Simple Scheduling Tips For Mom Entrepreneurs

You create an uncomfortable values-gap when your daily actions don’t reflect your priorities – like your family, or growing your business, or self-care. Fortunately, getting back into alignment can be as simple as tweaking your schedule.

All moms must navigate working around everyone else’s schedule. Mom entrepreneurs carry the additional pressure of fitting in time for your business. Often a flawed schedule is the root of feeling frazzled, flustered, and unproductive.

Here are 5 simple scheduling tips for mom entrepreneurs to create your path to sanity and abundance:

Step 1: Review Your Schedule Seasonally

Activities change with each season; you and your business evolves; and kids have developing needs. When you don’t update your calendar, it’s easy to get into the new season with non-workable routine and conflicting commitments.

Create a spreadsheet or template you can fill out by hand, that will allow you to log in your anticipated daily routine, sometimes in as small as 15-minute increments.

Step 2: Plug In and Tweak Activities

Insert your activities into your schedule grid like this one. If you want to get fancy you can color code activities. Green could represent revenue generating activities. Yellow could be family activities. Orange could represent recharge time for you. At a glance, this visual could see if you are neglecting or overemphasizing any area. The visual can make it obvious why your plans are or are not working for you.

Step 3: Pray and Trim Your Schedules

Take the schedule conflicts to prayer and begin the trimming process. Your first stab at scheduling confronts you with schedule clashes, overscheduling problems, lack of personal care time, neglect of legitimate family needs and conflicts. It forces you to make choices that you often won’t make when you wing it without a plan. Look to your values to help you trim your commitments. Make sure your schedule incorporates transition times and does not neglect any critical area.

Step 4: Implement and Experiment

Give your schedule a shot. Here’s where you will discover instances where you over or under estimate the time it will take to complete activities. Acting on your plan will also illuminate when your planned activities are not in sync with your biorhythms.

Step 5: Tweak

Trying your new schedule for a week or two reveals its flaws. Identify and analyze what isn’t working so you can make adjustments to your template. For example, planning to work on something that requires concentration in the early afternoon when you are drowsy likely won’t work. I switched doing my to do list for the next day from the end of my day to the beginning of the next day when I was more mentally fresh. At night I write key “to do” notes I will want to include in my full schedule in the morning. I was also underestimating the amount of time to check my email daily or forgetting to schedule looking at them at all, which always threw off all my other planned activities, usually the high pay off activities.

Spending the time looking at your schedule allows you to better listen and understand God’s will and make the tough choices that will ensure you are in alignment with your values.

Catholic Mompreneurs Biz and Life Tips: Don’t underestimate how designing the right schedule can be a deal breaker in whether you are successful in your business and personal life. If yours isn’t up to snuff, invest an hour to modify it by using these simple scheduling tips for mompreneurs.

Copyright 2014 Christina M. Weber