Looking for tips on how to get organized and move your business forward as a work at home mom?
You’re in the right place.
In this article, I am going to give you 7 steps to reduce overwhelm, increase productivity, accomplish goals, and move your business forward.
I thought having a full time job and trying to balance being a mom and wife with a side hustle was a lot, but running my own business and balancing that with being a mom and wife?
Now THAT was a whole new beast.
I not only had a ton of things within my business to manage, but life still happens and that includes budgeting, and bills and meal planning and appointments etc.
I found myself 2 months into working from home and not really making much traction on my business because I couldn’t seem to figure out HOW to to organize it all to get stuff done.
I was struggling to figure out how to really get a handle on this.
I tried to write out my to-do lists and use apps to help me keep organized, but I found myself still feeling overwhelmed with all of the tasks I had to manage on top of keeping up with all of the random sheets of paper I was attempting to write them on.
It took months of struggling through this until I finally got a handle on managing my time and balancing everything out and more importantly, my business started to grow!
How Exactly to Plan for Your Success
So how did I do it?
Here are my best tips for how you can get organized from the get go and prevent yourself from getting too overwhelmed as you start running your own business.
Define your goals
This may sound cliche but knowing what your goals are will help you decide what you need to do to be able to accomplish those goals. Think big here. You can have a yearly overarching goal then break that big goal down into quarterly goals. What 4 big tasks do you need to accomplish to make the big goal happen? Then within each quarter, you need to break it down even further by coming up with things that will help you reach that smaller goal. And so forth until you get to where you know on a weekly basis what you can do to make the bigger goal happen. I just said that like it’s super easy, but there’s a lot of effort that goes into it. For more resources on how do this, check out Todd Herman’s The 90 day year and Ruth Soukup’s blog for a lot of insight into planning based on goal setting. Ruth incorporates this when she designed The Living Well planner and I love it for that reason.
Determine all of the things that you HAVE to do in your business
With this exercise, you will see just how many things you need to schedule into your week but it will also help you get a handle on what kind of time your business really demands.
For this one, simply write down all tasks you have to complete to keep your business running.
Don’t forget to include all of the mundane tasks. These are the things that can fall between the cracks but can really hurt your business if you don’t keep on top of them because, as boring as they are, they’re probably things that have to get done to keep your business running smoothly.
For me, I have an online business where I sell items on ebay and Poshmark. I wrote down all of the tasks I enjoy like buying items, photographing, and creating the listings but it is also important to remember the other tasks like putting items into inventory, cleaning and prepping the items, and filling out my spreadsheet for tax purposes.
Write out all of the household tasks you have to manage
This would include any household chores, meal planning and cooking, errands you have to run,etc.
These things need to be done but also pose the most danger for eating up your schedule.
As a work at home mom, these things feel like they take priority because you are physically sitting at home.
You see that pile of laundry that needs to be folded so you feel like you NEED to take care of it, but if you aren’t waiting to do these tasks until their scheduled time, then you will find that you have no time for your business.
Identify Any Obligations You Have
Here, you need to write down all appointments, trips, etc that are set in stone so that you can block them off on your calendar.
Running your own business gives you the freedom to travel and things, but in order to do those things, you need to plan ahead for that down time in income.
Remember, you wear all the hats now. If you aren’t there, not much is going to be happening in your business.
How Much “Kid Free” Time Do You Have
Figure this out can really help you plan for success.
As you are probably very aware of, getting work done is not exactly easy with kids at home.
Especially if you’re like me and have a very demanding and adventurous toddler (those two don’t go well together for getting work done by the way).
Look at your entire week and pinpoint times when you are kids aren’t at home.
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Maybe you have them in a day school a few days a week or the grandparents take them for a few hours here or there. Or maybe they are always with you and that means you might have to start getting up early or staying up late. This includes times when your spouse can take the kids for a bit and give you time to work.
This exercise will help you figure out what time blocks you have or where you might need to ask for more help from family and friends to create this “kid free” time.
Whatever time you have without the kids is going to be critical to your success.
