Relaunch Your Career Part 5 – How to Manage your Time Better

Over the next 6 weeks we are talking about how to instil the right mindset to relaunch your career successfully.

At Supermums we specialise in helping people to relaunch their career and we understand the challenges that many parents face when thinking about taking the plunge to re-skill and relaunch a career into something new. It’s a scary prospect so it’s so important to get the right support around you to make it happen successfully. Supermums combine coaching, mentoring and training to empower trainees with the right mindset to launch their career successfully. We wanted to share some of this wisdom with you so you better understand it yourself or share with it someone who might be in that position.  Join us to learn about the following mindset attributes that can support you on your journey to relaunch your career:

• Relaunch Your Career Part 1 – How to relaunch your career with confidence 
• Relaunch Your Career Part 2 – How to overcome anxiety
• Relaunch Your Career Part 3 – How to re-energise yourself
• Relaunch Your Career Part 4 – How to stop burnout before it starts 
• Relaunch Your Career Part 5 – How to Manage Your Time Better
• Relaunch Your Career Part 6 – How to juggle a career and kids effectively

This week we kick off with Part 5 – How to Manage Your Time Better.

To discuss this topic Heather Black, CEO of Supermums was delighted to be joined by Nikki Oden, founder of Your Ideal Mom Life blog and Love your Mom Life podcast. Nikki is dedicated to helping you navigate mom life and crush your goals— without the guilt. She loves talking about time management and hacks to help you manage time better so you don’t have to juggle and struggle.

Time management is always top of the list of the things that mums struggle with it seems when it comes to juggling kids and a career. 

It’s really hard to enjoy life and enjoy what you’re doing in business and in work, if you can’t manage your time because you always feel like you’re letting someone down or something’s slipping through the cracks, or I’m one missed deadline away. from everything falling apart, and that’s just not a good feeling. It’s like you’re in fight or flight all the time. 

Hack 1 – Be Intentional with the Right Mindset

If we aren’t sticking to the plan then the reason is because we’re not starting with what we want. And if we aren’t starting with what we want, we don’t really know where we want to go. It’s kind of like Alice and Wonderland. Well, if you don’t know where you’re going, then it doesn’t really matter which direction you walk in, does it? Right When she’s talking to the treasure cat, it’s very true with our time.

If I don’t know exactly what I want to accomplish, then. I’m not going to be intentional with how I spend my time. I will allow other people to dictate how I spend my day, whether that’s because there’s a fire that pops up that I feel I need to urgently put out now, or some other crisis or disaster happens.
Some of those things. Feel like they’re important, but they’re really just urgent and they don’t need to happen right now. But we get pulled in all these directions because we don’t have a clear focus on where we want to go. Mm-hmm. . So the first question I always ask moms, especially moms in business, is, what do you want?

A lot of times we don’t take the time to sit down and think about what do I want personally as a woman, as a mother, what do I want to accomplish in my life? And then professionally, what do I wanna accomplish? So I really recommend people sit down and take a minute. To dig deep into what they wanna achieve in the next 12 months. And you can do this at any time of the year. Obviously January is the time everyone wants to do it, but you could do it right now and decide what do I wanna achieve in the next 12 months, personally. So let’s start with personally, because maybe there’s some health goal that you’re, you’ve been meaning to tackle or there’s something in one of your relationships that you want.

Improve or to be better and be really crystal clear and focus on what you want to have happen. Like really visualize what that would look like for you and write those goals down. And business, we’re really good at this. We, we sit down, we talk about our big goals, and we talk about milestones, etc, but we don’t always do that in our personal lives, and it’s very important too to avoid our personal lives falling apart. 

So I think we always need to focus on our personal goals first, and I recommend having no more than three personal and three professional goals. A. Feels manageable, right? Yeah. I mean, if you only have one in each category, that even better. But if you, if you are really ambitious and you have, we wanna have more than one, I recommend not having more than three big goals.

And then from there, once we know what we want to achieve, we can back into what we need to be doing on a monthly, weekly, and even daily basis to get there. 

And then once we have those big things crystallized in our minds and we’re moving toward them, we won’t feel that temptation to say yes to things that aren’t gonna support that big goal and fill our plates with too many things. And like I said before, get distracted by things that seem urgent, but really in reality are not important.

Hack 2 – How to Turn Ideas into a Plan 

I always recommend every week doing a complete mental dump in one place. . So if you’re an electronic person, you can use the notes section of your phone, or if you are like me and you like to put pen to paper, you have a a piece of paper where everything is gonna go and sit down for 30 minutes, give yourself 30 minutes and write down everything that you have to do, even if it has nothing to do with your big goals, like just everything that’s on your mind. So books you wanna read, courses you want to take, workouts that you wanna try, or little things like texts you need to respond to… I’m talking everything.

It doesn’t matter if it’s been on your list for months. If it’s on your mind, put it on the paper. And this serves two purposes. One, it’s out of your mind and onto paper, it just feels better. It really does. Yeah, that feeling that we have where we’re anxious or we feel like we’re gonna drop a ball or we’re forgetting something, it’s because we have so much in our mind and it’s not captured anywhere.

We’re trying to remember it. It’s noise in our brain all the time, and if it’s something that’s nagging us, like, I feel like I’m forgetting something. And so once you have it all on out on the paper it feels better. It doesn’t have to be pretty, it just needs to be out there.

Hack 3 – Prioritising Your To-Do List 

Once you have it all down then you can sort through it and prioritize what must be done, what we would merely like to do, and what we must do, what we should do, and what we would like to do.

So I, I put those in like an A, B, and C category. The things I must do, the things that are on my list are anything having to do with taking care of myself so I can’t wiggle out of it. Having to take care of myself is, is an A item or if it supports one of those big, huge goals I have personally or professionally, that’s an A item. That’s a must do. 

Anything else that I feel like I really should do, like this would be a nice. Things to do if I had a little bit of extra time and it, it is important, but not as important as the A things that’s a B. And then anything I’d merely like to do is a c. 

And then I can, now I can go back to my planner and I can calendar all the A items, all the A items go in first, no B’s or C’s.

Hack 4 – Outsourcing or Delegation!

Think, is there a way for me to automate this task or outsource this task or get help with it? Because probably those things that don’t make it on your calendar don’t necessarily need to be done by you.. So I’m talking about things like grocery shopping or even shipping your kids from point A to point B, if you can get help with that task or with laundry or things around the house. Those things are very, very easily outsourced and they’re really easy ways to take back hours of your week because although they need to be done, they don’t need to be done by you if we’re being honest.

To listen to more hacks and insights on the above suggestions, check out the podcast to learn more.

Thinking about re-launching your career?

At Supermums we specialise in helping mums (and dads) to relaunch & reshape their careers for the better. We have helped over 1300+ people from over 10+ different countries globally, all with a wide range of education & industry backgrounds, to relaunch into flexible, well paid careers that improve their circumstances, and mean more family time.

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Whether you are returning to work after a break, on maternity / paternity / career leave, or currently working and looking for something with more flexibility or better pay, we’ve got you covered! Supermums are passionate about education, and we accelerate your success by providing not only the technical training, but also mentoring, coaching, work experience, peer support and job search support.

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