Tag Archives: busy

Time Management – What’s It All About?

Time management is one of the toughest things to master as a person, but becomes even doubly difficult as a parent whether working outside the home or not, especially a parent of a young child. I’ve struggled with focus and being task oriented for almost my entire life, and I have a lot of hobbies outside of my day job, so having strong time management skills were a MUST. It is because of this need for laser focus, that I started looking into different way to stay on course and meet my goals. I thought that it would be a great idea to share those tips with you in a new series that I’m simply calling Time Management for the Busy Mom.

Time Management - What's It All About - Baby Doodah

Let’s be honest, even on some of our best days we struggle to stay focused and on task. One chime from Facebook, a notification on your phone, or a co-worker calling your attention to something other than the task at hand, is enough to derail even the strongest and most focused of individuals. And once you’re pulled off that task, it’s hard to bring yourself back to exactly where you were before.

[Tweet “The dictionary defines time management as the ability to use one’s time effectively or productively, especially at work.”]

I’ve read that it can take you 15 more minutes to get your focus back on track. The worst part? In that time, it’s easy enough for someone else to come along and interrupt what you’re doing. It’s enough to make a grown-up cry!

Believe it or not, there are many, MANY different ways to keep you focused on the end result. Simply doing a search of Google will turn up millions of hits on how different individuals handle their procrastination, and stay focused. Just like with anything, no one way will work for one person – if you try one method and it doesn’t work, I encourage you to try again and not give up! You will find your focus gold and will wonder how you ever survived without it.

Since we as mom’s, whether we work inside or outside the home (this can be SAHMs too), learning how to be focused and have great time management skills will help make your days run smoother and will keep your sanity about you.

Here’s my list of the Time Management Techniques that I’ve tried:

This list is not all encompassing of every possible time management trick out there, but can be used as a guide to find your comfort zone. I will also be covering each item in their own post to provide details on how each works, how I used it, whether it worked or not and some ideas on how you could tweak it to work for you.

  • Pomodoro Technique
  • Urgent / Important Lists (Prioritization)
  • Block Your Time
  • Creating “Tickler” Files

As I try new or different ones and as I do, I’ll update my post and share those results with you, too.

If you’re looking for some great posts that talk about time management here are some additional options:

For bloggers: Blog Clarity’s post on 25 Tips to Become a More Productive Blogger or Write Better and Faster with One Simple Tip.

For Moms: Time Management Tips for Moms or Time Management: 6 Tricks for Parents to Stay on Track

Your turn!

Have you tried any Time Management techniques before? Did it work, did you feel more productive? If so, I’d love if you shared them in the comments below.

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A Day in the Life

A few blogs that I follow have been doing “day in the life” posts and I thought it would be fun if I did one too. If you want an example of another “day in the life” post, you can check out Healthy Tipping Point.

4:40 – 4:45 AM – My alarm goes off and I remark to myself that I think I’ll go sleep for a bit on the couch. I’d love to stay in bed and snooze a few times but Seamus has a hard time getting back to sleep after my alarm, so snoozing it repeatedly isn’t fair to him, so I get up.

Once I’m up I realize that I’m not actually as tired as I felt while still in bed and can use this time to get some things done.

5 AM – I’m wide awake now, and flipping through Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Pinterest or trying to catch up on reading some blogs. I’ll also occasionally write a blog post, but not this morning, a little too slow mentally.

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5:20 AM – Hop in the shower. I always try to get in and out before I wake Seamus up at 6, that way once I’m in the bedroom again I can dry my hair right away. With it being shorter, it air dries quickly and if I don’t handle it right away it looks messed up.

6 AM – Head into the bedroom, wake Seamus up, blow dry hair.

6:10 AM – Do make- up and hear Emmett starting to stir on the monitor. I’ll usually let him roll around and sing to himself for a bit before getting him, unless he’s bawling, then I get him (or Seamus gets him) right away.

6:20 AM – This begins my whirlwind of dressing, styling hair, packing bags, brushing teeth, walking back and forth across our house about a million times, ensuring I haven’t forgotten anything and finally loading Emmett into his car seat and heading out the door.

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7:15 AM – We are on our way to school. Typically Emmett falls asleep on the ride in, sometimes he’s mad and just shouts the whole way. This morning, he was nice and content and dozed within minutes of us driving away from our house.

7:50 AM – Arrive at day care. I drop him off, put his sippy cups of milk in the fridge, take him over to the younger baby room because his normal teacher his helping with breakfast. Get him buckled into his high chair, open a banana for him and chit chat with the teacher for a few minutes.

I realize I’m already running late (I have a meeting at 9 that I need to prepare for), I give Emmett about 20 more kisses and head out the door.

8 AM – Even though I’m running late, it’s Monday and what better way to start the workday than with a Venti Iced Coffee from Starbucks? So I stop and order just that with a shot of vanilla and 1 cream. Perfection!

8:15 AM – Pull into work and hustle in with all 4 bags I have. Normally I only have 3 but since I decided to workout during lunch today, I had a fourth one with my gym clothes in it.

8:20 AM – Begin the extensive login process to my computer and other necessary systems. Bunker down and get to concentrating on what needs to be covered in my 9 o’clock meeting.

9 AM – I have a series of morning meetings which all go smoothly and then I’m back at my desk trying to get through all the new work that I have since being promoted. All stuff I am enjoying doing, but I am trying to work on my time management since all of my old jobs had hard and fast deadlines that were a long distance out, and now my deadlines are ever changing.

11:30 AM – Emmett is still nursing and I’m still pumping once a day, I head down to the lactation room for my one pumping session.

