Contemporary Mums: 10 Keys To Managing Your TIME Successfully (Part One)

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By Eyinade Eweje

Contemporary mums are always on call and there’s hardly enough time to meet up before 24 hours breezes away, especially with the unpredictable nature of traffic in our country. Save some extra hours to get more items in your long list of to-dos sorted and enjoy more leisure with these tips:

1.PUT YOUR ACTS TOGETHER: Cultivate the culture of keeping things in specific places your little kids can’t reach and returning them immediately after each use. Imagine if everything was in place 90% of the time, picking them up for use when they’re needed becomes a breeze. Then, you wouldn’t have to spin your wheels looking for a name card or that piece of jewelry on a busy Monday morning.

2. SCHEDULE TO-DOS OFF PEAK: Standing on long queues at the bank to pay utility bills, sitting in rush hour traffic, navigating the crowd at the grocery store on busy days are sinkholes that are time consuming. If affordable, get a driver and use traffic time to work off emails, make calls, or for some quiet devotion, instead of just looking out of the window. Make a habit of doing things that necessitate you to commute ‘off peak’, so you can arrive at and leave work early. Find out if it’s possible to pay your utility bills online to avoid bank queue. Less time spent waiting is more time available to devote to indulging yourself.

3. MAP OUT YOUR DAY: Begin each day by quickly mapping out where your time goes. The idea is to make you figure out the haphazard elements in your schedule to decide if you’ll need to streamline or not to free you up for what’s really important. Sometimes, it’s not the number of commitments on your schedule that counts but the disorder and uncertainty surrounding them. Working out solutions to potential problems early enough helps you utilize your time efficiently and ensure your day runs smoothly.

4. MAKE NOTES AS YOU GO: You stopped at the store on your way from work to get the groceries for dinner but you forget one important ingredient. However nerve-breaking it might be, you suspend preparing dinner to source for where to buy in your hood. Taking stock of what you need regularly and jotting them in a notepad you carry around relieves you of frustrating incidences like this and helps maximize your time.

5. SHOP IN BULK: Make optimum use of your pantry, refrigerator and deep freezer to store appropriate food items guaranteed to serve you long enough. Buy toiletries and other household items in bulk. Putting a stop to the almost daily trip to the market or mall saves you an extra hour or two to play around with.

To be continued....