As a mom to a 2-year-old and an almost 4-year old, I know the struggle of trying to have a productive week as a small business owner and stay at home mom. Whether you are running your own small business or you are a full time working mom – I see you! It can be hard to find the balance between spending time with your kids and actually getting work done and being productive while you are at it. I want to share a few tips and tools that are helping me to balance the two. I must say these tips are not only for moms, you can use them too if you are working from home or you run your own small business.
Table of Contents
My 6 points to getting this done:
1. Make a plan
This is essentially your “brain-dump” list. Write down every single thing you need to accomplish. It’s very important to have a roadmap of where you are going and what you want to achieve for yourself, your business and your children. First things first is to decide what you want to accomplish in the week and then break that down into small manageable tasks. You can do this by mapping out your vision, pen and paper would work great here. Write down a list of everything you want to accomplish, having a clear vision is a key to success here. If you are a mom I would also include a few activities for your children that you want them to do in the week focusing on their developmental stages. This also includes meal planning if you do plan ahead for meals.
Questions you can ask yourself when making this plan are:
- What is the MOST important thing I need to accomplish this week?
- Is there anything I need to catch up on from last week?
- How much time do I have for work, myself and the children?
- What small steps am l taking this week to reach the BIG goals I’ve set for the year?
2. Prioritise
Now, this is your “to-do” list. Look at your plan then look at your calendar and prioritise what needs to get done FIRST in order for you to make progress. Try not to overdo this or add too many things on your list making it impossible or overwhelming to even begin. I normally have a maximum of THREE things that I need to accomplish in a day if anything else gets done then that’s a bonus. As a business owner, this means you look at the tasks that are going to give you profit first – focus on the tasks that are going to make you money. It’s crucial here to understand what is important and urgent when it comes to making your plan work. As a mom, think of where your child is developmentally and what are the key things you are aiming to teach them at that stage then plan their “learning through play” around that. When it comes to prioritising I look at it this way:
- Urgent and Important Tasks – I prioritise these FIRST for example sending out an invoice to a client and as a mom meal planning on a Sunday is urgent for me.
- Important but not urgent – I clearly block out time for these tasks in the calendar, for example, a web design that has a deadline in a few weeks and as a mom something as small as washing and moisturising the girl’s hair.
3. Make the time and work your plan
Time to execute! You’ve made your plan and prioritised what needs to be done, now you need to make pockets of time in your week where you can clearly see and visualise how it is going to flow. I buy a yearly planner from TKMaxx and I love them, I could not do without one. So if you can get yourself a planner that gives you a good month/week’s view then that is great, use that. I also use google calendar to see a breakdown of my week on screen. This helps me especially as it relates to my work as a web designer and a blogger. I block out time in my calendar for web design-related tasks, for blogging and social media tasks and for family tasks. These are all colour coded and the calendar is available on all my devices.
With the blocked out time (no distractions during this time – Usually in the early hours of the morning or at night) I use the Pomodoro technique, I do not own a Pomodoro so I just use my iPhone timer and it works perfectly. The Pomodoro technique is basically:
- Choose a task you would like to get done.
- Set your timer to 25 minutes (You can add how many minutes your concentration lasts for)
- Work on the task until your timer rings (no checking social media, answering calls, sending emails etc. You are just focusing on that one task.)
- When your timer rings stop what you are doing, mark your progress then….
- Take a short break – about 5 minutes. Stand up and stretch, drink a glass of water, check social media etc
- Then get back on the timer and keep repeating the process.
- After 4 timers, take a longer break like 30 minutes to do something totally different and relaxing.
- This method works for me and keeps me from getting overwhelmed with the task at hand.
4. Have a routine
Keep Going! One thing I know now after just over three years of parenting is that children thrive on routine and so do adults. One of my top ten favourite books is Atomic Habits by James Clear – I highly recommend this book. He talks of routines and habits and how the quality of our lives depends on our habits. “A habit is a routine or behaviour that is performed regularly, and in most cases automatically. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous.” Truth is that there are not enough hours in a day to accomplish everything that needs to get done. By having a routine, you free up space in your brain to focus on other things. There are tasks that you know you have to do every week or every day, make those part of your routine.
5. Make Use of Systems and Time Saving Apps
- This generation is so lucky to have so many tools at hand to help us keep up with our schedules and never ending “to-do” lists. These are a few systems and apps that I recommend for you to try and see if they work for you.
- Google Calendar – If you don’t already have a google account you can create a free account that will give you access to the calendar.
- Notion, Asana, Trello, Evernote and To-doist are great project/Task Management apps you can use. They all allow you to visually assign tasks and break down what you need to do. My absolute favourite is Notion, it’s free for personal use – Try It!
- Google sheets – This is what I use for meal planning. There are a few paid apps that you can use for meal planning such as plantoeat. I haven’t tried it yet, maybe I will hop on their 30-day free trial and see how it works.
FOR BUSINESS AND SOCIAL MEDIA YOU CAN USE:
- Plannthat – If you want to plan out your Instagram posts to save you time.
- Canva – Bulk plan your social media content
- Wave – helps you prepare invoices and track expenses
- Dropbox and Google Drive – Provide a central storage location for all your business files.
- Appointy – If you need to schedule appointments with clients.
- 17hats – Great for an all-in-system if you are looking for everything in one place.
There are so many more that you can find online. If you have any that would like me to try let me know in the comments section below.
6. Make Self Care a priority -Take Care of yourself.
The most important of all these points is Self Care. Take Care of yourself. You cannot take care of others if you do not have your own oxygen mask. Be flexible and be very realistic. Your children need you to be awake, energetic and available, and you cannot do that if you work yourself to the ground. Running a small business from home and taking care of children and the home is a lot of work and takes up a lot of mental energy. If you do not take time to rest and relax you will burn out. You will hate what you do and you will take that out on everyone around you. Sleep. This concept of “I will sleep when I die or Hustlers don’t sleep” is flawed. If you want to die soon then go ahead and burn your candle at both ends but it’s not worth it. Stress is real and it can lead to depression so take care of yourself always. Exercise, pamper yourself, drink lots of water and eat a clean healthy diet. It helps!
Those are my 6 tips for organising and planning out your week as a mom and small business owner. Please note that as a mom things do not always go according to plan. So be very flexible and realistic with your plan but most importantly protect your time and protect your mental health.
