7 Time Management Tips for Homeschool Moms

7 Time Management Tips for Homeschool Moms

Overview: Have a hard time juggling all of your responsibilities? Try implementing these time management tips for homeschool moms & your productivity will soar.

Do you ever feel at a loss for how you’re doing to juggle all of your responsibilities as a homeschool mom? Have you experienced overwhelm and wondered if there’s any way to add more hours to your day?

7 Time Management Tips for Homeschool Moms

Homeschool moms have a lot of responsibilities on their plates and it’s easy to struggle with managing our time wisely throughout the day. We homeschooled for 17 years if you can believe it. And I learned some time management tips throughout the years that I hope will help other moms feel less overwhelmed.

Here are 7 Time Management Tips for Homeschool Moms:

1 – You Can’t Do It All

Homeschool moms often worry that they aren’t doing enough when, in reality, they are often doing too much. Don’t try to teach 12 different subjects. Don’t teach your children from 6 am until 5 pm with no breaks.

Don’t expect to have an immaculately kept house when you have kids home all day long. Be realistic about your expectations for yourself and for your kids!ย 

Decide what your priorities are and let go of some things that don’t matter to you as much.

The 80/20 principle means that 20% of what we spend time doing is what creates 80% of the result. It’s important for us to take a look at everything we spend time doing to try to determine which tasks are giving us the outcome we want.

If we’re honest, there are probably at least one or two things that we do throughout the day that we could stop doing and no one would miss them.

For even more about this topic, check out my friend, Melanie Wilson’s podcast, from The Homeschool Sanity Show called 6 Time Management Lies Homeschool Moms Believe.

2 – Ask for Help

Since you can’t do everything, you need to be willing to ask others for help. Delegate whenever possible. Make sure your kids are pulling their weight by doing chores.

Remember that our husbands can’t read our minds, so be willing to ask him to pitch in where you need it most.

If your parents live nearby, ask them to take the kids sometimes so that you can have some time for yourself or a date night with your husband. Swap kids with a close friend or someone from church so that you can have a chance to complete some projects. Be creative!

3 – Utilize Your Time Well

It’s easy to fritter away our time by texting our friends, watching the news, checking Facebook or emails, etc. When we’re spending time doing something, we should try to be intentional about it.

If we’re teaching our kids, we need to try to focus on that task rather than thinking about the myriad of other things we also need (or want) to get done.

Make a checklist for your day and then try to focus on what you’re actually working on at the time. This isn’t always possible when we have young kids in the home, but it’s doable as our kids get older.

It still doesn’t come naturally to us moms, however, because we’re used to being multitaskingย experts! Unfortunately, the side effect of multitasking can be that we miss out on the moment because we’re constantly thinking about what’s next.

4 – Be Proactive

Rather than waiting until something needs to be done, it helps if we try to anticipate what we need to do in advance. We know that we’re going to have to make dinner each night, so we will benefit if we choose a recipe in advance, gather the necessary ingredients, thaw the meat, dice up the veggies, make sure the pans are clean, etc.

We also know that we’ll be teaching homeschool lessons during the day, so we are much better off having our lessons prepared in advance than trying to wing it. We can waste a lot of time trying to figure out what we’re doing at the last minute rather than having our plans in place. Even though lesson planning takes time, it actually saves time in the long run.

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5 – Be Efficient

Have you heard of batch processing? It’s much more efficient to group our responsibilities together and do several of them at once rather than trying to do one of everything on a rotating basis. It takes some time to get our brains focused on lesson planning, so once we do, we’re better off planning the entire week’s worth of lessons rather than just planning one day. It’s also faster to plan all of the math lessons for that week before moving on to reading lessons.

This also holds true in the kitchen. If you need to cut half an onion for tonight’s meal, cut up the other half as well and store it in the fridge for the next time you need some onion. If you’re using a food processor, cut up two or three onions instead.

Also, try running all of your errands at the same time. You’re much better off taking one trip to five different places than to take five separate trips to one place.