12:15 PM – Get changed, go for a 5.88 mile bike ride. Come back and eat my delicious lunch, a salad with chicken, hard boiled egg, blue cheese crumbles and sunflower seeds and 2 locally grown plums.

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2:30 PM – Another meeting and it also goes well. The rest of the work day is spent trying to get through everything, I do a pretty good job and knock some big things off the ‘to do’ list.

5:15 PM – Leave work, head to pick up Emmett.

5:35 PM – Get to day care, find out that he had tripped earlier in the day and has a big bump right above his eye. He’s fine, it looks worse than it is but I still feel bad for the poor boy.

6:20 PM – Get home, IMMEDIATELY change and head outside with Emmett while Seamus cooks our dinner, burgers and corn on the cob tonight.

6:45 PM – Sit down to eat. Seamus is an amazing cook and his burgers tonight are no exception, I savor every single little bit.. Yummy!

7:15 PM – Play time! We all hangout in Emmett’s new play room and play with his toys and every so often our sweet boy will climb up in our laps and cuddle. Such fun!

7:35 PM – Emmett’s bath time, then lotion, book, nursing and finally bed.

8:15 PM – I fill my water bottle and sit down to work on this post. Phew!!

9:15 PM – Seamus and I will usually watch something on TV. Currently we’re watching Dexter, starting from the very beginning. We are two episodes in, Micheal C. Hall plays such a good creep.

10:15 PM – In bed with my iPad, reading some blogs.

10:45 PM – Time to Crash! Zzzzz

Are you as exhausted from reading that as I am from living it?! Life is so so busy right now, but I would not change a single thing!

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Your turn!

What does your “day in the life” look like? Are you a snoozer, or do you jump right out of bed?

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

That’s how fast today flew by!

It was my first day back in the office, as sad as I was to leave Emmett, I was excited to get back to work and have interaction with adults. The day went very smoothly and incredibly quickly, by the time I realized it, it was 3 pm.

Tuesdays, Emmett is babysat by my sister so for my first day back to work, it was nice to not have to worry about getting bottles and clothes ready to go because she comes here. It also makes it easier to leave him because I know he is getting one on one attention and is being well cared for. She sent me loads of updates and since I can just text her it was easy to check-in. I really can’t complain about today, overall it went pretty well!

I think the hardest part for me now is that when I get home from work I only have an hour or two with him before he goes to bed and those two hours FLY! I’ve contemplated putting him to bed later but he just seems to naturally want to go to bed between 7 and 8. I wish there was a way to slow time down between the hours of 5 and 7, start moving in sloooow motion.

Here’s one of the pics my sister sent me…

Last night after after we had put Emmett to bed we broke into our wedding cake. We actually froze our cake and stored it in our freezer for the last year. I know so many people just serve the top layer at the wedding and order the exact same cake they had for the wedding, fresh. Well, I am a traditionalist and wanted to have our actual wedding cake.

Frozen cake!

My mom did a fantastic job of sealing it up because it came out looking beautiful and tasted really good, not at all like it had been sitting in our freezer for a year.

How was everyone’s Monday Tuesday (obviously, it’s MY Monday)?

What Have You Accomplished?

These days just getting out of the house is an accomplishment for Emmett and I. BD is breastfed, with breastfed babies you have three options, one is that you can feed exclusively from the breast, the mother can pump (express the milk from her own breasts) and feed it to baby via bottle or the third option is a little of both. We’re of the little of both camp, however, the majority of the time E eats from my breast.

So in order for us to get ready and out the door we have to run through a checklist of tasks before we’re actually ready to go.

  1. Make sure the diaper bag is stocked full of diapers, wipes, a change of clothes (or two) and a toy or two.
  2. Make sure all my stuff is together and ready because once E is in his car seat, we need to go go GO! He is not happy just sitting in it.
  3. Feed and burp E, ensuring he’ll be satisfied for hopefully 2(ish) hours.
  4. Change E’s diaper.
  5. Put E in his car seat and MOVE!

I realize that might not seem like a lot but it takes quite a bit of time to do tasks 3 and 4 and since they’re most important, you really can’t rush them.

Once we were all set to go, Emmett and I ended up going out and running some errands because mama was getting stir crazy and needed to feel the warm sunshine. I went to Dibella’s and grabbed a yummy sub for lunch, then we headed to JC Penney’s where I tried to exchange a shirt my husband had been given but they didn’t have his size in the color he wanted, so that was bust. I also filled my gas tank, which wasn’t fun because of the crazy high gas prices and then ran to Wegmans for a few things that we needed. It felt really good to get out and bop around after being stuck in the house all morning.


His shirt says “Handsome Like Daddy,” it really is true too! 😉

For dinner tonight hubby made us Cheddar Bacon Ranch Chicken Pasta. It was absolutely amazing!  Seamus is an outstanding cook to begin with so I had no doubt that this would be good, but it was out of this world!

It makes about 5 or 6 servings depending on how much you eat and is about 15 PointsPlus (I’m following the Weight Watchers PP program). It is pretty high but there are plenty of changes you could make to make it lighter. We did use less bacon than the recipe called for, only 4 slices versus 6. We used a different type of pasta but this is all about preference and we also only used half a packet of the ranch mix and it was plenty. I also probably should have added in some sort of vegetable but Emmett was being a fussy-pants right around dinner time so I was content to just eat.

I should also mention how obsessed I am with caffeine-free Diet Pepsi right now, but only directly out of the can and ice cold. I’ll drink it in a glass with ice but it is not my favorite way to have it. I might be strange but there has to be someone else out there who prefers to drink their soda directly out of a can or maybe even directly out of the bottle!?!?

So… what have YOU accomplished today?

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