Three Ways to Save Time on Household Tasks
Are you as insane and crazy busy as I am right now? I want to share three ways to save time on your household tasks.
With COVID you are remote schooling, homeschooling, or schooling all the time. You're constantly going back and forth on whether you are going to send your kids to school or not.
Trying to juggle all of the responsibilities around your house or you're delegating them. You're splitting them up with your spouse. It's a lot. And it's exhausting and tiring.
The thing that inspired this post was Eve Rodsky’s book called Fair Play - A Game-Changing Solution For When You Have Too Much To Do And More Life To Live. Does that sound like you right now? (You can also listen to it on Audible. If you use this link smallbizmama.com/audible you can get a free 30 day trial with two free audiobooks from audible)
Outsource Some Household Task to Save Time
You have this big, huge list of things you need to do. If you don’t have a list yet, you can come up with your own list. Or you can use the list from the Fair Play book.
Look at this list and see what you can outsource. There are many things on your household task list that you can outsource.
What you can outsource
For example:
- Laundry: If you hate doing laundry, do you know that there are laundromats that will wash your clothes for you? You just have to drop them off and when you pick it up it will be folded or hung.
- Outside tasks: your lawn care, and fertilization.
- Cleaning
- Food prep: If you don’t like food prep, there are services that will do the prep for you. There are meal services that will send you just what you need to make the meal. Or there are some services that will send you frozen meals either for you or for your kids that all you have to do is heat them up.
- Shopping: Use store drive-up or curbside pickup can be huge time savers.
So the first thing you need to do after you’ve made your list is to think outside the box for what you can outsource. If you find something that you don’t think you can outsource, go to the Small Biz Mama group on Facebook and ask if anyone knows how to outsource this. And I bet you that they will come up with a solution for you.
Delegate based on strengths to save time on household tasks
The second one is to delegate based on strengths. Now here's the thing when you delegate. You have to delegate all of the pieces. So Eve Rodsky who wrote Fair Play talks about CTE: conception, planning, and execution. Don't conceive and plan and then give it to your spouse to execute.
That's not going to work. You have to outsource the whole thing. The nice thing is you can then let it go.
Make sure you are delegating based on strengths. For example, my husband is so much better at cleaning than I am. But I'm a better cook. So I do the cooking. And he does the cleaning.
You don't have to keep the delegation that way forever. Split it up. One week you cook, and the next week your spouse cooks. You can trade back and forth as long as you're clear about it.
Don’t forget that when you are delegating you are no longer in control and you have to let go of that task. Make sure to delegate all components of the task.
Save time on household tasks by using 15-minute blocks
The third thing is to utilize 15- minute blocks. Some people designate a whole day for one task like laundry. You might have a laundry day. Or you might do a load or two of laundry every day. Here is where the 15-minute block comes in: In the morning you can sort, and put in to wash. Then at lunch, you can put the clothes into the dryer. Put in the second load to wash, and then before dinner, you can flip it over. Pull out the clothes from the dryer, fold, and put away. And then in the evening while watching tv, you can fold and put away the second load of laundry.
These tasks do not take long at all. It will probably take you about five minutes to flip the laundry over, and 10 minutes to fold and put away.
As I was listening to Greg McKeown's podcast and he was saying that we overestimate what we can get done in a day, but we underestimate what we can get done in 10 minutes.
You might be thinking that you only have 10-minutes of time and that you can’t get anything done during that short period of time. But in reality, you can. You can do things like doing little pickups.
Set your timer for 15-minutes
Set your timer for 15 minutes and go into a room and just pick up as much as you can. You can put on some music and go into the room. What can you clean up? Throw away? What can you get out of that room that doesn't need to be there?
There is so much that you can get done in 15 minutes that you just don't realize. So set a timer, put on some music, and see what you can get done.
Three ways to save time on household tasks
So those are my three tips:
- Outsource
- Delegate, and
- Utilize your 15-minute blocks.
Now, if you want more tips, you get my Mother of All Time Course. The course is a five-part video series and it's completely free. This course will show you how to cut your household chores and your life chores by at least 10 hours a week.
