Take Back Your Time — Top Productivity Hacks for Busy Moms

A lot of time management systems ask you to write out your ideal or your typical day. We’re not going to ask you to go through an exercise like that because we know there are no typical days and we also know that you can have the intention of having your ideal day, but then life happens. Here’s how we’d like you to think about your time:

Analyze weekly anchor activities.

Let’s start by listing out your anchor activities — what are the things that can’t really move during the week. Think specific work hours, classes, meetings, etc.

What are the things you love to do and what are the things you hate to do?

What can you outsource or delegate to a partner, colleague, or your kids?

How can you schedule the things you love to do? Look at the fringe hours — here are some examples:

• Love to read? Make sure you have a bag big enough to shove a book into or download the Kindle app for your phone. Read while waiting in line instead of scrolling your phone!
• Enjoy catching up with friends and seeing their faces while they talk, but scheduling video calls or in-person meetups just too difficult? Grab an app like Marco Polo and leave video messages to each other when it works for you!
• Are you crafty? Try to break up craft projects that you love doing into smaller pieces rather than trying to tackle a big project all in one go.

Time block and schedule to get things done!

Don’t just have a big to-do list but actually stick it on the calendar — here are some of our favorite hacks:

• Schedule 30 minutes to do admin tasks like scheduling doctor’s appointments, paying bills, ordering groceries, etc.
• Brain dump your to-do list (like everything, EVERYthing, every. thing. that you need to do) on one sheet of paper. Then prioritize that list and break it out into days of the week.
• Be realistic with how much time tasks are going to take.
• We’re huge fans of the Pomodoro method — set a timer for a relatively short amount of time (approximately 25 minutes). Focus exclusively on a task for that length of time and then when the timer goes off, leave the task where it stands. Take at least a five-minute break before starting the timer for your next task. If you’re not familiar with the Pomodoro method, it’s worth reading an article or two about! The science behind optimizing productive brain time is pretty fascinating.

Do your future self some favors.

What things can you do today or right now to help your future self? We see this as a form of self-care. You’ll probably find yourself saying thank you to your past self for setting up fun appointments or for taking care of things in an efficient way. Here are a few examples of things we do for our future selves:

• Book a babysitter for a few upcoming events or date nights.
• Schedule a massage or manicure for the weekend or after work.
• Add things to your Target cart as they come up so when you are ready you can do a drive-up order on your way home from work.
• In general, if a task takes less than 10 minutes, don’t procrastinate. Get that task done and move on with your day.

Don’t forget big picture planning.

A lot of what we’ve talked about so far is managing time on a day-to-day basis. However, it’s important to plan further out than just one day or one week. We all have vacations we’d like to take, dates we want to go on with our partners, activities we want to do with groups of friends, intentional time we want to spend with our families, not to mention the time we spend taking care of ourselves. All of these things take advanced planning.

Tackle big picture planning similarly to the brain dump list and then break tasks out into realistic goals. We love taking time with our partners and/or kids to make a wishlist of things we want to do in the next six months, year, or even the next five years. This is especially important when trying to balance time with your partner and time you get without your partner or kids. Communication and advanced planning save the day and keep your relationships in balance!

We hope that you’ve found some helpful nuggets of information in this guide. In order to carve out the time you need to go after your ambitions and be a mom, you need to be in control of your time and dominate your schedule. Get in touch with us if you have time management tips that help you feel in control of your day!

Make sure you get the full “Own Your Time” guide here: www.themodernmomcollective.com/own-your-time

Originally published at https://www.themodernmomcollective.com on November 4, 2022.