Do you ever get to the end of the day, and feel burnt out – like you’ve just been spinning your gears all day long. You don’t have a sense of satisfaction about your day. You are tired but not with the tiredness that comes with the satisfaction of a day well spent. You have been constantly doing things, but never actually feeling like you are getting anything done. Sometimes the day gets away from me, but here are a few ways to set ourselves up for success in this area.
Use time wisely
Unlike a traditional job where we are told what to do and we check certain tasks off the list, there is a huge amount of flexibility in life as a homemaker and parent. To a large extent, we get to choose how we will fill our days. If we don’t, the time will be spent, but it might be spent on things that don’t use that time well for us or our children. This is especially hard when you are a mom of only littles who are not yet school age. At this stage there is not yet the demand of schools to force some structure into our lives. It is easy to just let the day be frittered away, or to fill it to the brink so much that there is no breathing room.
Even though there is no rigid structure that must be followed, as a homemaker and a parent we need to think about our priorities, so that we use the valuable time with our children wisely.
Be disciplined. Treat your job as if it matters
If we choose to sit in our pajamas half of every day watching cartoons with our kids, we aren’t going to get fired, but there are certainly more meaningful things that we can do with and for our kids. Additionally there are meals to be had, and the house to be cleaned. As a homemaker, we are choosing to stay home with our kids rather than going to work for a paycheck. There is a temptation to treat being a stay at home parent as unimportant because there is no paycheck and no recognition, but as a homemaker, you are shaping the characters of little souls. It can be helpful to go through your days with at least some sense of rhythm that will help you be disciplined about your days.
Get Dressed
Have you ever gone to a special event like a wedding. Most likely you wore something nice. The event, or the people having the event were important to you, so you took the care, time, and effort to choose to wear something nice. You would not dream of wearing your pajamas to an important event. Well I’m here to tell you that parenting is important, and if we stay in our pajamas half the day, we signal to ourselves that we don’t care very much. I’m not saying we should be obsessed with our looks or wear something fancy, in fact choosing practical and comfortable clothes is a good idea. Parenting and homemaking are very active jobs. However, when we get dressed into something that makes us feel put together, and equipped for our job, we are setting ourselves up for success within our mindset.
Don’t say yes to every opportunity. Saying yes to every good opportunity means saying no to some other things.
While it is easy to fritter our days away doing nothing, it is equally easy to overcommit our days. Most of the time there is a plethora of good activities that we could be doing with our kids. So many good activities can make it hard to select just a few great activities. But if your life is so full of outside commitments that there is no wiggle room, then there is a chance that you are not prioritizing the reasons you chose to stay home in the first place.
Put time limits on certain daily chores.
I don’t know about you, but I have the tendency to turn a quick meal clean up into an operation. I start wiping the counters and doing the dishes, and suddenly I am dealing with a small pile of clutter that started accumulating on the countertop. This sends me going to other parts of the house to put things where they belong. Pretty soon what started out as a twenty minute job ends up taking an hour, and I don’t get to the thing that I really wanted to do. I find that when I set a time limit for routine and basic tasks at least occasionally, I am able to quickly work through them, and start on the next thing.
If your days have been feeling unintentional and chaotic, you will want to implement a few steps to bring more order to your days. However, in the process, make sure to bring fun into your home. While it is important to get things done as a stay at home parent, it is also important to make sure that productivity does not become the main focus. Serving God and the people in your home should be the main focus, and you want your time with them to be fun and enjoyable. You can slow down and be playful with your family while still maintaining a peaceful rhythm
