I spent a good deal of my life and time working prior to becoming a parent. I was literally working through contractions, deciding on and making adjustments on an exhibition stand for an upcoming event. And I always worked to a schedule before becoming a stay at home mom. I pretty much lived by my google calendar, scheduling in work, play, sleep, relaxation time.

Schedules and a sense of achievement

After baby came along, and the initial months which were a bit of a blur, I thought I should come up with some kind of “schedule” for each week ahead of time and just kind of force my baby to adjust to that. I needed a sense of “accomplishment” to my days and I thought following a well thought-out daily schedule where I had planned “me time” into it would do the trick.

HA! That didn’t work at all. I had all these things I wanted to do that never got ticked off. Inevitably, the baby would need more attention some days, an exploded nappy would take 20 minutes deal with, there would be interruptions with people working on the house or the baby would not to sleep for the full duration of my allocated times.

Being quite good at compartmentalising things in my mind and then being focused on just the task/activity at hand, I needed time to know “okay, now I will focus on this” or “now I will spend time with the baby doing that.” But having a traditional schedule on my google calendar was just not working.

A new way of scheduling

So that’s when I came up with a different kind of “schedule”.

I made my stay at home mom daily schedule that looks more like this:

Basically each block is a 20 minute chunk of time. This ties in with the whole 90 minute rule and 40 minute sleep cycle, which I talk about here.

Each week, I’d just print this off and colour or tick off the boxes for what got done that day. During the week, I didn’t have to spend time thinking “what am I going to do with the baby during this time?” I was always worried I wasn’t keeping her stimulated enough, or we were always doing the same (easier for me) things in my constantly worn-out haze.

I have a very fast ramp-up for when I move from one task to another, so as soon as the baby would fall asleep, I would know I had at least 40 minutes (2 blocks) and so my time and more importantly, my mind was focused on just that.

Schedules can help a stay at home mom relax

Decision paralysis is REAL. Especially when it comes to finally having some “free” time as a mom. You can fall into the trap of wanting to do so many things that you do nothing at all. Which time and again is totally fine, a girl needs to relax. But you can relax so much better when you schedule that in as RELAX-time. Not time to think about what you could otherwise be doing, all the while feeling guilty for not doing it.

I know I’m super lucky in that I’ve got a part time, work-from-home thing going on. And I’ve only got one child to take care of for the moment. This type of scheduling won’t work for every new mom. But I hope it gives some of you a new take on scheduling and time-management as a mom. Let me know if you try it!