Working parents and single parents usually always have one thing in common-lack of time! Taking care of a family while working eight or more hours per day outside of the home can be an extremely daunting task, even for a Martha Stewart type personality. Try some of the following ideas to help ease the load while hopefully having some time left for fun with your family:
• Cooking takes up a lot of time, but stopping at the local fast food restaurant several times per week can be costly both health wise and on your budget. Try cooking several meals at a time over the course of the week. For example let’s say you are having spaghetti and meatballs at one meal, cook a double batch so that later in the week you can have a meatball sub. Cooking an extra meal and freezing it for later use is also a great way to save time. Someone I know gets together once a week with another friend to cook several meals for that week for their families. This makes the cooking experience more fun when sharing it with someone else.
• Be as organized as possible! Keep your stuff picked up as much as you possibly can to avoid clutter. Every evening take five to ten minutes to try to put the majority of your clutter away so that you do not end up using two hours on the weekend putting away your piled up stuff. Enlist your children’s help to do this with their toys every night as well. Use bins, boxes, file cabinets, and whatever else you need for storage.
• Start the day off on the right foot. Try to do as much as possible for the next day at night before you go to bed. Make lunches. Set out your clothes and your children’s for the next day (This is a good time to check to see if they need to be ironed or missing a button). It is much better to invest a little bit of time at night in case that alarm does not go off, or so you do not have to run around doing the 100-yard dash in the morning just to get to work on time. Try to get up a few minutes early if possible, so that you do not feel rushed.
Prior planning is one major key to saving time. Writing out a plan to save time seems counter intuitive, but will really pay off in the long run.