The pomodoro technique is a great way to get tasks done without distraction by setting aside focused blocks of time and breaks. This article explains how to use this method for your projects.
How Healthy Eating Improves Productivity
Why You Need to Make Time for Organization
How to Increase Productivity After the Holidays
How Priorities Can Eliminate Mom Guilt
Managing Your Time by Managing Your Energy
What is a Done List And Why You Should Have One
How to Get Your Schedule On Track When You've Been A Mess For So Long
How You Can Use Batching to Save Time
Quick Tips To Make Cleaning Go Faster
I hate cleaning. Plus sometimes it just feels like a wasted effort when the mess is back an hour later. And then if that weren't enough to dissuade you, the time it takes can be incredible. Hours to clean what takes my kids 30 seconds to dirty. On the other hand, the peace of mind that comes with a clean and organized home is amazing. You can physically feel the difference when you enter a clean room. It also does wonders for your mindset! So, in order to help you get in and out of cleaning mode more quickly, here are some tips to make cleaning go faster.
Stop Procrastinating
Procrastinating is easy. We all do it. We even rationalize it. I can either do that one difficult thing or a bunch of easy things. We tell ourselves that getting more done is better. Often times however, it is that things that we procrastinate on that will help us move forward the most.
Eat That Frog is a fantastic book by Brian Tracy about ways to stop procrastinating. It is a quick read but really life changing. It teaches you how to get the most important things done. This saves you time and energy. I have found this book to be invaluable.
One of the biggest tips in the book is where the title of the book comes from. Essentially, it says to get the big task, the one you want to put off or avoid, done first. Often times we want to work up to the big task. We do the easy little things first. This means that the big task looms over our head all day. It may or may not even get done. Then the next day comes and we do the same thing all over again. It's a vicious cycle. The things we really need to do get delayed far too long or don't happen at all. Obviously, this is not good.
Instead, eat that frog means you get the big overwhelming task done first. This does several things. First, it ensures that the important thing gets done in a timely manner. Second, it does wonders for your mindset and energy. Instead of spending your day weighed down by the thought of what you are putting off, you have a renewed sense of accomplishment. You know that you accomplished the really hard thing, so your other tasks appear that much more manageable.
So now that we know that we need to get out most important task done first, we need to determine what that task is. Thus we need to prioritize and assess our goals and the things we need to do. This book delves in to how to determine what exactly is the task that needs to be done first.
There are tons of great practical tips and advice in this book. I definitely recommend checking it out. You can click on the link above to get it from Amazon. Go check it out!
Happy Weekend!
Cheers,
Emily
Things to do While Breastfeeding
When you have a newborn and you choose to breastfeed, you can spend much of your day with a small person attached to your boob. With 8-12 feedings a day clocking in at 20-40 minutes each, this is a lot of time spent sedentary. Here's a list of things you can do while breastfeeding to help pass the time.
1. Talk to your baby - Being in such close proximity, this is great time to chat to your little one. As my 3 year old likes to tell me, they can't talk back, but they can definitely hear you and recognize your voice. Talk to you them about your day. Babies are great listeners.
2. Catch up on TV - You are in one spot for like 30 minutes, prefect time to catch up on your favorite sitcom. You can also split a drama between two feedings.
3. Read a book - For those middle of the night feedings, put on a little nightlight and enjoy a good book. It's quiet, won't disturb anyone, and is a great time to read the latest bestseller.
4. Catch up on social media - You only need one hand to operate your phone right. You can use this time to catch up on Facebook and Instagram and all your other favorite social media sites. Share updates of the baby with friends and family.
5. Write a blog post - You can write a post one handed on your phone while breastfeeding. It may not be as efficient as using 2 hands, but it's a productive way to use your time.
6. Have a sandwich - A sandwich is easy to eat with one hand so you can have it while breastfeeding. What a great time to nourish yourself while you nourish your baby. Just try not to drop crumbs all over the baby.
7. Read a story to your older kids - It may be hard for your older kids to understand that you can't run around with them while you feed the baby. Have story time with them so you get to have quality time with your older kids and the baby gets to hear the story too. Plus older kids love to help turn the pages!!
What have you done while breastfeeding your child? Share in the comments.
Next week we will be talking post-pregnancy body including stretch marks, fitness, sleep, and belly. See you then!
