Category Archives: Time Management for the SAHM

How Checking Email Once a Day Can Increase Productivity

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First off, I have to share the great news: I passed my Qualifying Exams in my doctorate program!!!! That took about 9 months of intense preparation, including over 200 pages of writing and studying. I am so glad it is over! Now I just have to write a dissertation (“just” –HA!).z

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This last year, Padded Tush Stats grew far more than I expected. Pairing that with the insane Quals prep I had, everything in my life snowballed and I am still trying to catch up. Despite having Carolyn as an awesome helper with that website, I’ve still struggled. So I have been trying to do baby steps that make a difference in my productivity. BOY, I’ve found one, and I’d almost argue that it is a Baby LEAP.

So a while back I was at a Professors for the Future meeting (it’s kind of a rad group of a dozen grad students who were chosen because of their promise as rockin’ future professors–and I am honored to have somehow tricked them into picking me). We were talking about how stressed out academics are and how difficult it is to balance work and life. As you know, I’m pretty passionate about this topic so I think I chewed big holes in my tongue as I kept my mouth shut and tried not to go crazy and sound like the sleep-deprived-we-are-not-progressing-as-a-feminist-movement-in-academia freak that I am (off topic–I got so many emails after my last post of people worried about my personal well being–have no fear, I am doing fine and won’t go crazy [yet], but I am so GRATEFUL for your support).

But one thing we talked about in this meeting was “compartmentalizing” parts of your life. One person talked about how she ONLY checks email once a day. I balked. WHAT?! In this era, you have to apologize if you missed a call and returned it *gasp* an hour later. So people expect email to work the exact way, right? I posed this question to my group….

Suddenly the room seem divided into those who DO check once a day, and those who check all day. Would you believe the most productive people in the room check only once a day? No joke, I keep a tally of these people and admire them and YUP, it must be working, because that’s what they do.

I have been trying this and I can’t BELIEVE how much more productive that I am. I am getting a lot more done and I go to bed less stressed and with an empty email box. It’s also nice because people in my life (like Carolyn, who diligently emails me about two dozen emails a day because she is so on it) now get responses from me on a consistent basis. I’ll confess, I was procrastinating on tough or long emails and it would sometimes take days to get to them (<—Carolyn noticed that and now only puts in bold what I REALLY need to read….now that’s sad I pushed her to that). But alas, no more of that. I’m ON IT, people (crap, announcer’s jinx). But really, I have noticed that I am better at communicating with people and I actually get stuff done.

So let me give you my tips:

1) First off, give the world a heads up that they may not hear a response for 24-48 hours. This is establishing an expectation and it may take a while. I literally had an email from a student saying he was having a “panic attack” because he hadn’t heard from me in 8 hours—had he started his assignment earlier, this wouldn’t be a problem. Lesson learned–he won’t do it again because I established an expectation. One colleague of mine has it as her signature in an email. You could have it be set as a vacation message, but that’s pretty obnoxious. If you are a teacher, make it clear on the syllabus that you answer emails once a day. My signature looks something like this:

I respond to emails within 24-48 hours. If this is an urgent issue, please feel free to call me at 555-555-1236.

By having my email-checking at night, I have missed some fires that could have been put out during business hours. In a perfect world, my email checking would be first thing in the morning, but at that time, I am changing diapers, filing sippy cups, trying not to pass out from sleep deprivation, etc. I didn’t want to do the email checking in the middle of the day, since my schedule is very consistent. One thing in my life IS consistent: putting the kids to bed (thank GOODNESS for that). Sometimes I look on my phone during the day just to see if there are “fires” and, if so, I do tend to them (<—this happens very rarely. It has to be a BIG fire).

2) Set aside a time at night where you can check the emails and respond to them. What’s crazy is by compartmentalizing this, it only takes an hour for me. I clean the house while my husband reads to the kids. Once the kids are tucked in and the house is clean, I go to my office and check my email.

