Manage Your Time

HAVING CHILDREN robs you of many things: your SLEEP, your SANITY, and the biggest loss being your ME TIME. Don’t despair, you can juggle everything and still be a good parent.

- Lucy Taylor

“Seemingly tossed away with the placenta, and all the clothes that used to fit, your time disappears down the plughole along with the new baby’s bathwater,” says mom of three Alison Mitchell, author of Time Management for Manic Mums. It’s far from unusual for moms to sit down with a tub of ice-cream at 1am because it’s the only ‘me’ time they can find. It’s now common for unpaid bills to pile up, to spend precious minutes every morning looking for that pair of shoes, keys or mobile phone and to screech into school two minutes late, everyday.

Even though many more women now work outside the home, they still do the lion’s share of caring and homework in the home. Doing everything is having a huge impact on women’s lives.

One survey done to look into the amount of time women spend on childcare and domestic duties, revealed that women with full-time jobs spend an average 62 hours per month on household tasks. Stay at home moms’ average is 81 hours. From this alone, it’s easy to see how many women feel their time is not their own.

Even though Mitchell’s book is packed with tips for how to spend less time doing humdrum things and more on enjoying life and your children, she admits she can be quite chaotic herself.

HAVE A ROUTINE

Mom of three, Ntebo, 38, says, “I am quite a spontaneous person and tend to move onto the next thing without finishing what I am doing, so I was always a bit manic. I would book holidays too late and we’d end up in a place we didn’t want to be in and with a room we didn’t like, and then washing was never done when we got home.