Why scheduling is important – Especially for moms!!

20 Time Management Tips For Moms

You wake up – a couple of hours later that you decided last night. You couldn’t sleep well because you had SO many thoughts running in your already exhausted brain! You need to go shopping for your husband’s birthday and you’re postponing this task for weeks ( a very common thing we all moms do!), but not again, you think while trying to sleep. You will definitely do the shopping tomorrow!!

And you wake up late!

You frantically start doing your everyday morning work. You get busy cooking breakfast and meal for lunchbox for your kid while brushing your kid’s teeth & giving her bath & getting her ready for school & helping your husband to find something that he needs. You pack the lunchbox in a hurry and drop her to the school.

You return home keeping in mind to go do the shopping BUT then you see the mess in the kitchen & living, there is also “the pile” of laundry on the table and you start cleaning and you realize you also need to make a grocery shopping list and there are many other things you need to do! And you simply can’t decide what you should do first and you start spinning around in circles or get easily distracted by mobile to check the mails or social media to avoid the chaos & confusion you’re feeling (you deserve a break after a very busy morning, right?), and end up actually doing nothing!!

Till then it’s already time to pick your kid from school. And once she arrives home, it’s impossible to do anything! You can’t go out now for the most important shopping and you decide (again!) that tomorrow you’ll definitely go and do the shopping!!

But that tomorrow never arrives!

Does this all sound familiar to you?

I’ve experienced these kinds of days in my life many times. I had a long to-do list for every day and it always lengthened further with every passing day. I never seemed to reach to the bottom of my to-do list!! Because most of the time I was overwhelmed by the amount of that work I needed to do, and at the end of every day I’d realize that I haven’t accomplished anything except keeping my daughter clean & well-fed and have my mails checked ( I always tried to escape from the overwhelm by spending my time on the mobile)!!

But not anymore!!

Do you know what’s missing in the above scenario that could have changed everything and made things actually happen – like making time to actually go for the shopping for your hubby’s birthday??

A Good Schedule!!

Yeah, a schedule!!

Since I’ve started scheduling my days, I no longer feel the overwhelm over my to-do list! And I actually get more things done now than I could’ve managed before. Now, I can’t even think to spend a day without a schedule!!

Scheduling your day can really help you in getting things done in reality. It is really effective to have a schedule – especially for we moms!!

Because as a stay-at-home mom, we tend to get overwhelmed by the never-ending to-do list. And it’s really a never-ending list because you need to do all the household chores repetitively every day in the little time that you can manage to get from your kids!

I believe, we moms need scheduling more than anyone else!! Well, that leads me to a very obvious question :

Why scheduling is important for moms & how will it help?

Scheduling is way more important -in order to achieve your goals- than you can imagine! Especially as a stay-at-home mom, scheduling can be your savior! You can achieve SO much with a schedule. You can do all your everyday chores with full energy and still be able to give time to yourself and your kids! Once you try a day with a schedule, I bet you’ll never like to live without a schedule again!

But before scheduling, there is one more thing you need to do – planning! Scheduling is always easy to make when you have a plan!

Planning and scheduling are crucial! These are very powerful tools. These two things seem similar but there is little difference between them. Planning helps you to decide your priorities – the most important things in your life- on which you want to spend most of your time. For example, your family or keeping your house clean and tidy or cooking healthy homemade food for your kids or de-cluttering your home can be your priorities at the given time.

Related: How to plan your days as a SAHM.

Planning can be even long term, for example- you can plan your monthly and yearly cleaning chores or you can have a plan for decluttering your home for 3 months or 6 months! But scheduling is breaking those goals into little pieces of tasks and assign a timeline for the tasks for single days – basically deciding what tasks you can do in present-day in order to achieve your long term goal! for example, de-cluttering one cabinet every day to achieve your goal of decluttering your entire home in 3 months.

So, let’s see how scheduling can help you-

#1. It’ll help you to set an order of tasks you need to get done.

Only planning is not enough though. You need to implement that plan, and there comes the scheduling to help you out.

When you plan, you decide what are your most important tasks – monthly or yearly- like your monthly and yearly cleaning tasks. But with a schedule for a day, you can decide which tasks – among the planned important tasks- you can do on that day depending upon how much time you have that day to do the tasks.

You can further set the order of tasks for the day. Which one you’d do first and which one you’d do next and next and next. This way you eliminate the overwhelm you probably feel due to the long unplanned to-do list.

It helps you to set an order of the tasks and shows you a path to lead on. You don’t have to think much about what to do, once you have your schedule, you can simply start working on it! and believe me, it makes everything really simple and manageable!!

#2. It’ll help you in actually making time through your day for your most important tasks.

I always schedule my day the night before. Because I like to wake up with a plan and a schedule for the day. If I don’t have a schedule then most of the time in my morning ( and also throughout the day) is wasted on making decisions instead of taking the action.

When you sit down to schedule your day, you’ll come to realize that in reality, you have much more time than you think. You’ll start to see where you can fit those tasks in your day. In the scenario, I earlier described at the starting of this post, you could have gone to do the shopping when you got out of the house to drop your kid at her school. You could’ve done all the needed shopping while your kid is at the school and while returning home, you could’ve picked her up from school!

See, with a little schedule you’d have found enough time for the shopping.

#3. It boosts your confidence in getting things done.

When start doing the tasks – the important ones and not the urgent ones- you feel more confident about getting it all done. Forget about when you start, but when you make a schedule for the next day and you see that you can actually have time to get things done, Even if it’s still on the paper but simply thinking about yourself doing all those important tasks can boost your confidence and gives you the feeling that “Yes! I can do it!!”

And we moms need to feel this way more than often. Because this feeling will actually motivate you to follow the schedule and start doing the tasks.

#4. You actually find yourself doing the things that you’ve always postponed.

Most of the time, we moms postpone many to-do things because the time always runs out of our hands and we never find enough time to do those tasks! When you have a long to-do list and no schedule you start spinning around in circles and get trapped in the indecisiveness which leads to the overwhelm you often feel every day.

If you’ve noticed, we always tend to do the urgent tasks first instead of doing the important tasks – like cleaning the mess in the kitchen instead of doing the required shopping!.

When you have a schedule, you know what are the important tasks and you focus on that. With a schedule you have an order of tasks you need to do and that makes it very simple for you. You just start doing those tasks at the decided time and with a boost of confidence, you find yourself actually completing those tasks in that time slot.

#5. It’ll give you a feeling of accomplishment.

You work hard all day, but still, at the end of the day, do you often feel like you haven’t accomplished anything? I have felt that way, many times. but I have also found that whenever I had a schedule for my days, even if I didn’t manage to complete all the tasks I had scheduled for that day, I always felt accomplished at the end of my day! Because truly, I wouldn’t have managed to do even that many tasks – whatever little I did – without a schedule!

So, yeah, it definitely makes you feel accomplished! And that’s a great feeling mamma, isn’t it? We all want to feel that at the end of every day because it gives us more confidence to handle the next day!

Related: How to schedule your day as a SAHM.

So, mamma, try scheduling your days. It will surely help you to do all those things that you wanted to do for a long time. It will make it actually happen…. but not until you take action!!

A good schedule on a paper can’t work for you! You need to take action and do the tasks you’ve scheduled for your day and you’ll be surprised at the results.

So just go ahead and start scheduling your day’s mamma. You’ll make much more out of it!!

Have a happy time & take care of yourself :)!