3) If it is part of a bigger task, I let the person know that I am taking action on it, I archive it (in gmail), and then I promptly put it on my To-Do list and give it a deadline. Right now I am digging Wunderlist for this (Carolyn and I both joke that while some women are obsessed with shoes and purses, I’m obsessed with productivity apps. To see ones I’ve reviewed, you can go here).

Since I started checking my email once a day, I am so much more calm and way more productive. Here is my lovely sight tonight before going to bed:

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So WHEW, that is one baby step completed. Other ways I’ve been more productive are by doing small intervals to ensure each area of my life gets attention and doing a brief morning routine to combat lazy days. Now I am on to the next step: tackling my to-do list. I used to do this 6-item a day format, but it has gotten more difficult.

Do any of you have suggestions for tackling a to-do list? I’m great at MAKING them, but would love advice for tackling those lists! 

Finding the Right To-Do List System FOR YOU – Step 5 of the Time Management for the SAHM

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How did you guys do with not turning your computer on until 1pm? I got a lot of GREAT comments from people who tried it and couldn’t believe how productive they were. Others were too scared to do it (I don’t blame you!) or couldn’t. Now that you’ve tested it out, you may chose to set aside a few days a week where you unplug until 1pm (or nap time for the kiddos) if you can’t commit to EVERY day. That is what I do, and it helps a ton.

So now it is Step 5, which will likely be the last step of the series for a while. This is all about you finding a to-do list system catered to YOUR personality. My challenge to you is to take a week or two to try several different methods. Who knows, there may be a system out there that increases your productivity and preserves your sanity.

If you aren’t getting your things done and are buried in over your head, don’t lose hope. I do this a lot, and tend to think I am just destined to fail or to-do lists don’t work for me. But I have most recently had a lot of luck now that I have pinpointed what to-do list systems work for me.

Post It Note: Are you someone who needs a task staring RIGHT back at you in the face? My Mom is like this, and so my childhood consisted of post it notes on the dashboard, cupboards, refrigerator, etc. Now this works for some, but mine tend to fall off, or my daughter thinks they are stickers and takes them off everywhere and stashes them in a corner, or I have this gift where I can see PAST the post-it and pretend it isn’t there.

Lists: You can keep a general list of what you want to get done. You just check off as you go. This is great for people who aren’t always using technology. You just need to make sure some form of the list stays with you. If you are in line at the grocery store and think of something to put on the list, you need it THERE to write it down before you forget.

Planner: This is great, but the key is you HAVE to consult it. If you don’t look at your planner, you won’t know what to do! But this system works well for people who just need to SEE it in writing. Plus it is easy to keep on the go. I like this system, except that I don’t always get to all of my tasks, and it stresses me out to have to re-write them again on the next day (but maybe that’s the point).

Google Calendar: I’ve given my tutorial here on how to get this system to work for you. I tried this for some time, and found it helpful, but I also got overwhelmed when I missed several days (either because of sheer laziness or some legitimate reason) and then had to spend time rearranging tasks–and the thought of being so behind made me want to give up.

On Your Phone: There are a lot of to-do list apps for phones, so if you have a SmartPhone, this could be an option for you. Google Tasks even syncs with several phones, so you could try that. The bonus is that it is with you pretty much everywhere you go. The downside is that you may get so many reminders (if you have it set for reminders), that you’ll start to tune them out. OR if you don’t have the reminders set up, you may neglect to go and look at it because it isn’t staring at you in the face like a planner.

Astrid: I really like this system. It looks pretty and I love that you can divide the tasks up onto different boards. I would set a timer for 10 minutes and work on one board, then 10 minutes for another, etc. You can label by priority and give a deadline. Only problem is, this had some glitches and I also found I couldn’t organize them easily according to what I wanted done first.

*You’ll notice I have reading to my daughter on my to-do list. Of course that’s not the ONLY time I read to her, but I like to make sure that my kids are on my to-do list to help ensure they are getting one-on-one time with me.

