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Laughing Lemons

The Journey of a Stay-At-Home + Work-From-Home Mom

How To Be Productive Working From Home With 3 Kids

April 10, 2017 by contact@heatherbsmith.com Leave a Comment

I never knew what tired was until my daughter was born and she only joined our family 10 months ago. Being a work-from-home mom who is in the middle of launching a graphic and web design business my time is very limited.

My typical day begins around 7:00am. I’m so lucky that my husband takes care of our boys in the morning so I can focus on myself and our daughter. I am not a morning person and every morning I dream about sleeping-in but I rarely get to.

By 9:00am our youngest 2 are at their preschool that they go to Monday – Friday from 9:00 – 12:00. During those precious 3 hours, I schedule client meetings, work with a couple of my ongoing clients, and do as much work as I can. The time flies by but I love it.

By 1:30pm the littles are down for a nap and I have an hour and a half until my oldest gets off the school bus. During that time I try to answer client and prospective client emails, schedule any other phones I might need to have and do any quick jobs that I might have.

Once my oldest son gets home from school I can forget about getting any work done until my daughter goes to bed between 7:00pm and 7:30pm. Once she goes to bed, I’m able to really start my workday and I work until 11:30pm – 12:00am.

My schedule seems insane and  I remind myself that this is just a season of life. I know that one day my kids won’t need me as much as they do now and some days I long for those days and other days I enjoy my kids being little. I love being home with my kids and the flexibility of being a graphic/web designer so that I’m able to work from home.

I am currently working with about 8 clients, which can be overwhelming because they all have needs and I want to give them the best of me but how do I do it?

Lists. I have tried Trello, Notes, handwritten notes, a whiteboard, and I finally landed on Asana. Asana is a productivity app that can be used with a team or you can use it as a team of 1 which is perfect for me.

I’m able to create tasks, some with deadlines and some without. Every night before I go to bed, I will review my unfinished tasks to plan the next day. I’ve also started focusing on one project at a time. I find that it helps me to cross things off my list so I try to do the easiest tasks first.

I also try to break-up tasks that I do not enjoy doing such as building databases. If you are a creative then you know building out databases is not creative and feels like busy work. I have learned that in order for me to be productive than I have to break-up this task to add anything in the middle of it to help me get it done.

I definitely don’t think that I’ve got it down and could be more productive. Sometimes I think it would be helpful to uninstall Facebook and Instagram from my phone but I’m growing and what I’m currently doing works for me.

If you have a great system down, then I would love to know what works for you. We are all in this together so let’s build our community.

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The Girl Behind the Lemon

Laughing LemonsMy name is Heather and I am the owner of Laughing Lemons. I am from the Georgia, met my husband in Orlando, lived in NYC for 7.5 years, and now we are living in Atlanta where we are raising our 2 boys and our daughter. Check out the about page to learn more.

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