Time Blocking, ToDoist, and Temper Tantrums: How I Do Life as a Freelancing, Homeschooling Mom of Four

This is a guest post by Annie Mueller. She is a writer and mom of four. She blogs about productivity for creatives at FreakishlyProductive.com.

Hi, I’m Annie, and I’m…

I’m a productivity addict.

It’s true.

But what’s also true is that I obsess over productivity because I’m not naturally great at it, and I want to be better.

I’m a married mom of four, a freelance writer, a home schooler, frequent traveler, party-hoster, laundry-avoider, obsessive reader, overachiever. Some days are great; others are chaotic. Some weeks end with me hiding in the coat closet, weeping softly and binge-eating out of the Nutella jar.

But most of the time, we roll along pretty well. That’s because, over time, I’ve focused in on a few key strategies and techniques that really work for me.  Productivity itself is not that complicated; it is based on a few basic, universal principles such as knowing your goals, working efficiently, focusing on priorities, and using resources (like time and energy) wisely. The options in how you apply those productivity principles, however, are nearly endless.

These are my choices, the methods that have worked well for me in taking those big productivity ideas and applying them to my finite (but full) little life.

The Foundational Strategy: Time Blocking

I learned a while back that scheduling my day into time slots, or even assigning particular times to activities, causes more stress than productivity.

This is partially because I don’t like being boxed in and feeling like I’m under pressure.

It’s mostly because I am doing life with four young kids, which means flexibility isn’t a nicety, it’s a necessity. Tying tasks or errands to a particular time of day meant that I always felt like I was failing. I couldn’t finish Task A in time to transition to Task B. Or an inevitable kid-related crisis or need would pop up, and we’d be off schedule… again.

Enter my new strategy, suggested by my husband who does not ever think in terms of minutes or hours or schedules or deadlines. He thinks in terms of NOW and WAY OFF IN THE DISTANT FUTURE.

Using timeblocks or timeboxes isn’t a new concept, but it wasn’t one I had really tried before. What I had always used before to manage my life was a combination of a calendar and a to-do list. Pre-kids, this combination had worked fairly well for me.

Post-kids, this combination became deadly. At the end of every day I was frustrated by my inability to keep us all on schedule, and guilt-ridden because I’d only managed to do maybe 2 out of the 27 things on my ever-growing list.

Now I use my calendar, and lists, with the time blocking strategy, like this:

• Time-bound activities (birthday party, doctor’s appointment) get added at the appropriate date/time on the calendar.
• Days get divided into blocks of time.
• Tasks, projects, or focus areas get assigned under those timeblocks.

A timeblock does not mean “finish these assigned tasks”; it means “work for this block of time on these tasks, starting with the first and working until you finish, then starting on the next, and so on.”

In a single timeblock, I work for a focused amount of time on a designated set of tasks or a particular project or an area. But the goal is not to get the tasks done or reach a certain place in the project; it’s simply to work for that amount of time, focused on what I’ve assigned to it.

Editor’s Note: See also, outcome vs output.

What isn’t done in that block gets assigned to the next related timeblock.

Here’s what a typical day looks like for us, using the timeblock strategy.

A Typical Daily Schedule

A typical weekday gets divided into 7 main time blocks, punctuated by our regular routines:

Working this way gives me two things I desperately need: flexibility and structure.

Since we homeschool, I have the flexibility to start and end our days as I see fit. We don’t have to start school at 8 in the morning. We don’t have to do school at all in the mornings; we could do afternoon school, or evening school, or a little bit of all three.

But too much flexibility results in chaos. Life is easier when you stick a good bit of it into a sturdy structure. That way you don’t have to rebuild it, from the ground up, every single morning.

We might have friends over on Wednesday night, resulting in a later bedtime for everyone; Thursday morning, I’ll take advantage of our flexibility and let the kids sleep in later than usual. But when sleepy little faces start appearing at my elbow, I’ll end my Work Block and start in on our Morning Routine.

Flexibility and structure work together beautifully.

My Favorite Productivity Tools

There are so many great productivity tools. I get to try and review quite a few new apps and I love doing that. Some I incorporate into my systems. Some I use for a while but find they don’t work for my purposes or style.

But a few tools have been my consistent allies.

Google Calendar has been my calendar of choice forever, basically. Actually I prefer paper calendars, but for the purposes of sharing important time-bound events with my husband, Google Cal is the best. He adds his stuff, I add my stuff, and hopefully it all works out. If it doesn’t, at least we’re both aware of it.