Kanbanflow: I recently started doing this and WOW am I getting a ton done. First of all, it’s meant for me because it has a built in timer system. And you know I love my timers! I like this because I can easily track where my time is going. Plus it has me anticipate how much time I think I will spend on a task and it helps keep track of how far off I was from your estimate. This is great for me since I tend think things take less time than they actually do. I like that I can just drag some tasks over for the day. I can also color code them, reorder them, and put dates on them (I don’t do the dates). The concept behind this site is that you can accomplish a lot if you give it 25 minutes of undivided attention. That is great and all, but my kids interrupt a lot and I give them priority on my attention. You can pause the timer for an interruption, but it takes several steps to do so and by then my kids are going nuts. And nuts kids=nuts mama. If this system were 10 minute intervals, it would be RIGHT up my alley.

Don’t think that you are just NOT a to-do list person. Try out different things. Also, give yourself a little break–no one can accomplish EVERYTHING. My list has close to 50 items on it and I am learning to be at peace with the fact that the list will never go away, I just keep chipping at it and adding to it. 

So try out different tools to figure out what works with your own personal style. If there is a great to-do system, please share!

Don’t Turn Your Computer On Until Naptime – Step 4 of the Time Management for the SAHM Series

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This is Step 4 of the Time Management for the Stay At Home Mom Series. For all posts in the series, please go here.

Oh no she did-n’t. Yup, I did.

Is your computer your time suck?

Now for all who said “No,” take a second and ask yourself that again–I once answered no and later found that I should have answered Yes. Denial is a fascinating thing.

I didn’t realize how much my computer sucked up my time until I stopped looking it until the kids went down for a nap. GASP! Did you read that?! NAPTIME? That’s like…all the way until 1pm. Holy cow.

I once read about one blogger who didn’t open her computer until 1pm and I thought that was like blasphemy. How on EARTH did she do that?!?! Maybe she cheated and used a SmartPhone, I dunno. But once I tried it, I realized how much more I got done.

I do still pick up my SmartPhone for little tasks, like managing my apps, checking my calendar and to do list, seeing if emails come in, or photographing my kids, but aside from that, I rarely get online until the kids are asleep! And holy moly guacamole I am so much more productive! I often find that an email I check in the morning, or an IM with a friend, can throw off a full day. I put up a blog post and have to press refresh 1,000 times because I want to make sure there weren’t any issues people had. I see some recipe on Pinterest and then find a blog filled with delicious recipes. I post a comment on Facebook and feel the need all day to keep refreshing to see what people have said.

So this is your challenge: Take just ONE week to where you don’t turn your computer on until your kid naps (if the kid’s don’t nap, pick a 1 hour block mid-day).

Mind you, I am not perfect at this. You’ll see me on here before nap time. I strive to do this most days of the week and find that it helps me out tremendously. My challenges are not about taking extremes, but about testing different things that help productivity.

Let me know how it goes. If you find you are more productive, awesome, keep doing it. If not, well, at least you tried!

How to Keep Up on All Areas of Your Life (Step 3 of the Time Management of the SAHM Series)

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How has everyone been doing taking the baby steps in the Time Management for the Stay at Home Mom Series? I hope you are finding that you are getting a lot done, while not feeling burnt out. Now it’s time for Step 3. if you are just joining in, head back here to the first step–it’s best to take this step by step, or it could be overwhelming. Good luck! Bloggers, feel free to link up if you are taking the steps and blogging about it!

I often get the “How do you do it all?” questions, just because I work at home, am working full time on my PhD, own 2 websites, am active in my church, and often have some research and teaching jobs on the side. Now don’t be deceived, I am also notorious for juggling so many balls that they all come crashing down and my family is constantly worrying that I will self combust at any moment.

And I did.

Several months ago, I totally lost it. I was helpless. I became so overwhelmed that I almost left my graduate program. I became so overwhelmed with everything that I shut down. It took my family pulling together to work me through it and now that I am on the other side of it now, I see where I went wrong. I had too much and I handled it poorly.

