9 Habits of Highly Effective Busy Working Moms

Looking for the best tips & tricks for busy working moms to keep your family and career super organized? Here are 9 life changing ideas your have to try out in your life!! 

 

Being a working mom is extremely rewarding AND challenging, and if you’re anything like me, you are doing all the research you possibly can to make sure you are optimizing your time and being the best you can at BOTH. As a working mom myself, I am giving you the top busy working mom habits that my family and I swear by. 

You are going to learn about all the best habits for busy working moms: from our trick to waking up early, putting your family on your calendar FIRST, the science behind the value of sleep, a new digital calendar that makes building these habits foolproof and more. 

After learning about all of these busy working mom habits, you will be a pro and extra prepared when juggling your career and family. 

This post is all about the best busy working mom habits that every mom should know about. 

 

Best Habits for Busy Working Moms

 

1. What Up at 5 am 

Listen, I get it (and can relate!) As busy working moms, we all want and feel like we need more sleep, but get a jump start on your day! My trick is that I build a little treat into it. My husband and I treat ourselves to a hot cup of coffee before the kids wake up. It has become one of our favorite times to wake up slowly and talk without the kids’ distractions, phones, etc. Then we both get a jump on work – working on projects that need focus time, getting through emails, etc. I love early mornings because it all feels like offense – versus defense. Once the day gets going, your day will be more susceptible to change. 

I also use this extra time to empty the dishwasher, pack the kid’s bags for school and get their bottles ready for their morning routine. 

If you need more convincing, waking up early isn’t just a busy working mom “hack” – waking up early puts you in an elite group. Nearly 60 percent of self-made millionaires report getting out of bed at least three hours before their workday actually started. If you are going to juggle a career and motherhood, why not invest in waking up early so you can be the BEST at both? 

 

2. Put Yourself and Your Family on Your Schedule First. 

Working mom burnout is REAL – 93% of mothers reported feeling burned out at some point this year – that’s up 7 percent versus JUST LAST YEAR!! According to Motherly’s 2021 State of Motherhood Survey. 

Work will always compete/demand our time + attention, and if we aren’t careful (read: intentional), it will fill up our entire days/weeks/years. We love (and live into!) Michelle Obama’s approach – of putting herself and her family on her calendar first – to break out of the spiral, so many of us busy working moms get pulled into. 

In a recent interview, she said: 

“Starting every year, before I booked anything, agreed to any meetings or conferences, we’d sit down with my assistant, and we looked at our lives first,” Obama said, as Money reported. “We put potlucks in there, we put date nights in there, I put my workouts, we put our vacations on the calendar first, we put sports things and summers. We planned that out first, and then what was left would be left for work.”

“Even when you schedule your family, there’s still plenty of time for work, but we don’t plan like that,” Obama said. “We let work inundate everything. We have to start setting the priority of allowing people to put their lives before their work.”

Moments – our FREE personalized calendar – makes putting yourself on your calendar first EASY! We begin by sending you a lifestyle survey to understand what family activities you want to enjoy, what trips you want to take, your family and friends’ birthdays and what self-care routines you want to practice, etc. From that, we create a blueprint of calendar events (because to-do lists are great, but you need to carve out TIME for yourself to get these things done) that make preparing for life’s big and small moments easy. We also curate products and recommendations for every subtask to try and help make your life even easier! 

 

3. Find a Working Mom Schedule that Aligns with your Family’s Goals. 

It’s essential to take the time to step back and be intentional about how you want to spend your time, but just wanting to spend your time a certain way doesn’t get it done. You need to find a method – be it one of the many free printable working mom schedules or working mom templates that you can find on the web – that jives with your personality so that you have a framework to actually execute those intentions. 

The only way I’ve found success is by turning my to-do list into time on my calendar. That’s at the foundation of Moments. Ask yourself, can you not give yourself and your family just 30 minutes during your day to help curate life’s big and small moments? 30 minutes is just 2% of your day!!! You and your family are worth that must of a time investment, right??? 

 

4. Ensure that your Family Schedule or Family Planner Lives Where you are Already Spending The Majority of Your Time 

Listen, I’m the first to admit how much of a sucker I am for BEAUTIFUL planners and organization systems – like bring on all the beautiful paper, fonts, colored pens. Still, honestly, I can’t even admit to myself (let alone you!) how many planners I’ve bought with the hopes of this year being the one I get organized and how I only use it for a few weeks before it’s not with me when I need it, too heavy to carry around, etc. 

