Time is ticking: three tips to manage your mom’s time

Most moms don’t have a hard time finding things to do with their time.

The problem is the opposite. There are too many things to do. The list of possibilities for the care, entertainment and education of children, in addition to family and home management, seems to be getting longer, even though the workday does not exceed 24 hours.

Someone once said that women’s work is never done. Then someone else repeated it and somehow it became a regular cliché in our lexicon. Childcare, family management, and property management (i.e., housework) combine to make time management challenging. Not only is it difficult to do everything, it is also difficult to find time for leisure, self-care and personal development.

In a typical workplace, a job description will define the responsibilities of a position. Workers, ideally, take over work within that periphery, unless overtime somehow magically appears. An employee who manages time well sets realistic expectations and takes unexpected events like sick days and fire drills into account so that a crisis can be more easily managed.

Job descriptions for moms, however, tend to vary from person to person. With endless media images of perfect moms floating through our minds, it’s easy to overreact and underestimate the time requirements. Therefore, a critical examination of how we manage mom’s time can be very beneficial.

Work-at-home moms face similar time management issues as most freelancers. Here are three suggestions for ways to handle the dilemma: our work is never done.

1. Decide what kind of mom you are and know that. Are you the clean house mom? Are you the mom who makes cookies? Are you the mom who finger paints the kids? Recognize that you cannot do everything, all the time. You need to set goals and priorities. Every business needs to find a niche. Find your mother’s niche and let the rest slide.

If anyone has experienced the combined power of theory and practice in time management, it’s Denise Wallace. Wallace, a training specialist and mother, teaches self-management skills, such as time management, to workers in the industry. This energetic and optimistic professional knows how to avoid the trap of trying to be everything to everyone. “The first thing you have to have in mind is some kind of goal. What do you want to achieve in life? What are you here for?”
Wallace became a single mother after the father of her children died several years ago. “I just couldn’t keep it all together,” she said in an interview.

You set goals, prioritized them, and gave up items you didn’t value highly. “Once you start prioritizing, if your kids mean the most to you, it’s more important to take them to the park for an hour than it is to spend six hours cleaning your house because crumbs on the floor drive you crazy. You need to learn to let go of some things.”

A former human resources manager before taking on the full-time job of a mother, Maryanne Niyogi agrees. This mom set clear goals for her break at her house. They include developing a strong support structure and establishing a sense of community for her two preschool-age children. She strives to “craft, walk. That’s the kind of point of view we’ll never forget as moms.” But with the daily grind of life, Niyogi agrees that “it’s easy to lose that.”

Wallace applauds goal setting and highly recommends writing and reviewing goals regularly.
“Your brain is a funny thing,” he says, “once you have an idea in there, as soon as you write it down, the better chance you have of achieving it. The more you revise it, the more your brain works.” on that idea to get you there, without you knowing it yourself. It is the law of manifestation.”
This is where the hard part of setting goals comes in. It’s easy to set too many goals for yourself.

If you’re having trouble accomplishing all the things you want to do, you’ll need to remove some or get help, which brings us to the second tip:

2.Get help. Delegate. Find support.

If a clean and tidy home is what you absolutely need, but you can’t achieve it with your other goals, you may need to outsource this or get help from other family members. Teaching children to do some tasks may be inefficient at first, but it will probably pay off in the future. Of course, all this depends on the age of the children and what is really possible for them at each age. In the book Pick Up Your Socks, parenting educator Elizabeth Crary includes an excellent chart detailing the household chores children can be involved in, at what ages, and up to what age they require assistance or supervision (Parenting Press, 1990). Most moms easily recognize that they can’t and shouldn’t do it all alone and ask family members for help. At the same time, study after study acknowledges that more of the work of parenting and managing the home continues to fall on the shoulders of mothers. Part of any management strategy is delegation. Moms also need to acquire firm skills in this area.

Outsourcing is great, but it’s not financially feasible for all moms. Family support also varies from family to family. Wallace also suggests another time management tip: get a mom friend.
“When I was a working single mom, I didn’t have time for fun until I got another mom friend at work,” Wallace explains, “that’s what I would do for the first two weeks of school: start making friends with the moms.” . I would say, if you pick up the kids on Tuesday afternoon, I’ll pick them up on Thursday and they can come to my house or my kids can come to your house. This is how I would schedule my fun time, is to make friends. with other moms so they can ease that part of the duty for me on any given day.”

“I’m in favor of it. [the buddy-mom system,]agrees Niyogi. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to set up. For one thing, it’s easier with fewer children. For mother and educational consultant Laurie Anderson, the buddy-mother system has been a challenge because she has three children. Many Mothers are willing to trade child care for one or two children, but find it more difficult to add three children.For Anderson, the solution has been to place the children in family day care one or two days a week, allowing her to complete his part-time consulting work.

Niyogi says she’s been surprised that more women aren’t able to take advantage of the buddy mom system. She is surprised that playgroups don’t usually become a shared child care system. She attributes this to a culture that emphasizes individuality over community, along with demanding workloads that result in a kind of crisis management planning style that leaves limited time for long-term relationship building. However, she continues to work to develop friend mothers because she believes in the system to strengthen the bonds between women and families to forge a stronger sense of community affiliation.

Regardless of the way you do it, delegation emerges as an essential component of mom’s job and critical to time management. Once the goals are set and the delegation is sorted out, there remains an additional factor for effective mom time management.

3. Use time management tools.

Colleen Gibson, mom and home-based business owner, describes herself as a “lister.” Writing down what she needs to do to run her home, care for her two children, and her full-time beauty business helps her stay organized. She also helps her manage stress. “I can’t sleep if I have some things on my mind, so I worry.” Putting them on a list allows you to release stress. “At least she’s in the role,” she says.

Wallace says stress management is a common benefit of list-building. “People keep it all trapped inside and it starts to build anxiety. So the first thing they need to do is throw out the trash can.”
Wallace describes how one of his former students was able to manage his worries by making lists. This engineer had moved west without the support of his family, who had stayed behind to sell the family home and organize a subsequent move. As he struggled with a new job in a new city, he worried about his partner and his children back east. He decided that he would schedule time to worry at the end of his workday. When an anxiety came over him at work, he would simply write it down, put it in his journal, and accept that he would give himself time to worry about it later, between 4:30 and 5:00. By “letting go” of his fears, he was able to handle his more immediate responsibilities and was able to learn his new job.

Schedules and calendars are also helpful for moms, Wallace says. He has varied in the type of tools he’s used over the years, from paper to electronic, but now he’s settled on a paper journal and a series of highlighters. “When I look at my monthly calendar, I can quickly see how busy I am, what clients I have, I can instantly tell how much money I made this month just by the colors. I color code everything.”

Wallace emphasizes that every mom needs to find the system that works best for her. Anderson also relies on her paper calendar to write down her son’s upcoming speed skating lessons and other commitments and appointments for her family. For Niyogi, a weekly email review is the key. Every Sunday night, she writes an email to herself to move the items she didn’t complete last week to the following week. She also checks and reminds herself of upcoming appointments for the next week.

“Now when I get frantic, I go back and look at that list again,” she says. For Niyogi, the email solution eliminates the risk of losing paper. Her email remains safe in her folder.
Wallace’s journal includes entries highlighted in green, times that he has scheduled for his free time. In his life, the main leisure priority is sailing with his family.

The ultimate goal of all our work, paid or not, recognized or not, is to have fun and enjoy life. The ultimate goal of time management for moms is also to organize our time so that we get a slice of that ‘fun’ pie too.