Are you struggling to manage work and home together? This article is all about giving you a few useful tips that could be helpful if you are a working woman or a working mother.
If you look at the title of the article carefully, we have not used words like tips for work-life balance or how to manage your home perfectly. Because the two words perfection and balancing are highly overrated. And we don’t feel they exist in our dictionary.
So, what happens when you are a working woman is that some days your priorities will be more towards your work and some days your priorities would be more towards your house, you, your family or your kids.
And if you feel that you are dragging yourself a little bit too much in one direction, then that’s the time you have to reset your expectations. You have to take a step back and re-evaluate where you are going wrong.
So just try to manage all these aspects along with yourself, your health, to the best of your abilities. That’s what we can suggest, from our experience.
Generally, what happens is that when we try to be perfect at anything, be at work, be the perfect mother, be the perfect wife, we often end up being guilty with a capital G. So that’s why it’s definitely not about perfection or balancing. It’s about managing and setting your priorities or your expectations. So, let’s get started.
Tip #1 : Wake Up Early
Of course, it goes without saying that you can achieve so much more if you wake up a little bit early. It takes about 21 days to develop a habit. It may be hard for you now but you will see that in a few weeks it will be second nature.
Tip #2 : Stop Checking Social Media in the Morning
Never to start your day with your social media accounts. Don’t open your social media accounts in the morning. As we all know that willpower is highest in the morning.
So, start strong. If you like to be productive and get the most out of your day, this can waste a lot of your precious time that you could use to spend with your friends or family. You could use making your dreams a reality. So, stop wasting time on social media especially in the morning.
Tip #3 : Keep Your Kitchen Tidy
Never leave your home with a messy kitchen, whoever leaves the home last if it’s you, then you just clean up the kitchen.
If it’s your husband asked him to clean up your kitchen or put the dirty dishes at least in the dishwasher. This way when you will come back home after a long and tiring day you will have a clean slate to start your work.
Tip #4 : Make Your Bed Every Morning
Always make your bed in the morning before you leave for work. It just takes two minutes or even less. It instantly improves your mood when you come back home. It just not looks better it also feels better.
Do these two tasks before you leave for work. Your kitchen should be tidy and your bed should be clean and tidy.
Tip #5 : Prepare for the Work Day
A few tips are about the preparations that you can do before. You should always keep all the lunch boxes and water bottles in one particular designated area.
You can keep all these in a tray on your counter so that you don’t have to juggle around in the morning. And see where the need is where the boxes everything is right in front of your eyes.
Tip #6 : Soak the Nuts Before Sleep
Soak the nuts before you sleep that should be the last work for the day. And keep it on the counter so that you don’t forget to take them.
Tip #7 : Teach Your Child Responsibility
The next step is designating and making the kids responsible for their dresses for the next morning. You can use separate baskets for each of your kids and they will decide which clothes they want to wear and put them in these baskets.
Now gradually they will pick it up but initially, they will take some help from you. So be a little patient with them, help them for a week and you will see next week they will be able to do things on their own when you are busy in the kitchen in the morning. You will not need to be present there while they are dressing up.
Tip #8 : Inculcate the Habit of Self Study in Children
This is also related to kids. And that’s for the study. So, what you can do is prepare a folder for each of your kids, whatever they need to study and keep those sheets already in that folder.
For example, you can create some problems for your kids for mental maths and then similarly for grammar, reading comprehension, and then a biography project that he’s working on in his school, so he needs to complete these tasks for this entire week.
And when you are working in the kitchen, and they’re sitting on the dining table, you know actually what they’re working on without being present there. And this will also help them to inculcate the habit of self-study, which will be very important later.
Tip #9 : Never Skip Breakfast
Never leave for work without eating your breakfast or having something if you are running out of time at least have a glass of fresh smoothie, some fresh fruits, spinach leaves, and flax seeds. It will definitely be fulfilling and at the same time nutritious.
Tip #10 : Prayer of Blessing
Never leave for work or from your home without having the blessings of almighty. Prayer often bring immersive happiness into a home, take time to pray for you and your family.
Tip #11 : Grocery Shopping
Make sure that you do your groceries on weekdays. If the grocery store is closer to your husband’s office, ask him to do that. If it’s closer to your office, you should do that while returning back from work. This will save a lot of time on the weekend.
Tip #12 : Everything in Its Place
Everything in your house should have a home of its own. For example, while you come back from work, your shoes go on to the shoe rack, keys on the key holder, your goggles, your purse, your office badge, your lanyard, whatever you carry, they should have a particular designated area to themselves so that you don’t have to rush in the morning to find these things.
It will help you gain so much time and mental peace in the morning.
Tip #13 : Get Your Clothes Ready for the Next Day
When you go to your closet to change your office clothes you are already in the closet. Utilize this time and prepare your dress for the next day so that you don’t have to waste extra time for this particular task.
Tip #14 : Make Your Own List
Keep a to-do list, a grocery list somewhere you can have a lot of visibility. You can keep this on your refrigerator and this list will show the list of grocery items that are about to finish in your kitchen and pantry.
It will also show some important appointments or to do things that you need to do this week. Apart from that it also contains some emails and calls that have to make so this will be a great tool to keep you on track.
Tip #15 : Meal Planning
This tip is regarding meal planning, menu planning or pre-preparation. Especially for working women, we would like to give you a very simple tip here. You have to do is add one task to each day regarding meal planning, what I mean is that for example on Sunday, you soak the beans so you will be soaking like chana, dals and some dosa batter as well.
Monday you will boil the beans and you will grind dosa batter and keep it for fermentation. So, on Tuesday onwards it is ready. Each day you have to do one task.
For Tuesday you will be boiling the saag and making a puree keeping it in the fridge.
Wednesday you will be doing methi chopping and cleaning, make a dough and keep it. So, each day you do just one thing and do it while you are preparing dinner so it’s easy for you and more convenient.
Tip #16 : Replace Garbage Bag
Never leave the garbage in the kitchen when you are going to sleep. When you close your kitchen for the day, remove the garbage, put a new garbage bag so that you can start fresh in the morning.
Tip #17 : Organize Your Kitchen
This tip is very important. You may spend a lot of time in the kitchen. So, it’s very important that your kitchen is very clear, very clutter-free and most organized, everything should be stocked up. Everything should be visible properly.
The things that you need most while cooking, the most frequent things that you use should be at a hands distance. So, oil, ghee, your spatulas, and your sugar, tea, all the masalas intact in one place.
All the things that you use for prepping lunch, your foils, your clean grabs, these things should not be in somewhere where you need time to find out, because it wastes a lot of time in the morning.
So the more organized your kitchen is more efficiently you will be able to work and not only that, there are huge chances that you will be making more home-cooked meals. To know more about kitchen organization, check out our article on 10 Clever Home and Kitchen Organization Ideas.
Tip #18 : Keep Yourself Active
And our last and the very important tip is to keep yourself active. Keep yourself engaged. This will not only help you become healthy physically but mentally as well.
Spend some quality time with your kids. Keep the child alive in you. At the very end no one will remember your great PowerPoint presentations, but people and your family will remember the person you were.
