Practical Time Management Tips for Working Moms

Time management for working moms is all about effectively dividing your time among the responsibilities at both home and work. It is all about doing it in a way that make you feel accomplished and appreciate the progress that you have made. It’s about managing the time to your advantage to help make progress on your goals and create your own version of work life balance.

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Time Management Strategies – The Truth

The truth about time management strategies is that there are a lot of them. And not every one of them will work as well for you and your household as they do for someone else.

You have to figure out which ones are best suited. Which ones will help you manage your time better so you are more efficient and effective with your tasks and responsibilities.

If you are feeling overwhelmed – start small. One time management strategy at a time.

Best Time Management Tips for Working Moms

Time management as a full time working mom can be challenging. There are simply a lot of things to juggle on a daily basis. But there are also some great time management hacks that have proven effective for many working mamas.

Fix your mindset – you cannot do everything

You have to start with your mindset and realize that you are not a superwoman. You have to decide what are the most important things for you in the phase of life you are in.

Concentrate on your priorities first.

Everything else will wait until the priorities tasks are done. If you have time to tackle some items that are on the ‘nice to have list’ – go for it! If not, they are not that important anyway. So let them go!

Plan ahead

One of the most effective time management strategies you should implement is planning ahead. There is nothing more stressful than doing things last minute because you forgot or did not have a plan.

For example, when you have your kid’s birthday party coming up and you wait until the week of his or her birthday to start getting stuff ready, you will most likely get very stressed out. You will run into all kinds of problems with very little time to correct them. But, if you had a plan ahead of time, you would be able to start working on it much earlier saving yourself a lot of time and stress.

You have to make a habit of planning ahead.

This will truly impact all aspects of your life and help you balance all your responsibilities much more effectively without feeling overwhelmed. Every other tip and strategy below has a planning component.

Planning ahead is much easier with a planner, where you can write down your reminders and to-do lists to help you better manage your time.

RELATED: Best Planners for Working Moms

Get organized with checklists and systems

When you think about ways to better manage your time, think about what you can do to get more organized. When we have chaos around us, we tend to get overwhelmed.

Think about your work and household responsibilities. Which ones do you do on a regular basis?

These would be the ones where developing checklists and systems would work best!

It can range from creating a system to do your laundry, through vacation packing checklist and house party checklist, to creating a chore chart for your kids. Think of those as templates or cheat sheets that will help you stay organized, save time, and be more efficient with completing those tasks.

Create routines to help your household run smoother

Routines are meant to help your daily and weekly activities flow better. If there are things that you do each day or each week – consider creating a routine for them. Here are some common routines:

• morning routine
• evening routine
• cleaning routine

A morning routine will help with getting yourself and your family ready for the day. Similarly, an evening routine will help you with dinner prep, after school activities, evening chores, and getting ready for bed. And finally, a cleaning routine will help you stay on top of all the cleaning tasks for your house.

Weekend prep is crucial to time management for working moms!

As working moms, weekends are the time to prep for the week ahead. This is our time to get things organized so the week days don’t feel so stressful and overwhelming.

Dedicate some time each weekend to get some things done. Because weekdays are usually crazy busy with work, after school activities, dinner prep, helping kids with homework, and many other things. And our time during the week is very limited!

Some things you can do on the weekends:

• meal planning
• meal prepping
• grocery shopping
• cleaning
• organization projects
• decluttering projects
• catching up on laundry
• budget updates
• paying bills
• running errands

RELATED: How to Prepare for the Week Ahead 

Fill your cup

You cannot forget that in order to manage your time better and be more productive, you have to take care of yourself.

If you are not getting enough sleep, not nourishing your body with healthy food options, not feeding your souls with what you enjoy to do – you will quickly run out of energy.

And even the best time management strategies will not be effective if you are constantly not feeling well – both physically and mentally.

Therefore, if you want to be more productive and manage your time better, you absolutely have to dedicate some time just for you! You cannot run on empty!

3 Best Tips to Save Time

Besides managing your time better, there are also a few things that you can do to save yourself some time.

Get things delivered

Trips to the stores can be very time consuming. You have to drive there, look for the items you need, hope the check out lane is quick and painless, and then drive back home. Not to mention spending too much money because something caught your eye next to the item that you were looking for. And before you know it your shopping cart has a few extra, and often unnecessary, items.

Get your groceries delivered or order and drive up to the store to pick them up. It will save you lots of time!

And anytime your child come home from school and tells you that need something for a project or maybe it’s a green t-shirt for the Spirit Day – just do yourself a favor and head straight to Amazon.

Automate what you can

If you are doing something on a regular basis, consider if there is a way to automate it. This can be from setting up automatic payments of your bills to setting automatic prescription refills with your pharmacy.

Similarly, you can also use Amazon’s subscribe and save option to get regular shipments of the items that you use all the time. Think soap, vitamins, or coffee.

Delegate

This helpful time management method will definitely save you time!

Is there is anything that takes a lot of your time that someone else could do for you?

You can delegate yardwork, deep cleaning of your house, or driving your kids to school (carpooling with a neighbor or using a school bus). You can also delegate some house chores to your kids.