Simple Time Saving Tips For Nurse Moms
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To the mom who is a nurse: You’ve got amazing skills and you are beyond capable of running the world.
At work you are busy caring for patients, organizing plans of care, giving life-saving treatments, advocating for patients, all while continuing to make them feel safe and well-cared for. Now its time to apply your nurse time management skills at home. After all, nurses know more then anyone about how to prioritize the most important tasks first. Our patients lives often depend on it.
No one has the ability to multi-task the way a nurse does. Here are a few time saving tips and tools to help you apply those talents as a mom managing a household:
Simple Time Saving Tips For Nurse Moms:
1. Have your to-do list in your phone
I love planners because I think they are pretty. Problem is, when you have children you almost never get a chance to look at them. Which is why I have found it necessary to keep my to-do lists organized in my phone where I can easily see them.
Here are a few awesome apps to stay organized:
- Trello: This is my favorite!
- Google Tasks: simple tasks in Gmail and Google Calendar
- Google Keep: A bulletin board for your tasks
- Remember The Milk: very simple yet powerful task management
2. Make preparing lunches and family meals easy
- Sunbasket Meal Delivery (Get $35 off Sun Basket meals with this link!)
- Amazon Prime Now grocery delivery
- Slender Kitchen
Choose from 18 healthy & delicious recipes a week from Sun Basket! Save $45 if you order today!
3. Listen to podcasts for perspective on nursing, motherhood, parenting and lifestyle tips
Podcasts are a great way to add a little adult conversation to your day. After the birth of my first baby I seriously missed reading books. So, I would take my daughter for long walks and listen to podcasts for hours. I was able to walk off my baby weight relatively fast and learn about ways to make my life easier in the process.
Here are a few of my favorite podcasts:
- Dave Ramsey (I listened to every one of his shows and it inspired me to pay off $27,000 in nursing school student loans that same year!)
- Your Next Shift (I was actually a guest on this podcast and it was so fun!)
- Brillant Business Moms: Interviews with Mompreneurs doing amazing things with their online businesses.
- The Minimalists
- Fresh RN
- Nurse Keith
4. Make it super simple to tidy up your home
I remember people telling me just to “let things go” after I had a baby. Then I heard it even more after my second baby. I think this might be the worst advice I have ever gotten as a new mom. Who feels better when their lives and homes are a complete disaster? Not me.
I have found though the years that its easier to keep my home clean and organized when I don’t keep things that we are not using or providing a helpful service to us. Basically, if its not being used, then its got to go. Here are two books I read that inspired me to declutter our home and keep it that way:
5. Make family photo books in 20 minutes with Chatbooks
ChatBooks is a mobile app where you can pick photos from your social media accounts or mobile device and have them printed in a pretty book. Chatbooks are photo books for people who don’t have time to make photo books (ahem, nurse moms!) You can easily add, edit, and rearrange your favorite photos to create a beautiful photo book.
Before I had children I had the time to spend hours making photo books and ordering pictures. Now that I have children, I want to document everything they do and make hard copy books for our family and ourselves. Problem is, there just isn’t time anymore! Chatbooks has been the best and easiest solution for this problem.
Every few months I go through my phone and make a new book. I have books for both of my children first year of life, all of our family photoshoots, vacations, and other special events. Plus, it has made it so easy to make great birthday and holiday gifts for grandparents as well.
6. Get off social media
Limiting social media is simply one of the best time saving tips there is! There is nothing more time wasteful then scrolling through social media or constantly uploading photos.
Focus on whats most important to you. Besides, studies say that people who look at social media are likely to become more depressed. And if your are a busy working mom, you have got no time for that!
I try and focus on any of these productive tasks instead of mindlessly using social media:
- being a wife
- raising an amazing kid
- spending time with friends
- writing in this blog
- cooking
- cleaning
- reading
- listening to music or a podcast
- meditating
- practicing yoga
- sleeping
- relaxing
Recently, I was reading an article about an author named Tim Ferris who wrote a book called The 4-Hour Workweek. He talked a lot about how being perpetually busy just for the sake of business is actually a form of laziness. Ferris explained that on a superficial level, being busy is a satisfying substitute for doing important work. “It’s very easy to confuse activity with productivity,” says Ferris.
This got me thinking… Is my addiction to social media just me being lazy? Am I unconsciously browsing social media instead of living my life with intention? This realization inspired me to do an experiment and quit all forms of social media for one week. And guess what?… I survived! And I was motivated me to limit myself to checking my social media accounts 1-2 times a week from then on.
I have so much more time now to focus on things that actually serve me well.
I hope these time saving tips inspired you to be more productive and purposeful. Now, continue doing what you do best and continue running the world!