I have tried several strategies since then to see how I could better balance myself. The fact is, it wasn’t necessarily that I had too much, but it was that I didn’t handle it well. We ALL have more on our plate than what we can actually get to, it’s all about balancing.

But I finally found the right trick to help me stay on top of it all. One thing I found to be key was to set my timer and hit the different areas of my life. By constantly attending to the different areas of my life, I found that I was always a little bit more on top of everything and much less prone to procrastinating. It as also easier for me to do the things I dreaded doing, since I could just say “Hey it’s only 10 minutes.” I was also able to give undivided attention to things, rather than being scattered. This was KEY in me giving my children the attention they deserved.

Here is what I do

When the kids are up, I set my timer and do these intervals:

10 minutes cleaning – sometimes I like to just fixate on one room, generally the worst in the house. What’s nice is since the interval is only 10 minutes, I can DO that, I don’t feel overwhelmed. If I don’t want to clean, I just say, ‘Whatever, it’s just 10 minutes, no worries.’

10 minutes one-on-one or one-on-two time with the kids – I have found that this is ESSENTIAL both to the well being of my kids and to my productivity. My children are my #1 priority and I find that giving them my undivided attention a third of the time really helps. They tend to need me less when I am doing other things, plus I feel like they get much more quality time with me. We do things like dance, read, do a craft, or play piano. Now let me be clear, if a child needs me in any of my other intervals, they are my top priority [in fact, I just had to step away because daughter was calling me because her doll "throw up"]. This is just how I ensure that I don’t spend hours sucked in a computer neglecting them or missing out on great emotional connections and learning opportnities.

10 minutes project – This could be a to-do list item or I quite often like to have it be an organization project. I like to work on organizing a shelf. Something that stares back at me all pretty.

If I am particularly tired, then I will use that third interval to sit down and relax. I may just sit there or I might pick up knitting or something, just to catch a breather.

What is so nice about this is I tend to get wrapped up in a project. I get sucked into the timeless space of the internet…but the timer helps snap me out of it. Now this doesn’t mean that every waking moment I have a timer set. This is just for when I am at home.

When my kids are asleep at nap time, my intervals look like this:

15 minutes writing the dissertation

15 minutes writing for Padded Tush Stats

15 minutes getting through email

I do that over and over again until one child wakes up.

When my kids are down for the night, my intervals look like this:

15 minutes working on my research job

15 minutes working on photo editing for Padded Tush Stats

15 minutes getting through email

And don’t think I don’t get any downtime in there. I like to sneak in downtime intervals and at 9pm I am STOPPED for the day and enjoy a relaxing bath and watching some of my favorite shows with my sweet husband and reading.

Because I do this, it ends up that every day I get in this:

1 hour of dissertation writing

45 minutes of my research project

2 hours of cleaning the house

1 hour of organization/to-do list projects

2 hours of working on Padded Tush Stats

1 hour of quality one-on-one time with the kids

2 hours of getting through email

2-3 hours of “ME” time

This doesn’t mean that I don’t accomplish more than this (i.e. running errands, making dinner, out and about activities, story and cuddle time with the kids, etc), this is just how I ensure that I am on top of the different areas of my life.

I hope this helps to inspire you to help give yourself balance, peace, and productivity! Keep me posted on how it goes!

Combating Your Lazy Days (Step 2 in the Time Management for the SAHM Series)

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How is everyone doing on the Time Management for the Stay at Home Mom series? In the last post, I talked about establishing a brief morning and evening routine. Something that helps you keep up on the things that tend to get pretty out of control.

If you haven’t done that step yet, it’s worth going to that post and checking it out. Remember, it’s all about taking baby steps.

STEP 2: COMBATING LAZY DAYS

Do you ever have those days where you just want to sit on your couch all day? Maybe you just want to fiddle around on Pinterest or Facebook? In this step, I’ll help you get through those days and turn them into productive days.