Cheers,
Emily
Part 3: Tips for Working Moms
Here we are at the final part of the series on tips for working moms. We have talked already about mindset, prioritizing, and removing distractions in part 1 which you can find here. In part 2, we discussed practical tasks that can make family time run more smoothly. You can find that article here. In this final post, we will discuss essential things that should be included in your schedule to make you a happy healthy mom. We will also talk about why they are so important. Sometimes as working moms we feel like we need to spend 100% of our time outside of work with our kids. We can feel like time out for ourselves or with our significant other will only decrease our quality time with our kids even more. The thing is, if we don't nurture our relationship with our spouses and ourselves, we may have increased time with our kids but far less quality.
If you spend more time with your kids but don't take anytime for yourself, your kids get a crankier, more exhausted you. It's better to take some time out so you can be your best self. The following tips are things that need to be included in your monthly calendar to be your happiest self.
1. Spend Time with Your Partner
This is important for so many reasons. Firstly, it's important to let your partner know that they are still an essential part of your life even though you have kids. They need to feel important and wanted as well. Spending quality time with your partner can help you relax. Take a break from talking about kids and stresses and bills and just enjoy each other's company. This helps you promote a healthy relationship between the two of you. This is important not only for yourselves, but it is also important to model healthy relationships for your children.
Secondly, alone time with your partner helps you get on the same page as far as the kids. Know what their current favorite thing is, or what they are having trouble with in school. You want to discuss how you are handling different situations with your kids so can have consistent behavior.
Lastly, you need to have intimate time with your partner. This is essential to a healthy, happy relationship. Sometimes you might feel exhausted from your day and just not be in the mood. Do it anyway. You will get in the mood. A lot of the time, it's one of those things where you can fake it til you make it. It brings you closer to your partner and can reduce stress, the very thing that was preventing you from getting in the mood in the first place.
Try to plan at least a couple date nights during the month, have a few evenings to chat about family stuff, and be intimate as much as possible.
2. Fit in Some "Me Time"
The unhappiest, most depressed moms are the ones who feel like they are constantly giving. They give to their job, their children, their spouses, their family, their community. They lose themselves by taking on the happiness and well being of everyone else. They put themselves last.
This is an absolutely terrible idea. In order to be the best mom you can be, you should be happy and fulfilled. People can tell when you are faking it, especially kids. By fitting in a little me time, you can renew your whole energy. It doesn't have to be a weekend away at the spa to be effective. It just has to be something that makes you feel happy and fulfilled.
I love dance; it is my passion. When I am not pregnant I rehearse and perform with a dance company. This is my time to do something just for me. We rehearse one day a week, a few weeks a month and perform a few times a year. This is something I need in my life to be my happiest self. Sometimes I feel bad leaving Tyler behind with grandma when I leave to rehearse, but I always feel reinvigorated after rehearsal. I'm excited to see him and he's excited to see me.
You might take some time out during the week for a group fitness class and enjoy the community of other women. Maybe its a mani/pedi at the nail salon. Maybe a monthly brunch with your girlfriends. Whatever it is that makes you happy and feel like yourself, make time for it. It can only make you a better mom. Your kids will thank you for it later!!
3. Plan Specific Family Time Activities
I know you love your kids. I love mine too. But sometimes after a long day, I cannot keep up with the sporadic switching from activity to activity and game to game. I want to spend time with Tyler, but I'm tired. Especially now at 38 weeks pregnant, going from puzzles to Legos to Mashems to puppets to everything else all in one evening just makes my head hurt thinking about it.
One or 2 nights a week plan specific family time activities. Tell your kids ahead of time, so its something to look forward to. for example you can have an Star Wars movie night. Make popcorn and get them in their favorite Darth Vader jammies. Enjoy the movie together as a family. You get to spend time together and it feels like its an event for the kids.
You can plan a family game night. Play Candy land and have the different candies from the game. If you land on that area of the board you get the candy. You can make or buy gingerbread men and decorate them together. You might play Candy Land all the time, but this makes it a special event.
Little things you can do to make an ordinary event a little more special will be greatly appreciated by your kids.
I really hope you enjoyed this series of tips for working moms. I know I enjoyed putting the articles together. We can't be perfect all the time. Some months things come up and we might miss a date night, or my me time might get short changed. We might let mom guilt slip in once in a while or we might accidentally double book a date. But if we make an effort to work on these 9 tips, we will be happier, healthier, better, more loving moms.
In light of the upcoming birth of baby Hailey, on Friday, we will be talking about the transition from one to two kids. Since I do not yet have experience with this, I have compiled interviews from a few bloggers and we will be hearing their advice on how to get through this change. I will see you then.
