5 More Tips to Help You Get it All Done

Awhile back I wrote a post with 5 tips for how we get it all done, but since then my little guy has arrived fully into toddler land.

He’s decided not to take a nap anymore, which was my work time, and teaching him about rest time is not going as well as I had planned.  Plus, my daughter is more active in dance this year, which takes up extra time and requires that we are more diligent about getting school work done by a certain time.

So, I’m thinking that those 5 tips might not be enough because everyday I’m left with a few things still on my task list.  I’ve come up with 5 more tips to help me get it all done.

5 Tips to help you get it all done

1. Don’t sleep

Research says that a person should sleep about 8 hours each day, I need about 7 hours every night.  So, I’ve already reclaimed one hour, but think of how much more productive I could be if I never slept, never rested!

It’s the number one place I can see that there’s real fluff in this homeschooling, work at home mom’s day. I have had some experience with this already when my little guy was a baby.  I didn’t much rest for the first six months because he didn’t want to sleep at night.

It wasn’t the best, but I think that I could do that again, at least for a few months, maybe, if need be.

2. Drink your meals

I spend at least 30 minutes preparing each meal and another 30 minutes eating it with my family.  I figure that drinking a meal would take about 5 minutes to prep and 5 minutes to eat at most, so on 3 meals a day I can save a minimum of 1 hour and 15 minutes if I drink everything I eat.

If I can get the whole family on board, I could have an extra 2 1/2 hours each day!  Plus, we might loose a bit of weight in the process.

3. Be very selfish

Let’s be honest, when you homeschool and work from home, there are a lot of things that pull on your time. There’s your children, your husband, your customers, and the work itself, plus there’s time for friends and extended family.

If I set out to only do the things that I have listed on my to do list, I figure I could add 1 to 3 hours of productivity time to my day. Of course, I’d have to ignore requests to play with my children, I couldn’t share about my day with husband, or answer any of my emails, but they would understand, right?

4. Forget social media

We all know that being social in  your real life and in your online life takes time. I spend at least 30 to 45 minutes a day keeping up with Twitter, Facebook and Google +, plus reading my favorite blogs.

Sure, this time is spent connecting with customers and friends, developing my professional skills, and gleaning encouragement from other homeschool moms, but I don’t really need all that, do I? I could do a lot with those extra minutes each day.

5. Never clean your house or do your laundry

Laundry and cleaning the house type tasks take up an hour or two each day. If I reclaimed that time, just think of all the things I could accomplish!

Now, I have passed off a few things to my kids as they are getting old enough to do them, but some still remains in my hands. If I just stopped doing those things, well maybe this might not work, as I could never let anyone in the house, but then again that would help me out with #3…

By now you are wondering, is she really serious?

I hope that you’ve figured out that this post is a bit tongue and cheek.  The reality is that I am not crossing off everything that is on my task list these days; some things are falling by the wayside. I’m having to let go of the ideal of what I think I should be able to accomplish in a day.

I’m still using those 5 tips that I wrote about and it has helped. I have been re-evaluating our schedule every few weeks to see if we can be doing things better, but I have had to acknowledge that I physically cannot do all that I want to and that’s alright, because with good organization, I can do all that I need to do.

One day, I will be able to complete my ideal task list once again and I will have time to tackle some of the ideas rolling around in my head.  I know that this is just a season of life that I am in and that I’m not alone in it.

For now, I’m boiling my list down to the essentials and getting up earlier so that I can work before the kids awaken. It’s not my favorite thing to do, but my kids need me during the day and I want to be there for them. Plus, I don’t want to just survive this season, I want to enjoy this stage of life and I can’t do that if I’m stressed out about what I think I should be getting done.