3 Tips to Help the Working Mom Manage Her Week

One thing I’ve learned since going back to work – the hours in the day are fleeting! This is true for everyone I know, but the minute you work outside the home, the more obvious this becomes. There is no worse feeling than walking in the door at 5:30pm (if you’re lucky) and realizing your kid goes to bed in 2.5 hours (if you’re lucky), you’d like to be not-to-far behind them, you’ve got to do dinner, bath, homework, and bedtime, pack lunches for tomorrow, lay out clothes for tomorrow, feed the dog, walk the dog, the dishwasher is full and clean, oh and what will you eat tomorrow night?!? Then Saturday rolls around and all I want to do is hang with P. But instead I need to clean the house from top to bottom and put away the quarter of my closet that’s strung around our bedroom from my frantic morning dressing sessions! WOOF! I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

Needless to say, this adjustment has been a work in progress. And I’ve fine tuned 3 little tricks that I practiced in previous periods of my life. I’m no pro at ANY of this! Trust me! But I am an analyzer. A critic of my own ways. I’m constantly trying to figure out how I can do things better. And after the year we had in 2017, SIMPLER!

So here are 3 tips I’ve found to be super helpful and make my week (and weekend) run much smoother.

• Cleaning Schedule
  • Confession – I started this cleaning schedule shortly after P was born. When I wasn’t working. I was slacking on house work and feeling overwhelmed when it would pile up and everything had to be done at once. We tried cleaning all day Saturday and that just down right sucks. Who wants to do that? Plus, how do you do that when your kids start playing weekend sports. So I decided I would break down the house chores into 6 days (yep – I do NOT clean on Saturdays).
    • I divided our house into 6 “areas”. Each day of the week has an “area”. The cleaning of each “area” really is pretty simple. Its basic tasks that honestly don’t take that long. So I try to do these things in the morning. If it doesn’t get done. No sweat. I can usually tackle it while cooking dinner or while Parker plays in the bathtub. They really are that simple!
    • Then I took the MAJOR jobs, the deep cleaning, the things that don’t need to be done EVERY week, and I put those in a separate column to do on the 1st allotted “day” of each month.
    • I also split up laundry. I mean GOOD LORD how do 2.5 humans create this much dirty laundry! So I wash clothes, sheets, towels, etc. according to how they relate to each “day”. This prevents 15 piles of wrinkled laundry in baskets waiting to be folded.

Here is a link to a downloadable PDF version of my cleaning schedule Get Your Clean On Momma

This way, our house feels relatively clean all week. And I don’t spend an entire day cleaning.

• Sunday Meal Planning
  • Y’all know I hate to cook. Like REALLY hate to cook! I even made it part of my 2018 fitness plan. So we all know what happens to things we don’t enjoy doing…we put them off until they don’t get done. AKA: we get takeout! So if I don’t have something planned to cook when I get home – it ain’t happening.
    • So part of my Sunday is spent planning meals and making sure we have the groceries for them. I typically order my groceries to be delivered on Monday when the sitter is here. {Read here about my obsession with an AMAZING and AFFORDABLE grocery delivery service}
    • I write down our meals in my planner. I know some people have special notepads {cute one from Shutterfly here} or chalkboards {magnetic one for your fridge here} in their homes to write these things.
    • My mom made an actual calendar when we were younger. We literally knew what we were eating every night for an entire month. Not gonna lie – I thought it was corny when I was a kid. Now, I’m totally down! I get it! She also made us help pick out the recipes so she knew we would eat what she was cooking.

• Laying Out Outfits
  • This is something I’ve been doing since elementary school. Honestly! My mom made us do this when we were kids. Eliminate the fights in the mornings. And then in high school I did it so I wouldn’t repeat the same outfit for at least 2 weeks. Ha ha.  And now I do it just to make my mornings run smoothly. It eliminates frustration, frazzle, and the mess in our bedroom.
    • Sundays are also spent laying out outfits. I go through my week and I lay out something for each day. Even if it’s just scrubs and tennis shoes/socks. This also forces me to make sure the laundry is caught up. There’s NOTHING worse than wasting a solid 15 mins looking in every drawer and on every hanger just to find the shirt you’re looking for is in the dirty clothes. Back to the drawing board…and now 20 mins late.
      • I also lay out my workout clothes. This is especially helpful if you run home after work to change and rush off to the gym. Or if you take workout clothes with you to work.
      • This is also something you can do with your kids. I can ONLY imagine the frustration of trying to get a 3 year old to agree with your outfit selection when you have 7 minutes to get out the door.

Like I said, I’m not expert! And I don’t claim to be! This is all still VERY new to me and I’m working daily to make it run as smoothly as possible. But these 3 things are CLUTCH for me to have a stress free morning, maintain a somewhat clean house (and bedroom), and ensure we aren’t eating Dominos 4 nights a week.

Happy Monday Mommas

-Meghan