This next baby step is learning to fall in love with your timer.  I swear by the timer in my house, it is great about motivating me. There are days when all I want to do is sit on the couch and watch TV or work on the computer. Those days come by most often after a long night with the kids. But I have learned to bargain with that lazy side of myself by using my timer system.

I set a timer for 10 minutes and tackle the most overwhelming task. This could be the messiest room, a thing on my checklist that I have been procrastinating on, or whatever. I just try and spend 10 minutes doing it.

It’s easy to think, “I’m tired and don’t want to do anything, but all I have to do is 10 minutes of ___ and then I can sit back down.” I will often find that after just 10 minutes, I want to keep going, and so I do. But if I want to sit right back down after the timer beeps, I don’t beat myself up. Instead, I set the timer for 10 minutes and allow myself a break. This is a great chance for me to sit and knit while chatting with my daughter. Or we curl up and watch part of a Disney movie. Or I catch up with email or blogging.

I am also notorious for letting my computer be a time suck for me. Checking my email could translate into an hour on the computer, flipping through Facebook pages, chatting with friends, googling recipes, or whatever. And I don’t like that–at all. I don’t want my children to see their mother as a person whose face is always behind a computer. So I find that the timer helps snap me out of it and keep me from losing track of time and spending most of the day wasting time online. Once the buzzer goes off, then it’s back to do a next task.

One note: I found that setting the timer on my phone didn’t work, because I could essentially turn it off right there, which worked moreso like a snooze button for me. I instead use my kitchen timer, which makes me have to get up and separate from the current task.

So Your Challenge: Set your timer to work, and set it to rest/play and let me know how it goes. Did you get more done?

Comment here and let me know how you are doing. If you are a blogger, and are blogging about this, feel fee to link up.

Stay tuned for more steps in this series. You’ll see how I build on top of this timer concept to ensure my children get my attention and that I use it to make sure I accomplish something in all areas of my life.

Time Management Series for the Stay at Home Mom

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In this Baby Steps series, I want to show you how I have been able to tackle on of my biggest issues: TIME.

Actually, this baby step tackles a ton of issues I have had–boredom, fatigue, messy house, full to do lists, etc.

But since I have started this routine, which I will call “My Intervals”, my house is cleaner, my to do list is closer to being checked off, I have been able to give my children my undivided attention, and I don’t have days where I end up in my PJs all day flipping mindlessly through Facebook and Pinterest.

So I am going to walk you through this series and show you how you can create your own time management system to get on top of all the things you are doing. If I give it to you all at once, trust me, it will seem totally overwhelming. So I hope that you can bear with me and do things step by step.

So let’s start with Step 1:

STEP 1: Establish a BRIEF Morning and Evening Routine

The very first thing that I did was I identified the three things that jump start my day. I wrote you guys about this earlier. For me, personally, it is unloading or loading the dishwasher, putting in a load of laundry, and making the bed. The rule is, the routine must take you 20 minutes or fewer, that way it doesn’t seem too overwhelming. And start with it being just 3 things. Now I know mine focuses on the house, and that’s just because the condition of my house has the greatest influence on me. But you can pick anything, whatever you seem to find to have the biggest influence on you.

Now create the same routine for the evening. For me, it is spruce up the living room, do the dishes, and put in a load of laundry.

Remember, keep it at 3. With this series, everything works in 3s so it is easy to remember.

When you plan these routines, think about the things in your life that always seem to get out of control the easiest. It doesn’t even need to pertain to cleanliness. It could be that you are more stressed if you don’t work out in the AM, so you need that. It could be that you need to read, or snuggle with a loved one, or whatever. Just figure out what is stressing you out the most and create a routine that works around it and helps you keep up with it.

Once you start doing this, you’ll find that you start to be on top of things a little bit more. Stay tuned for Step 2: Fall in Love With Your Timer

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