NOTE: With this article, Towel & Basin continues its celebration of Women’s History Month by serving and supporting, encouraging and empowering women who are making history today.
How can you do that?
It’s all about scheduling. Let’s underscore that:
Schedules are good, schedules are essential, schedules will keep your productive at work and in control at home.
Why schedule?
If you are a more creative thinker, scheduling tasks can seem rigid and unwelcome. You might not like the idea of having to schedule when you do certain things. But completing tasks on a schedule can actually produce freedom.
When you work at home, you are shoulder to shoulder with the unexpected interruptions, the laundry, and the children. It’s easy to get sidetracked trying to take care of these things.
But if you establish a schedule with set times for tasks (even the children, if they are home during the day), you can get more done. You’ll be able to focus on work when you’re working because you will be less likely to be sidetracked thinking about all the other things that you need to get done. Avoid paying personal bills or ordering books for your family. Save those tasks for your work breaks or your personal and family time.
How to schedule?
Think about the things that you need to get done on a daily or weekly basis. Consider common tasks such as:
For example, If you know that you are usually home on Saturdays, for example, you could make Saturday laundry day. If you stick to that schedule, you won’t get sidetracked folding laundry sometime during your workweek.
Planning menus is essential. If you are the primary cook in your house, you can plan ahead for the meals you are going to cook each day.
Plan a month’s worth of menus at a time. If that seems too much, start with planning for a week. Buy all the groceries you need for the week; clean and cut veggies, put meat in marinades and measure ingredients. When you complete your work-at-home business for the day, you can get a simple meal on the table because you were organized and did some preparation ahead of time.
When to break?
Be structured enough with your time to schedule and take regular breaks at specific times during your workday.
Think of yourself as working in an office. You would probably have at least one break in the morning and another in the afternoon. You might head to the break room for a cup of coffee and on the way, have a brief discussion with a coworker about a party you both attended the night before. You might take another break later in the day and make a phone call to your child’s teacher.
If you think of your work at home life in a similar fashion, you can quickly see the results of your structured time. Take regular breaks. During those breaks, you can send a quick email to a friend or send a text to another. You might make that book order or that phone call. A few minutes later, you return to work just as you would if you worked outside the home.
Where to start?
Start your scheduling and organizing with the beginning of each day. Make sure the breakfast dishes are done, that the beds are made and the house is generally straightened. Sit down to a clean workspace.
Then, as you begin your work for the day, you’ll have a sense that everything is in order. You can focus on your work-at-home business because there are no other pressing needs to worry about right now.
Structuring your time as a WAHM might seem like just one more thing you must take care of. But investing in the time to do “this thing” will actually free you to focus on your business work and your "home work" at the appropriately scheduled times.
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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