It’s this time that will allow you to really get work done so you need to identify it now so that you can plan your time accordingly.
Get A Planner
You can write all of this out in a cute notebook (this will help you get excited about using it) or you can invest in a planner. I started out trying to write it in a notebook or use apps on my phone, but it wasn’t working for me. It helps me to have some sort of organization on the page to help me visualize all of my tasks. Having a physical planner adds to the feeling of being organized because it’s all in one place and the planner helps you organize your thoughts in unique ways. Last year, I used the Happy Planner which I liked a lot, but this year I was looking for something that helped me organize everything in life I was having to manage, and not just my work to do list. So which one did I find to be perfectly suited for work at home moms? The Living Well Planner by Ruth Soukup and I LOVE it. She’s a self proclaimed planner lover and has put a TON of thought and effort into designing this planner to help the busy mom manage all things with business, finances, meal planning, etc because she wanted something like that and couldn’t find one that fit what she needed. So she made her own. If you are interested in hearing more about The Living Well Planner, I did a thorough video walk-through review of it here. .jpg)
Putting It All Together
Now that you have your tasks written out, you know what you need to work with.
1. First things first. Go ahead and fill in any obligations you have. That way you can see what time you have left to work with for the rest of your tasks.
2. Now, look at your to-dos from above and figure out which things you can do with kids and things that need to wait until the kids aren’t around.
This is so important.
Otherwise, you’ll face a lot of frustration and failure.
Trying to do something that requires quiet and focus while your kids are around is setting yourself up to struggle to complete that task. Instead, find a time when the kids aren’t there to do things like that.
3. Now take each task on your list and fill it into your calendar based on when the kids are there and when they aren’t.
Tip: It helps to mark each item off the list until they are all in place.
This will take some time for you to figure out which tasks need to go where.
And remember, this is not set in stone.
If you set up your schedule one way and it turns out that it doesn’t quite work out, then tweak it.
You’re the boss! It will take some trial and error to figure out the best flow for you and your business, so give yourself grace. The important thing is you are trying.
Crush your goals and move your business forward
Setting out on your own to run a business is hard enough but add being a mom and wife on to that and things can get pretty chaotic.
Having a plan and a schedule are key to making sure that you succeed in both your business and in life without losing your sanity in the process.
Follow these steps and you will be well on your way to making this journey a success:
Define your goals
Determine all of the things that you HAVE to do in your business
Write out all of the household tasks you have to manage
Identify Any Obligations You Have
Determine How Much “Kid Free” Time You Have
Get A Planner
Putting It All Together
I hope you found those tips helpful and practical. And remember, you’ve got this!
Nice information. I love this blog
Pandemic or not, there are plenty of perks when it comes to remote work. One of the biggest benefits of working remotely is a better work-life balance for employees.
Now this is amazing and very helpful and i am going to share it with others too, although there are so many ways you can use to mak money online you can check mine out too
This is such an interesting read! Thank you for sharing this will be so useful to so many mummies out there! It’s definitely a challenge with children!
One of the key drivers behind the rise in remote working is the ‘millennial effect’. Younger generations have grown up being able to communicate cheaply and effectively from anywhere in the world, so it follows that they expect the same in a workplace environment.
Yeah for sure. It helps to imagine a world where you can work online and reach the world through your computer when you’ve grown up using electronics to communicate. It can be a big pro for sure. Thanks for commenting 🙂
LOVE this article! Such great ideas in here. Being a mom of 4 teenagers (and currently unemployed but that won’t last for long) with a husband back in school for his Masters, I am pretty darn busy. Oh, and did I mention I”m trying to start a busines?! LOL. GREAT tips in here; thank you!
Wow! Yeah I would say that you’re definitely busy. Hope these tips help 🙂
Fab tips. Writing things down definitely helps to keep things in order. For some reason if its written down I always tend to be more likely to do it too. Thanks for joining us for the #dreamteam
This is great. I constantly need to remind myself to write down my goals. It is an important step! #dreamteam
yes! Writing them down is so much better than keeping them all in your head. Then on paper, you can see the big picture 🙂