7 Time Management Tips for Homeschool Moms

6 – Combine Subjects

Rather than teaching 25 subjects to your kids, try combining a few of them to make the amount you’re trying to teach your kids more reasonable. For instance, you can have your child read a book about WWII, copy any words with which he isn’t familiar, and write a short paper about it, combining history, reading, grammar, and writing. Keep it simple rather than having lots of unnecessary overlap!

It also helps our kids to retain the information longer when we’re able to intertwine subjects in this manner. That’s one of the reasons why we love using unit studies so much around here!

โ†’ Related Content: Self-Care For Homeschool Moms โ€“ 17 Ways to Thrive!

7 – Combine Kids

Whenever possible, teach the same lessons to all of your kids at the same time. Bible, science, and history are subjects which are easy to combine. You can require different things from each of your children if there is a large age range, but the presentation part can at least be done together.

Also, if you have older kids and younger kids, consider allowing your older kids to do some of the teachingย tasks for you. Younger children generally look up to their older siblings. And one of the best ways to learn is to try to teach the material.

So, this is actually a WIN-WIN for the kids and can even be done if there isn’t much of a difference in their ages.

7 Time Management Tips for Homeschool Moms

Even as a seasoned homeschooler, I still had to be intentional to apply the above tips or I very quickly found myself sliding back into sloppy planning, which makes everything take longer and makes my job harder than it needs to be.

When we are doing things as efficiently as possible, it helps relieve some of the pressure that we’re feeling. Homeschooling our children is a huge responsibility, but I’ve learned that with the right methods in place, it doesn’t have to completely overwhelm us.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by all of your responsibilities as a homeschool mom? Do you have any time management tips or methods that you can share? Please leave a comment below!

Have a hard time juggling all of your responsibilities? Try implementing these time management tips for homeschool moms & your productivity will soar. | time management tips | homeschool mom | homeschool mom time management |

15 thoughts on “7 Time Management Tips for Homeschool Moms”

    1. Thanks, Glenda. Yes, combining classes is a wonderful way to save time and to keep learning fresh rather than beating our children over the head with all the things. ๐Ÿ™‚

    1. Good for you! Makes me think of something our pastor always says. We need to work on TALKING to ourselves more than we LISTEN to ourselves. It’s great that you give yourself this reminder. ๐Ÿ™‚

  1. Such great tips! I have often combined my two girls for Science and Social Studies. It does really help with the overwhelm. I have also committed to keeping our actual book work to no longer than 3-4 hours a day as long as I can. (Obviously, the high school will probably be longer but for now…)

  2. Keep it coming, Michelle, you are my favorite mom-of-boys homeschooling blogger.

    Batch processing, totally. I do that with lesson planning, but hadn’t thought of it with cooking in the simple ways you mention.

    Planning to purchase your preschool curriculum for my toddler. I also want to get it for my godson if his parents will use it, but wanted to email them something to check it out first. Do you have any info i could send them without the pricing?

    1. Oh, I really appreciate that. I’m glad you’re finding value in my site!

      I just created a PDF you can share with them that doesn’t have any pricing information on it. You can find it here: https://www.homeschool-your-boys.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Learn-Grow-Information.pdf

      Will that work? I also have a few videos that you might want to direct them to that would give them an idea of what Learn & Grow is all about:

      – Learn & Grow – https://youtu.be/P8Dz9UP4IaI?list=PLXIOvhN9gD3NniVDsok73ha2D7TkIlrnB
      – Why You Should Use a Preschool Curriculum with overview of Learn & Grow – https://youtu.be/s18TEo0FjxQ?list=PLXIOvhN9gD3NniVDsok73ha2D7TkIlrnB

      Let me know if you need anything else. Take care and I hope you and your kids enjoy the program!

  3. Wonderful tips. They are great to keep in mind when life starts getting stressful. I really need to make a list instead of letting it run through my mind and distract me. Thanks for sharing your ideas.

  4. Excellent tips Michelle! much appreciated by me, a homeschool mom of multiple kids. I totally agree with combining related subjects and kids whenever possible. Great time saver! ๐Ÿ™‚

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