Today you’ll learn over 20 best time-saving tips for working moms.
So if you work from home and it’s challenging to manage your home and find time for yourself as a working mom at the same time, you’ll love these awesome tips on saving time.
In fact, these time management tips, tricks, and hacks helped me:
- save time in cleaning and organizing
- work smarter and get more done
- shorten my to-do lists
- overcome feeling constantly tired and overwhelmed
- save my sanity as a working mom and home manager
- develop stress-free daily routines
- boost my productivity and efficiency
- schedule my day realistically
- and finally, create “me” time
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Unquestionably, time is the most precious thing you’ve ever had, have, and ever will have.
All the same, sometimes you just feel your life is a hamster wheel.
To put it more simply, you’re constantly, splitting time between work, home, kids, work home, kids, and so on.
And suddenly, you wake up in the morning, feeling overwhelmed and discouraged even before the new day really starts.
In fact, you desperately want to find this magic wound and set just teeny-tiny time for yourself, for your passions, interests, or maybe ambitions.
Nevertheless, here I put a list of my favorite time-saving tips for working moms.
However, this is a place where I have to put a disclaimer.
These tips work for me perfectly. But your lifestyle may be completely different.
With this in mind, please take all these time-saving tips and tricks as inspiration and tweak them to your needs.
Table of Contents
Time Management & Time Saving Tips for Work-at-Home Moms
Make Time For Planning
As Brian Tracy says:
“It takes only about 10 to 12 minutes for you to plan out your day, but this small investment of time will save you up to two hours”
For this reason, setting up about 30 minutes a week and 5 minutes a day to plan ahead your month, week, and day-by-day is a huge time-saver (although it seems to be exactly the opposite).
Use a Right (For You) Planning Tool
Undoubtedly, I’m a huge fan of bullet journaling.
Other planning tools you may want to try out are:
- a classic planner
- a bullet journal
- Happy Planner
- pre-made journals
and digital apps like for example:
Be Realistic About Your Schedule
One of the common reasons why you may feel overworked but still inefficient is creating an unrealistic schedule.
Especially, creating work at home mom schedule can be a real challenge.
Undoubtedly, being a mom means more responsibilities and tasks that are time-consuming.
So creating a schedule that probably would work perfectly for a single girl in her twenties is a straight way to burnout for working moms.
Prioritize Your Tasks With an Eisenhower Matrix
Also, prioritizing your tasks allows you to decide which of them will have the biggest impact on the end result and which you can easily delete from your to-do list.
My favorite tool when it comes to prioritizing tasks is an Eisenhower matrix.
It’s a simple graph, where you divide all your items into four categories:
- Important-urgent: these tasks you want to complete immediately
- Important-not urgent: these tasks you want to plan
- Unimportant – urgent: these ones you delegate
- Important-not urgent: these ones you delete
Time Blocking
Obviously, planning and prioritizing tasks aren’t enough. Now, you have to take action and actually do them.
However, even in this case, you can save your time with the time-blocking system.
In general, time blocking allows your mind to focus only on one specific task.
Free Time Management Worksheets
Also, you can download free time management worksheets.
Use Pomodoro Timer
Speaking of which, I’ve been working in time intervals for six months.
What I mean by that, is I split each block into 4 or 5 parts.
Every part lasts half an hour: 25 minutes staying focused on work and a 5-minute break.
The most beautiful thing about the Pomodoro technique is that it forces me to remember to take breaks.
Definitely, it’s so easy to forget to take breaks while working at home without coworkers, lunch breaks, or a corporate kitchen.
Write Down 5-Minute Tasks
As a rule, we tend to underestimate what can be done within 5 minutes.
However, I bet you’ll be surprised by how many things you can do in a few minutes.
Just set a timer and check it out.
Next, you can put the list of 5-minute tasks in your planner for future reference.
“5 minutes is more than enough time to get a small task done. And small tasks add up to big productivity”
(Source)
Time-Saving Tips at Home
First and foremost, let’s begin with how you can save time at home.
Generally, you spend all home time cleaning, cooking, taking care of your kids and/or family, and chilling out.
And while you’ll find out my favorite time management tips for homemakers in a moment, writing about time-saving hacks in the context of bonding time with family or practicing self-care is quite uncomfortable for me.
In that case, I’m thinking more about being present and mindful of how you spend your time.
So avoid coming up with a new project idea while playing with kids- just focus 100% on them.
Also, when you’re relaxing, do it mindfully because you deserve it instead of feeling guilty.
Time-Saving Tips in Cleaning & Organization
Declutter Every Room and Keep Your Home Clutter-Free
Anyway, the very first step you need to follow in order to save an insane amount of time as a homemaker is decluttering every room in your house.
Without a doubt, every single item in your home requires more or less attention.
You need to clean it, repair it, organize it, etc.
So spending your time taking care of things you don’t need, like, or in general want in your life is ridiculous.
Make a Place for Everything and Have Everything in Place
However, keeping a home clutter-free might be a challenge. Definitely, it’s easier said than done.
But even if you’re far far away from being a minimalist, finding a place for everything and putting everything in its place is the key to making cleaning and organizing fast and easy.
Create a Cleaning Schedule
Undoubtedly, creating a cleaning schedule allows me to free up my weekends.
As far as I can remember, I’ve always found a weekend cleaning such a waste of time.
