How Career Moms Get It All Done: Maximizing Productivity

Here’s a question I get all the time:

“How do you get it all done?”

I’ve got two words for you:

CALENDAR and LEVERAGE.

CALENDAR / SCHEDULING

If you start using both calendars/scheduling and leverage to their max potential, you will start accomplishing more in a day than you used to in a week! No. Joke.

Here are some of my favorite calendar / scheduling systems:

-Gmail Calendar / phone scheduling app
I run my personal calendar on a Gmail calendar, and everything (and I really do mean everything) goes on the calendar! The ONLY way to quickly and efficiently deal with the curveballs that life constantly throws at career moms is to be able to reorganize your life at a moment’s notice—WITHOUT dropping any balls. The ONLY way to do THAT is an easily editable calendaring system that goes with you whenever and wherever you go (on your phone / in your purse).

It’s also documentation of where you’re spending your time. Are you getting enough time with your kids? Are you logging too many hours at work? When is the last date you went on? The calendar doesn’t lie!

-Printed Family Calendar
We keep a printed family calendar on your fridge, 3 months at a time (ex: we currently have May, June and July posted). This is how we say yes or no to upcoming trips, how we track my husbands (frequent) work travel, and how we know what’s coming up this weekend at a glance.

The whole family doesn’t have access to my personal Gmail calendar, but we can all see the fridge. It keeps the comings and goings of the house dialed in on a weekly and monthly basis (vs. the Gmail calendar, which is an hourly and daily system). We can easily schedule something months in advance this way, which means we get more of our priorities booked in our year, and spend less time scrambling to make up for the things we forgot we committed to.

-Master Date Calendar
This is just a simple Word document that lives on my computer that only gets opened when I’m creating a new month of the printed family calendar (see above). There are lots of important dates that are going to happen over and over and over again in your life, so get them all together in one place! Grandma’s birthday, Memorial Day Weekend, Spring Break (ex. Third week of March), the opening day of NASCAR season (you all obviously have this on your calendar, no?). Stop making extra work for yourself by having to track any of these down, or worse, forgetting and scrambling to make up or double-booking.

-Meal Board
We keep a dry erase, Monday-through-Sunday calendar on the counter that has one, and only one, thing on it: what’s for dinner. I’ve talked a lot about our meal planning system in the past, and it’s a pure game-changer for career moms that want to get a good meal on the table for family dinner each night!

-Industry Software
This may not pertain to you, but if you are in an industry that would allow you to use a specific software system to organize your days, it would probably be worth every penny! I have a couple I use to run my businesses, and I’d be lost without them!

BOTTOM LINE:
The fewer things you have to remember, the more capacity your brain has for the things that really matter, like killing it at work and soaking up every second of snuggle time with your babies. Both of the aforementioned activities are RUINED when you’re running 12,000 to-do’s and the days events though your head, in a frantic effort to get yourself organized. And remember to get grandma a birthday card. And when the heck Spring Break is this year.

Every second you spend organizing is 10 seconds saved scrambling, and repurposed back into living your best life! (Ok, I made that statistic up, but you get the point.)

What are your fave or essential calendaring / scheduling systems?!