Cheers,
Emily
Part 2: Tips for Working Moms
It's time for part 2 of our 3 part series of tips for working moms. If you missed part one, you can find it here. Last time we discussed tips relating to mindset. We lost the guilt, found jobs that fit our priorities, and minimized distractions. Our next three tips involve things you can do to maximize your enjoyment of your time with your family. These are not new ideas, but you may not have previously considered how these habits will help improve family time.
1. Prep for your family's day the night before
This can be a hard habit to get into. At the end of a long day of work and family time, you just want to relax. However, a little prep in the evening can make for a far more enjoyable morning.
If you are not a morning person, getting yourself ready in the morning can be a struggle. Add kids and it only gets more hectic and chaotic. You are on a time table and a lot of things need to happen before you head out the door. Many of these things can be done or at least prepped the night before.
For school aged kids, have them pack their backpack the night before immediately upon finishing their homework. There is no reason it needs to stay out and this means they can just grab and go in the morning. Have them also set out their clothes for the next day. This makes for less of a struggle the next morning when they have to get dressed. If you pack lunch for them, try to pack it the night before so again, it is something you can grab and go.
For kids in daycare, you can make sure their bag is packed and their clothes are laid out the night before. Also have your own bag packed and clothes laid out the night before. This makes mornings run far more smoothly. You can't completely avoid hiccups, but you can minimize them.
How does this maximize family time? It makes you less stressed in the morning. Your kids get to see you happier and relaxed when you start your day together. When you are away from the house for most of the day, you don't want the time you do spend together to be rushed and stressed. This includes the morning. With all this prep work done the night before, you may even have time to sit and have breakfast together. What a great way to motivate you through your day after having already had some quality family time in the morning!
2. Create a Family Calendar
I won't go over the practical steps to actually create such a calendar as I already have a whole post about it here. Instead, I will talk about why it's so important for working moms and dads.
Having everyone on the same page is essential for busy families. Calendars should be updated immediately upon notification of new events. This helps prevent conflicts and over scheduling. Prioritize family activities, make sure your kids know that their activities are important to you.
For our family, I work days and my husband works nights and weekends. Therefore, on any evening my husband happens to be off, we try to maximize our time together. Sometimes this has to be time to get things done around the house, but we try to make sure we have family time as well. For his weekend days off, we try to ensure we do some family activity like a trip to the park or the zoo.
Try not to double book, if possible. If your kids have an event make a point of not scheduling something for yourself. One of the most important parts of being a working mom is making sure your kids know that they come first. Emergencies happen, but if you generally make it to their events, it's easier to accept the one or two times when that's not possible.
3. Stay Connected During the Day
It's hard to focus when we are preoccupied with other things. If we are at work and thinking about what we are missing at home, we will be less efficient and less happy. Missing the kids can be a major distraction.
Some days I can easily get through my work day and then I'm ready for family time when I get home. Other days I miss my peanut during the day and wish I could just be home seeing what he is up to. If I dwell on that all day, I'll never get my work done. I am a big proponent of recharging your battery. One way to do it is a quick chat with the kids.
On the days where I miss the little guy, a quick FaceTime call can really turn the day around. A few minutes chat with T and hearing about his day can really fill my cup. It also helps him feel like he has seen me more during the day. If your kids are in school, get a quick update on how the school day was in the afternoon. These few minutes of break time can allow you to focus better and actually get more done during your day.
I hope you find these tips helpful. These are concrete things you can do to help ensure that family time is enjoyable. They are little practical tips that can reduce your stress when you are around your family. In the last part of the series, we will discuss ways to maintain good relationships with your family and yourself. You can look forward to seeing that post on Tuesday.
In the meantime, enjoy your weekend!!
Cheers,
Emily
P.S. You can find Part 3 of this series here.
How to Create Your To Do List
Family Time: Mixing Work and Play
OK. So based on the title of this blog, clearly we're busy. We're parents and workers and family members and we have our own interests to pursue. We have bills to pay, houses to clean, food to make, and a laundry list of other things that we need to do in order to keep of family organized and running smoothly. All these things however, cut into the most important time we have, family time.
As I see it, we have 2 options here: do some of these things as a family, or let some of them slide. Only some. Admittedly, there are certain things that we can't let slide and aren't appropriate family time activities. Like paying bills. I have yet to find a useful way to include my toddler in that and it is definitely not something we can let slide. But a lot of our other tasks can be made into family activities.
