If you’re a mum, with several children, whether of school age or younger, you know just how busy life can get! When you’re not making sure all mouths are fed, all feet are shod and all bodies are warm, comfortable and as clean as possible (!), you are probably sorting out the house and the pet(s) if you have any after much pleading from Junior who promised to do ‘all the work him/herself’ (yeah, right!).

And that’s even before taking into account your work life. Maybe you have a part-time or full-time job, or you run your own business, in which case there’s no such thing as ‘full’ or ‘part-time’!

As a mum of three, with no family nearby, I had very little support and definitely no time at all… for years, in fact. I also was working half-time, teaching French language and culture at university, after putting on hold my academic career when I gave birth to my son at the end of a two-year lecturing job (a passage obligé towards a more stable academic career, the fixed-term contract, not the baby!).

And however much and hard I worked, there was always more coming where the other chores had come from. I wrote to-do lists but before I had time to cross much off them, more and more chores and tasks populated them. I needed to add extra pages to them… It was more depressing than empowering.

Eventually, I got a little bit wiser about the whole thing. I read a good number of books, some of them classics of the self-development genre. They were of little help to me, unfortunately. Not that they were bad or lacked insight. They just focused on the problem from a different perspective. A very corporate or business-based perspective. And a very male one at that. These were written with the same kind of people in mind as the writers: white men, successful in their business, in their forties to sixties. What good were they to me, a sleep-deprived, part-time working mother of three toddlers?

That’s what prompted me to think about my own situation and start from there. I focused on what made my situation different and what these other, well-known writers had not thought about when they were devising their own solutions. Basically, I could not simply remove the distractions or the non-productive tasks from my schedule! They were my kids, demanded my attention and needed my care and until they grew more independent, that would be that.

But I realised that most of my problems with time, in other words with never having enough of it, came from five main mistakes I made, over and over again. Here they are, with the solutions I’ve worked out for each. I hope they help you too.

1. Lack of planning: I pretty much stumbled out of bed in the morning, bleary-eyed and exhausted after a night of broken sleep and started working on whatever caught my eye (or ear!) first.
2. Lack of routine: in the name of spontaneity and freedom, I was pretty opposed to having a regimented life and a strict routine. What ensued from that was something close to chaos, which meant I stumbled through the day with little foresight of what was next, few fixed landmarks (apart from work and meals) and absolutely no down time whatsoever.
3. Lack of focus: when there is no plan and no routine, there is no or little focus either. How could it be otherwise? So all tasks are dealt with the same urgency, and there is little relief between tasks. Having a quick look at social media for a little break becomes very tempting for someone who just never stops working. At times it’s the only break you get all day!
4. Lack of sleep and rest: when you sleepwalk through your day, frantically trying to do as much as possible, it’s hard to decide when to stop. So bedtime can creep later and later, especially if evening is the only moment to yourself, or time spent in adult company if you are a full-time mum. The result is that morning arrives quicker than ever and you’re so tired you hit the ‘snooze’ button… a few times maybe. By the time you get up, you’re already behind.
5. Lack of breaks and exercise: in your frantic chase to cope with the work you’re doing, you run at all cylinders all the time, feel too guilty or overwhelmed to take any breaks or time off. This leads to exhaustion, overwhelm and stress. In extreme cases it can lead to burnout.

So now I’ve painted a pretty grim picture of the ‘life of mum’, it’s time to get some of the colour back in!

So here are your top five priorities (and yes, they do match the five problems one by one!)

1. Define your MIT (that’s your most important task). You can have a whole plan for the year, the quarter, the month in mind. But you should definitely, every week, religiously write down the MIT for the week. The one thing that you need to have done so you are satisfied with what you’ve accomplished as long as you’ve done it.
2. Create routines. Wherever possible, make a habit of things that serve you, remove the need to make decisions (we have limited power to make decisions every day and the more decisions we have to make, the more our decision-making abilities get depleted, leading to all these rubbish choices we make in the evening when we snack on anything we can lay our hands on in front of shows we don’t even want to watch…). By removing the need to make decisions, we end up living a life made of better choices.
3. Avoid multitasking at all costs. Multitasking is a myth. It doesn’t exist, unless you’re thinking of chewing gum while you’re walking along the street… What you are really doing when you’re multitasking is that you’re constantly flitting between different tasks. So keep ‘multitasking’ to things that don’t both require mental focus; for example, it’s fine to empty the dishwasher while waiting for the kettle to boil, or to listen to a podcast while keeping an eye on the dinner in the oven. You can easily flit between these tasks, as they are not particularly demanding of your cognitive abilities. But if you are doing anything that requires focus and concentration, flitting between tasks totally destroys your ability to concentrate.
4. Go to bed early. That might sound a bit bossy and unnecessary but really the time you spend late at night is hardly going to be productive or well-spent. You’re more likely to waste it in front of series you’re not really interested in. Whereas if you get up early, I bet my last shirt you’re not going to slink into the living room to binge watch the latest show trending on your favourite streaming platform! The things we spend our time on earlier in the day are generally more useful and productive than the ones we waste our energy on last thing at night.
5. Break up your day into chunks. Don’t be tempted to work through your breaks or cram a sandwich in at your desk, you’ll not just make crumbs on your keyboard, but you’ll also end up feeling exhausted, fighting off fatigue and struggling to concentrate by mid-afternoon.

Using your time more intentionally and proactively will skyrocket your productivity! Let me know in the comments what you think and if you have any other tips to share.

Thank you to Karine Zbinden for this month’s blog post.

Karine Zbinden (Ph.D.) is Certified in Advanced Life Coaching and a University Teacher with over 20 years experience teaching, mentoring and training students and young graduates.

In her coaching practice she specialises in helping mums boost their confidence and productivity so they’re ready to restart their career or grown their own business.

She offers 1:1 life coaching, group coaching and hosts a free, friendly and supportive community,  ‘Back to me: Career after kids’, where she gives lots of hints and tips and hosts regular special training sessions. If you’d like more information, don’t hesitate to drop her a line or visit her website.

If you’d like to get lots of tips about productivity and time management, and be first to know about new offers, make sure to sign up for her newsletter.