The point of a system is fewer decisions, not more spreadsheets.Life shouldn’t become a productivity project. It should just take up less of your evening.
- Nobody should have to learn all this the hard way.Most of us did. That part, at least, is optional.
Between letters
Come for the systems. Stay for the opinions.
The weekly letter
One letter a week. Usually worth opening.
Essays on running a modern household, the help behind it and the good things it makes room for. Free on Substack, and you can leave whenever you like.