ToDoist is my task manager. Really, my whole life manager. I love its clean interface and its simplicity and its lovely functionality. I happily pay for a premium membership and consider it worth every penny a thousand times over.

I’ve set up projects in ToDoist that correlate to the main time blocks in my day, and I also have more specific projects, most related to my work. Task List is for any item that doesn’t belong to a specific project. The Calendar project is where all the time-bound events get funneled, so I can see them as I plan each day without having to switch screens.

IFTTT and Zapier make Google Cal and ToDoist play nice together. I’ve set up automations so that anything added into Google Cal automatically gets sent to ToDoist as an item in my “Calendar” project.

Paper and Pen still remain my best tools for note taking, brain storming, idea tinkering, and outline drafting. I have one notebook that I use as a journal/catch-all, one dedicated to notes from reading, and one for writing outlines.

Weekends and Checklists

People tend to think, when you school from home and work from home, that you have plenty of time to just fit in all the home stuff, like cooking and cleaning and laundry and creating Pinterest projects.

Perhaps this is true for some people. It is not true for me.

I have a Weekend Checklist. When I get through that checklist on the weekend, the next week is going to be a good one. A productive one. One in which I don’t start out already feeling behind.

When I don’t get through that checklist? Well, Mondays kind of suck if I don’t get through the checklist, because I am unprepared and playing catch-up while also playing keep-up, which turns out to be an impossible game.

My weekend checklist is super-exciting. Want to see it?

Actually I felt kind of bad for a while about requiring time for this stuff on the weekends. Weekends are for fun! Parties! Relaxing! Movies! Naps! Yay!

But the thing is, this list doesn’t take that long and having it all done relieves a huge amount of stress and chaos and gets us all prepared for the week to come. I might take the kids and do grocery shopping Friday afternoon, get the family to help with food prep, laundry, and cleaning for a couple of hours on Saturday, then take an hour or so at my desk on Sunday to get through the rest of it.

Because the Weekend Checklist has made my life so much better, I have proceeded to make checklists for other things. We now have a Pre-Party Checklist, a Post-Party Checklist, a Travel Checklist, Chore Checklists, and School Checklists.

Some of these go in ToDoist for my benefit; some go on Google Drive so I can share them with Joe; and some get printed out for the kids.

I don’t want to over plan and suck the fun out of life, but all of the crazy checklist making has had the opposite effect. This stuff needs to be done. When I’m the only one who knows about it, I’m the only one who can make it happen.

As soon as I put it on a list, however, and share that with other people? We can all help accomplish it together and get through it faster. The result is that I don’t feel exhausted and frustrated from having to do all the work, and we end up having more time to do fun stuff together.

Dealing with What You Don’t Plan

There’s another element to this idea of being a productive parent, and that’s the stuff that doesn’t show up on a checklist.

You don’t plan for your kids to get the flu, but they do.
You don’t plan for your spouse to need an appendectomy, but it happens.
You don’t plan for a neighbor to need a ride to the hospital, or a friend to need emergency babysitting, or your editor to need the piece tomorrow instead of next week, or your client to throw an extra ten hours of work your way…

But this is life. And life refuses to be reduced to a calendar or a checklist.

Frankly, I’m really thankful for that. We need the chaos and the crisis to interrupt us; we need the unforeseen opportunities to blindside us.

We need to be reminded that life is more than a schedule and a set of goals, and we are more than workers or doers or achievers.

We are people, full of infinite creativity and possibility. We are people, and we belong to each other first; we belong to each other more than we belong to our own productivity or our own priorities.

Life’s unpredictability reminds of us that. And if you’re a parent? Well, kids are the most consistent way to bring inconsistency into your life.

It’s when you have to put down your laptop and read a book to your sick kid that you get a free reminder: this isn’t about you.

It’s when you’re leaving that grocery cart full of food and carrying a screaming toddler out to your car that you get another one: you don’t have it all figured out.

Those are good reminders. If we’re willing, they keep us humble, flexible, and open to accepting help.

And that’s exactly how we need to be if we want to be truly productive: willing to learn, able to change, and ready to work with others to reach truly great goals.

This is a guest post by Annie Mueller. She is a writer and mom of four. She blogs about productivity for creatives at FreakishlyProductive.com.