Balancing motherhood and work is the ultimate work-in-progress, one that never quite seems to end. For the entirety of my life as a mother, I’ve worked to create a system that works for me - and surprise, it’s ALWAYS changing.
As your children get older and your work life demands change, we find ourselves struggling to maintain the small amount of balance that we’ve achieved. Often, this causes us to revert back to our stressed-out state.
Even as we struggle to find create some resemblance of sanity in our lives, there are a few things we can do each time to help out - aka these super simple tips for balancing your work-mom life:
Delegate Home & Work Tasks
“Hands-off” is not really in our vocabulary, but we can at least try. No one said being a working mom was going to be easy, but they also didn’t tell you that it’s 100% okay to delegate tasks to other household members or (if you own your own business) to outsource a few business tasks.
Delegate tasks that can easily be handed off at home or are time-consuming in your business. This can be as simple as asking a family member to pick your children up from school or extracurricular activities once per week or hiring a VA to manage your calendar.
Make “To-do” Lists
A simple addition to your typical morning routine, start creating two to-do lists every morning - one for work, one for home. I highly recommend separating each list into mini-list categorized by:
-Need to Do
-Want to Do
As you’re making each list, try to limit yourself to three-five major need to do items, allowing the rest to fill in your want to do section. This will keep you from being overwhelmed on one side versus the other.
Prepare in Advance
Have a little freetime on the weekend or maybe you have a little extra time on a certain day of the week? Use this time to start preparing for your week in advance.
Start prepping lunches, activities, and building nighttime and morning routines that prepare for later in the day or the next day (like tidying up toys every night before bed).
Know What Time of Day Works for You
Are you a morning person or a night owl? Identify what time of day works best for you to accomplish mentally taxing tasks or ones that require high-concentration and assign those tasks to that time of the day.
You’ll find that knowing WHEN you’re most productive and utilizing that time will keep you less stressed and allow you to finish tasks more efficiently - leaving more time for mom-life. If you don’t know what time works best for you, take a week and rotate!
Have Designated Break Times
Have designated break times from both your family and your work - you can suffer from both mom burnout and work burnout and neither are great for keeping your mom-work life balance.
Taking time to have a lunch break, just sitting after a strenuous task, or just planning a 15 minute stretch can help keep your mind clear and help you stay productive.
Balancing Mom-Work Life
Finding a healthy mom-work balance can be hard, and it can’t be done alone. You should always be open to accepting help (and understand that it’s okay to ASK for help).
Being a working mom doesn’t mean that we should sit back and be okay with never moving forward in our jobs and businesses - or that we should miss out on the key w=events in our children’s lives. It’s about finding a balance between the two and discovering what you’re okay with doing and what you’re not… aka establishing and sticking to boundaries.
But, that’s a problem for another day. For now, start with the simple things, like learning to establish a routine to help you balance or getting help from moms that have been in your shoes!
Check out what we spend our days on according to the average person:
- 2 hrs 24 minutes on social media per day
- 4 hours watching tv
- 90 minutes in daily interruptions
- 16 minutes deciding what to wear
- 35 minutes deciding what to eat
- 10 hours and 50 minutes in the car per week
That’s a lot of time! Let's start maximizing your time and getting rid of the time suckers you no longer need!
1. Make decisions quickly and Easily
You can waste so many minutes every day, just trying to make a decision. And a lot of times these decisions aren’t hard but you're allowing the overwhelm of making a decision to steal your time.
Dinner
Instead of sitting there for 20 minutes trying to decide what you’re going to cook up for dinner, make a list on the weekend of what your dinners will be for the week!
Outfits for the week:
Keep it simple! If you’re home, yoga pants and an oversize shirt are a girl’s best friend. I’m a huge fan of all things neutral because they’re easy to style, classic, and they make it really easy to put outfits together. Find your style niche and stick with it.
Automate Baby.
We are living in 2020 and there are SO many things you can automate. Take full advantage of this whenever you can. Set up automatic bill pay so you don’t have to think about when you’re going to sit down and pay your bills. Have your beauty products, vitamins, meal services, (yes, even printer ink) set up on automation. It’s really amazing what all you can automate these days.
2. Batch Your Time
If you aren’t familiar with time batching, it basically means you batch similar tasks together and set aside a time to complete all of them. This way you’re touching all of these tasks once instead of multiple times. This is really popular in the business world, but I think it should be equally popular at home, because it’s really helpful! Here are some ways I currently batch my time; Food Prep and running errands!
Daily and weekly routines eliminate a lot of time on decisions. When you have a set routine in place, you no longer waste time trying to figure out when you’re going to get the laundry done or clean your home, because you have a set day/time when you do it.
I want you to think about what those things are that are taking your time every week.
Is there a way you could make those things part of a routine?
For example, if laundry seems to pile up every day, and you feel always behind on it. Then, you need a laundry routine.
Does cleaning your home take you way too much and you always feel behind on it? Then you need a cleaning routine.
Every part of your life can become a routine, you just have to put a little strategy in place and then stick to that routine consistently until it becomes a habit for you.
4. Make a Plan
This is last but definitely not least. Planning your week is EVERYTHING! Let me say that again for those in the back – making a plan for your week will save your life all week long.
There is SO much that goes into a week, and taking just 30 minutes or so to put it all down on paper or in a google calendar, will save you all week. Bonus, put it on a shared google calendar with your spouse so they are in the know as well. We did this awhile back and its been a game changer for our marriage!
Okay, I know that was a lot! I hope this is making you think how of how much time (read actually hours you could have back in your day).
Now it’s time to take action and start. You’ve got this!
Pssst. I’ve got something for you. If you need more tips and strategies and easy button items on how to Take Your Day Back, visit here, to receive FREE resources on the one thing I incorporated which totally helped me revamp my day for you to use!