So when I heard about this idea of having a daily 15-20 minute cleaning routine, I was very enthusiastic.
However, my first attempt was a total failure because of the lack of a cleaning schedule.
In fact, I wasted half of the time deciding what to clean instead of taking action.
After some trial and error, I came up with my perfect cleaning schedule.
Every month I set it up in my bullet journal and it really works.
Time-Saving Laundry Tips
Get Sheets and Towels in the Same Color Palette
Unless you’re ok with washing whites with colored household items, having sheets and towels only in whites, or in general the same color palette limits the laundry loads.
Think How Often You Need to Wash Clothes and Household Textiles
Speaking of time-saving laundry hacks, first and foremost think about how often you need to wash clothes and household textiles.
Definitely, it’s very subjective and strongly depends on your personal preferences.
As a matter of fact, you can get easily triggered after seeing some kind of guidelines.
With this in mind, I’d only like to mention that, yes, I wash underwear after every wear, and no, I don’t wash bath towels after 2 uses.
Create a Laundry Routine
Also, creating your own laundry routine saves you time significantly.
In fact, I always have a designated laundry day scheduled in my cleaning bullet journal spread.
Again, some of us may have to do laundry every day, and some of us only once a week.
Generally, it depends on how many kids you have, how many clothes you have, etc.
Use Mesh Bags for Underwear
It’s unbelievable, how many times I wasted my time looking for missing socks.
Using mesh bags for underwear is such a great idea.
Not only it protects your underwear but it also secures them from getting lost in other items.
Skip Ironing and Folding
First of all, I only air dry my laundry, by putting clothes on hangers.
For this reason, clothes are almost wrinkle-free so I can easily skip ironing and folding.
Time-Saving Tips for Cooking
Choose Simple Meals
In this case, I like to limit myself only to 3-5 ingredients.
Moreover, you can write a list of your favorite quick and easy recipes in your planner or bullet journal so you never run out of meal ideas.
Meal Planning
Undoubtedly, meal planning is so helpful if you’re struggling with the “what to eat tonight” kind of decision.
Also, it cuts your time at the grocery store because you have a grocery list and you know exactly what to buy.
In the end result, you don’t have to return to the store because you forgot something.
Meal Prepping
Correspondingly, meal prepping saves significantly your time spent in the kitchen throughout the week.
All you have to do is just set an hour once a week preparing your weekly meals.
By batching ungrateful tasks like chopping vegetables, peeling off the garlic, etc you’re more likely to stick with your weekly meal plan.
Read the Recipe and Plan All Steps Ahead
Instead of cooking along with the recipe, read it ahead and plan the steps in the most efficient order.
For example, let’s make simple spinach pasta.
Firstly, heat water (for pasta) and a pan (for spinach) before you start pressing fresh garlic (already peeled off because of meal-prepping magic) and chopping spinach.
Double Meal Size and Freeze The Half
Now you can take your time management skills to another level.
What I like to do is to double the meal size, portion out half of it into a container, and freeze it for future meals.
Morning Time-Saving Hacks
Create a Morning Routine
Clearly, having a great start in the morning is a crucial factor in whether the rest of the day is productive or not.
Therefore, creating a morning routine allows you to start your day on a healthy note and boost your mind, body, and soul.
So if you’re always running in the morning, developing morning habits can help you to know immediately where to start after you wake up and stay on top of things around the house.
Moreover, it doesn’t have to be complicated.
In reality, even the smallest things like washing dishes, journaling, or reading 10 pages can really make a difference.
Plan Your Next Day in The Evening
Apart from the morning routine, you also want to know what’s on your to-do list right away after the alarm clock has rung.
For this reason, set 5 minutes in the evening and plan ahead for the next day.
You’ll see how this simple evening habit improves your overall productivity.
Get Everything Ready The Night Before
Similarly, prepare your clothes, declutter your workspace, and organize documents before bed.
Finding Time For Yourself
Wake Up Early (-er Than Your Kids)
First of all, start waking up before the kids.
At the same time, it’s hard to limit the number of hours you sleep (and in my opinion, you definitely shouldn’t do it) and wake up at 5 am.
While I know that most productivity gurus recommend it, I also think your health is your number one priority.
Nevertheless, try to start your day even 15-30 minutes before your kids and spend this time with yourself.
Reduce Your Expectations
The next thing you can do is simply reduce your expectations, stop trying to be the best mom, wife, homemaker, and “girl boss” together, and learn how to let go.
Put Only Three Things On Your Daily To-Do List
Also, reduce your never-ending daily to-do list to only three of the most important things you need to do.
Clearing Your Calendar on Weekends and Evenings
Last but not least, clear your calendar on evenings and weekends. If you think it’s impossible, read this blog post carefully one more time.
Time-Saving Tips – Final Thoughts
As true as I find all the work-life balance stuff a myth, I also think that you’re probably busy because you do so many unnecessary things that could be either make easier, delegated, or completely delete from your daily schedule.
Obviously, to be absolutely fair, my or your resources of getting help like cleaning ladies, nannies, etc is on a completely another level than celebrities, but I still hardly believe in the power of being intentional with your time.
As a rule, you as a working mom don’t have a lot of free time.
Now, you have all the time-saving tips, tricks, and hacks that allow you to create the strategy to get hours back in your day.
Add them little by little to your daily routine, develop stellar habits, and you’ll see how your life is getting better and better and better.