With Moments we will deliver your free personalized calendar in the format that best suits your lifestyle. Do you live in Outlook for work? We got you! Are you a Google Calendar master? We got you too!  

With these events living where you already spend most of your time, you won’t ever forget, lose track of or feel unprepared again. 

 

5. Start Task Batching! 

Task batching is the act of batching similar tasks together and doing them all at once, rather than addressing them sporadically throughout the day, week, or month. 

With Moments, we batch buying gifts, birthday cards, and similar events monthly so that you don’t have to think about or pick something throughout the month/week. We also batch any daily “events” simultaneously so that you can batch out any mini tasks within 30 minutes. Again, I get that 30 minutes might feel like a lot, and you probably won’t have events every day, but even on those 30 minutes – that’s just 2% of your ENTIRE DAY! You and your family deserve at least that, wouldn’t you agree? 

 

6. Delegate Tasks to your Spouse or Partner

Raising kids and juggling careers is a team sport – and if you are both supporting the family financially, both of you should be intentionally supporting the family’s goals. 

With Moments we make it’s easy to forward and invite your husband/partner to take the lead/to execute specific tasks. 

Heck, you can even delegate tasks to your kids! Time to think about Halloween costumes? Or time to look at camps to register for the summer? Give them ownership and let them lead the research tasks! 

 

7. Get Enough Sleep 

Okay, I get it – that’s included in every “list” out there, but do you know WHY focusing on sleep is important? Getting enough sleep is an essential aspect of human performance. It is a critical component of our overall health and allows the body to repair and restore itself in preparation for the day ahead. Sleep is one of the best things people can do to improve their mental and physical health – check out this podcast all about How Sleep Impact Performance.

It’s actually not just important to get the right amount of sleep but to get that sleep consistently (learn about sleep consistency here) to drive peak performance. A 2017 paper out of Harvard University introduced a new metric called “Sleep Regularity.” The paper reported a significant positive correlation between this novel metric and academic performance (measured by GPA) in healthy college students. In fact, students in the study with regular sleep and wake times had an average GPA of 3.72 while those students deemed irregular sleepers averaged only 3.24 on the 4-point scale; that’s the difference between an A and a B+ average.

Looking for Tips for Better Sleep? We love this article from WHOOP. Haven’t heard of WHOOP? From NFL and PGA players to pro cyclists and master trainers, the best athletes in the world get a competitive advantage with WHOOP. Check out their story here.

 

8. Prioritize Exercise 

Again, I’ll admit this one isn’t original, but there is a reason it’s included on every list. It’s the best therapy, in my opinion – even though I know there is a time a place when we need treatment too. Whether it’s a 30-minute walk or a really intense workout class – again, add this to your calendar and don’t miss an appointment with yourself – being healthy and feeling good makes us better moms, wives, daughters, employees, etc.! Invest that time so you can be the best version of yourself.

 

9. Instead of Aiming for Perfection, Aim for Happiness.

The two psychologists studied more than 40,0000 American, British, and Canadian college students between 1989 and 2016 and found that perfectionism has increased dramatically over the last few decades — 33% since 1989. Paper here.

In an Instagram (and now Zoom) world, we feel the pressure (and desire) to be perfect, but true happiness isn’t in what you have – it’s in the moments we spend with the people we love – so give yourself grace and try to not sweat the small stuff. 

 

In conclusion, there is no silver bullet, and I’ll be the first to admit that all these habits take discipline and consistency. Still, I genuinely believe Moments is the ONLY busy working mom schedule or busy working mom template that is dynamic, customized to only include what YOU want to achieve, and QUICK to implement.  

I built this tool for myself and felt like it was so helpful that I shared it with my sisters, then friends, and then my friend’s friends. Now, here I am sharing it with busy working moms I’ve never met…because I feel such a connection to all working moms out there trying to juggle both a family they love to death and a career that also provides the financial security/confidence/energy to be the best version of themselves. If this sounds like you, I hope you’ll consider giving Moments a try! 

 

What do you think of these tips? Would you add or remove any? We’d love to hear your comments. Also, if you have any questions, we’d love to hear from you!!