Laundry, for example. In our house the break down is my husband loads the washer and dryer and T and do the folding and putting away. I always let T help me. Sometimes its actually helpful and sometimes its not, but we have fun either way. When I fold my husband's and T's t-shirts, T's job is to identify the characters on the shirts. Sometimes he wears special laundry time attire for this job, i.e. one of my husbands shirts. Another T job is to sort out all the socks so that we can match them and roll them up. He thinks its a game. He gets to work on his matching skills and we get to have fun together, AND the laundry gets done! Win-Win-Win!!
Another family time activity can be putting toys away. T and I play different games depending on what we have to clean up. Sometimes we have races to see who can clean up the fastest. Sometimes we put all the toys of a certain color away first and then move on to a new color. Sometimes we let some toys help us put away other toys. For example, recently Sulley assisted us in putting away our puzzles when were done playing with them.
A few other family chores include setting the table and dusting. T is excellent at bringing dishes and utensils from the kitchen to the dining room table. He also loves to dust. If he sees you with a dusting cloth, we demands a wipe so he can clean as well. We like to have dusting races and see who can clean their half of the table first. We also test each other to see if we can remember how to put things back the way they were. As long as its a game, it doesn't feel like doing chores!
Some things that slide: sweeping under furniture, sometimes the dishes, a full cleaning of the bathroom, definitely cleaning above windows and light fixtures. The thing is, I am OK with that. My house doesn't need to look like a museum, we live there and it should look like it. I would rather sit on the floor and play Legos than make sure my sink is constantly empty. Being busy means you have to prioritize, and for me, my priority is having fun with my toddler before he's not a toddler anymore.
Pre-mom vs. mom vs. post-mom
Ok so the post-mom part of the title is a bit inaccurate, you never stop being a mom once you become one. I just mean to say post having your kids at home, but for title purposes, that seemed more catchy.
Today, I'd like to talk about why I think it's so important to be a multitasking mom, and it has to do with the 3 phases of a mom's life: pre-mom, mom, and post-mom.
Prior to becoming a mom, we all had lives and ambitions and we had a lot more time to ourselves to pursue whatever we wanted. We probably had jobs and families and all, but for the most part our free time was our own. Pre-T (my son), I worked full time, danced for sports teams, taught dance, took dance classes, was studying for actuary exams, and participating in community theater. When offered a new performance opportunity, I jumped at the chance. If a team practiced 3 times a week plus games, who cared. Dancing was how I enjoyed spending my time.
Now that I have T, guess what, I still enjoy dancing. Not only do I enjoy it, but I still pursue it. Just differently.
I still need to work full time to support the family. But my love for dance didn't stop just because I made a person. The thing about dance is your child rearing years are also your prime dance years. It's not exactly a field that you just jump back in when your kids are grown. Plus it makes me happy. I don't want to wait 18 years to make myself happy. So I adapt.
I still dance for companies and teams, but I choose teams that don't require as many practices. I teach at places that allow me to take my son with me and I specify when I am available to teach. I choose not to teach on weekends so I can have family time and I am available for all those fun weekend events that come up. I also select gigs that only require a few rehearsals, if any.
I make it work because while I love my husband and son and spending time with them, I know I am a better mom when I am feeling fulfilled. I am super lucky to have supportive family and friends as well. My inlaws are always willing to watch T if I have a rehearsal, my husband will bring T to my performances, and the places where I teach allow T to sit in class with me. Without that kind of support, I could never balance it all.
The emotional support is key as well. My husband encourages every endeavor I pursue. He never questions when I say I want to try something. When I decided to try pageants, that meant that our family vacations we're going to be wherever I was competing. My husband just asked when and where. He never questioned or complained or asked me to stop. We make it work.
This has a lot to do with my husbands pursuits as well. My husband works, but he also pursues acting. He understands the need to fulfill the part of yourself that was there pre-kids, so we work with each other so that both of us can pursue our outside interests.
Now back to the 3 stages. While it's important to pursue your interests during parenthood because you will be a happier better person, it's also important for after your kids grow up. If you do nothing for yourself when your kids are growing up, then what do you have when they leave? A lot of time and nothing to do. While it's perfectly acceptable to start trying new things at that point, it's nice to have something that you've maintained throughout.
You're the same person at all three stages. Your goals and dreams and inspirations may change, but you should never stop pursuing them. It's what makes you, you.
Love yourself and make time for yourself. It's one of the most important tasks in your multitasking life!!
Tips to increase your energy and organization to get through a busy day.