10 Tips for Time Management

Time management is an essential skill for moms! Some days we do it really well, but others we struggle! So many people to manage. So many places to be. So many things to remember.

One of my main priorities for this year is to be a better manager of my time. I seriously have a double major in time-wasting and procrastination. Anyone else?

The key to time management for me is to stay in the mindset that there’s no way that I can do everything that I think I can! Clearly, there are only so many hours in a day! This particular phase of life I’m in is definitely making this fact undeniable.

Between being a mother, wife, business owner, part-time blogger, I feel like I have 4 full-time jobs. There’s no possible way one person can do all that I expect myself to do. And this expectation is totally put on me, by me!

In light of the fullness of my daily life and ALL the things I feel like need to be done, this is the perfect time to remind myself, and help my other mom friends, manage, own, and control the 24 hours we’re given each day!

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Here are 10 tips I have for upping our time management game!

Put Your Phone Down

So this one is rather obvious, right, but it’s also the most challenging for many of us. To do this, we can simply turn our phones off for specific periods of time or leave them in another room where the temptation to pick them up constantly just can’t be fulfilled.

There are also apps you can download that will lock you out of your phone completely or just out of certain apps for specified periods of time. Simply search Screen Time Control in the app store and lots of options will pop up.

Meal Planning

I’m talking the most basic form of meal planning here! Nothing complicated or drastic. A piece of paper listing out what meals our families will eat each night is the first step here! Knowing what we’re going to cook every night will save time!

Meal planning does require some advanced preparation, but when done in conjunction with placing a grocery order or writing out our weekly grocery list, we can get pretty efficient at it!

When I plan meals at my house, I also consider what our evenings will look like. Busy nights filled with practices or other activities require easy, quick prep and quick to clean up meals.

Wake Up Earlier

A brilliant way to create more time in our days is to spend more time awake! Sounds exhausting, but one of the easiest ways to get more time is to get out of bed earlier!

This is also one of my “goals” for the year and so far I’m hit or miss. I’m the queen of the snooze button! I also stay up way too late so rising earlier requires a change in other habits, as well.

If mornings are a struggle, I’d say at the very least, waking up before the kids are up and about is step one! Get ahead of their chaos!

Waking up earlier can be a gradual process. 15 minutes earlier this week. 15 minutes earlier the next week…and so on until rising with the chickens is no longer dreadful!

Have A Plan For The Day

I definitely don’t mean planning every second of every day! That’d be absurd and we would constantly be frustrated because our plans would never actually work. Cue the sick kid who has to be picked up from school. Cue the canceled day of school for the weather. Cue the sick dog. There will be interruptions and unavoidable changes in events.

However, if we have 3 top priorities for each day and focus on those, we can end the day with some sense of accomplishment! We definitely have to be realistic, though! 30 minutes is never really as long as we need it to be!

Do As Much As Possible The Night Before

Just like waking up earlier, preparing the night before helps us stay ahead of whatever chaos the morning hurls toward us!

What can be done the night before? Writing down our top 3 priorities; packing lunches; picking out clothes; ironing said clothes; tidying the kitchen and living spaces, etc.

Something else that can be done at night is to make sure we have the ingredients for the meal we’re planning to cook for dinner. (Or move the meat from the freezer to the fridge) There’s nothing more frustrating than starting a meal only to find out there’s not as much rice in the box in the pantry as the recipe calls for! Am I right?

Don’t Wash Your Hair Every Day

This has been a huge time saver for me! I’m pretty low maintenance in the getting ready department normally, but now that my hair is longer (for me), it takes me 10-20 minutes to dry my hair. This often depends on how long I’ve let it air dry or how intent I am on getting it completely dry. This doesn’t factor in flat ironing or any sort of styling.

There are lots of dry shampoo options out there. I know there are all kinds of opinions on whether dry shampoo is good for our hair. (you do you) Long hair can be thrown into a ponytail. We can have a few good hat options for the in-between days, too.

Say NO To Some Things

We need to say NO more! It’s absolutely within our means to set boundaries on what, who, and how we spend our time. Often we say YES to activities out of obligation or to get people off our backs. We don’t have to dread tasks or engagements because we were not strong enough to say NO!

“I don’t say No because I’m so busy. I say NO because I don’t want to be so busy!”

I think Courtney Carver said this first. She is spot on! We can say no to protect ourselves from overwhelm and burnout!

Delegate

Here’s one that I don’t do so well because I like to be in control!

There are lots of ways we can delegate big and small tasks in our lives!

Our families can help with household chores.

We can let the grocery store employees pick out our groceries and bring them to our cars, or our front doors.

We can employ house cleaners to take big cleaning jobs off our plates.

We can let our babysitters help with kids so we can focus on our work, even if we’re all at the house!

The bottom line is there are people who are willing and wanting to help us. We just have to say YES and let go of control and perfection!

Batch Tasks

Planning to do similar tasks in specific blocks of time provides us an easy way to maximize our efficiency!

Here are a few categories of tasks that can be batched:

Computer work – emails, online orders, pay bills, registration for kid activities

Cleaning – One the multipurpose spray comes out, we can clean all the surfaces!

Errands – We can plan our errand routes and days to minimize the amount of time it takes us to run around town

Phone Calls – As an introvert, I don’t like making phone calls so if I can do them all at once, I’m expending a lot less emotional energy!

Cooking – While we’re in the kitchen cooking one meal, we can be prepping for the next. Or we can spend time one day a week doing all the vegetable chopping, meat browning, or baking for the week.

Set A Timer

Finally, I often tout the timer as a valuable tool when decluttering or organizing, but the timer is a friend to time management, too!

When working on our batched tasks (like we talked about above), giving ourselves a set amount of time to work on those tasks enables us to focus and maximize our productivity for that block of time. Without time boundaries, we often let our tasks drag on and work with less vigor than we will when we have a cut off time.

Between each time block, we can take mindless breaks and maybe pick up our phone for 5 minutes or so before we get back to the next time block.

Time management isn’t a one size fits all type of solution. The way each of us approaches our days and the time we have in those days is vastly different! We play so many roles, from working mom to stay-at-home mom, to single mom to business owner mom, and many more!

We each have to find methods that help us be more efficient managers of the hours we’re given each day. I hope these suggestions are at least food for thought as we seek to make the most of each day!