10 Productivity Tips and Tools for Mothers

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Last week, I spoke about time blocking (link) as a productivity hack that can help us stop running around like headless chickens and get more focused work done. This week I want to share 10 productivity tips and tools that have helped me run the household a little bit more efficiently.

The main thing I focus on when I want to be more productive in the running of the household is to streamline processes as much as possible. Some may call it cutting corners but I beg to differ 🙂

Streamlining processes needs to be an ongoing process as the children grow older and more capable, and as each person gets more efficient in his assigned chore. Streamlining the processes also reduces my stress level because streamlining means simpler and less steps to teach my progeny! Win-win for all!

I have split up the tips and tools into Meals, Household and Laundry to make it easier for you to scan through what you need at this season of your life.

Productivity tips and tools for meal prep

1. Make friends with your local butcher and fishmonger

Next to menu planning, this has been the greatest time saver! My butcher (pork & chicken) debones and slices all the meats for me in the sizes I want and packs them into the portion sizes I need. My fishmonger on the other hand descales, debones the fish I buy. He also deshells my prawns, and squids are cleaned out and sliced. All at no extra charge.This way, I can just go back and either store them as is, labelled of course. Or if I wish to, add in the marinate before storing them. They are either placed into the fridge for the current or next day’s meals or packed into the freezer.

Ask nicely

I am not naive, I know they are probably nicer to me because I am a big spender at their stall so I make sure to leverage on that! But even when I had a much smaller family, I used to make friends with the butcher at my previous place (Pek Kio Market) and the butcher will also do the same for me. Just be very polite when asking and make sure you are not requesting this on their busiest days, i.e. weekends.

Nowadays, I am on such good terms with them that I have their handphone numbers and I place my orders the night before marketing day so that I do not have to stand in line to wait for my food. Cool, eh?

2. Menu Planning or Meal Planning

I have written about menu/meal planning before. But it is truly one of the best productivity tools (next to making friends with your butchers!) even though I actually dislike it very much! Yes it is a love-hate relationship indeed.

Just a recap. A menu or meal plan is simply a plan for all your meals. It can be a weekly plan, a fortnightly plan or a monthly plan. It doesn’t matter. The idea is that you have a plan and you do not freak at around 5pm daily over what to cook. And then realise that you have to run out to the grocery store to get missing ingredients. Or worse, do what I often do, order MacDonald’s!

If you have no idea where to start, you can always google “menu planning” and get almost 58 million suggested sites! Craziness, huh? You would think menu planning is the easiest thing to do. But apparently it isn’t. And that is why there are so many sites offering to menu plan for you at a small fee. There are also plenty of menu planning apps if you prefer to go digital.

Sample menu plans

If you would like to try one out for FREE before using it, you can check out Meal Planning Central as an example of a planned menu plan with grocery list and all. If you have multiple food sensitivities or prefer a GAPS Menu Plan, Cara of Health Home and Happiness has her own GAPS approved Meal Plans. Click here to visit Health Home and Happiness.

The What can I eat now? 30 Days on the GAPS Intro Diet Meal Plan was what helped us when we first did GAPS in 2011. It was a good intro for us as it gave me some ideas of what to cook with all the restrictions in place. Click here to view more details. But once I got the hang of it, I unsubscribed.

That was the only Menu Plan I ever paid for coz I don’t like to pay for what I think I can do on my own 🙂 It does take a fair bit of brain cells to get up a weekly menu but the rewards are great! If you don’t feel like your brains has enough brain width at the moment to deal with menu planning, or you would like to widen your repertoire of dishes, paying for someone else to meal plan for you is a small investment to make. Once you get the hang of it, you can click unsubscribe.

No more decision fatigue

Having a menu plan settles in your mind what you’ll be eating for the next week/weeks/months ahead. It not only reduces decision fatigue – shall I cook fish or chicken? Shall I braise it or deep fry it? It also makes grocery shopping more efficient. You don’t wander up and down the aisle wondering what to buy, something very stressful when you have children with you. Grocery shopping is tiring in itself. Having to keep an eye on small children along the way depletes all my energy for the day! So the planning helps me be focused on what I need to get. What’s even better is being able to email/text my husband the list so that he can help me get what is needed!

Related Posts: Doing GAPS in Singapore, Travelling on a Restricted Diet. Menu Planning and How to Menu Plan

3. Using the crockpot/slow cooker or oven

The best meals in my opinion are those you can throw into your cooking implement and have it do everything for me. All I need to do is add the spices/marinade and then voila! Delicious food after the pre-determinate time has passed. So crockpots or slow cookers, pressure cookers, Instapots, and ovens fall into this category.

This can be a lifesaver in so many ways. The downside is that you need to plan ahead if you want to make this work successfully. Because it needs time! You can’t throw in your frozen food at 5pm and hope to have a meal ready by 6pm! So some planning ahead is required for this to work.

4. Freezer meals

Freezer meals are another lifesaver. Freezer meals can be cooked or uncooked.

a. Cooked freezer meals

With cooked freezer meals all you need to do is thaw the meal in the fridge overnight and then heat it up at the needed meal times. Although cooked freezer meals save more time on the day of the meal, you will need to set aside some time beforehand (at least 3 – 4 hours of uninterrupted time) to cook them, cool them down and then freeze them. Otherwise, do the cook once eat twice or thrice method. That is, you cook double or triple the portion of the same dish. Eat one portion that very day and freeze the other 2 portions for another day’s meal.

But be warned, some food just doesn’t taste as nice cooked, frozen, thawed and then heated up. We do not like cooked freezer meals. Especially if you have fussy kids or husbands 🙂 We generally do not like eating frozen then reheated cooked foods.

b. Raw freezer meals

Uncooked freezer meals need more planning ahead. These are meals which have been prepped (chopped/minced) and marinated but still raw. You will need to allow time for it to thaw AND cook. So the night before cooking, you will need to thaw it in fridge and then give yourself time to cook it the next day. Especially if you are planning to use the crockpot. If it is a stir fry dish, you must remember to take it out half to an hour before meal time for the food to get to room temperature before stir frying it. But no meal prep required on cooking day! And we all know how long and tedious meal prep can get.

With the raw frozen meals, it is very easy to assemble them the moment you return from your grocery shopping. If you managed to make friends with your local butcher and/or fishmonger (see Point #1) then all you have to do is pour in your marinade/spices, pack them up into freezer safe ziplock bags or the appropriate storage containers and put in freezer. Otherwise, you will  need to set aside time to chop and minced and marinate the meats yourself, then pack them into the freezer safe ziplock bags.

5. Stir Fries

I love stir fries! It is the easiest and fastest way to get food on the table in less than 30 minutes! And stir fried rice or noodles are even better because it is a one dish meal that can be served up with almost no hassle. If all the meats and vegetables have been prepped before meal times, all I need is 15 to 20 minutes to stir fry everything up.

Productivity Tools and Tips for housecleaning

6. iRobots

The best productivity tool for housecleaning is my Roomba. And a very close second is my Scooba. My 2 trusty robots have served me well. Almost 8 years to date! Well worth the money we spent on them!

I have said before and I am saying it again, investing in the iRobots has saved me heaps of time and angst. Time because we can turn the Roomba (dry vacuum) or Scooba (wet/mop vacuum) loose when we leave the house and return to a cleaned house. Ours are the older models (bought in 2008) but the newer models allow you to programme them even. They save me angst because – have you tried teaching your child how to vacuum properly??? Or maybe it is just my kids???

But seriously, this is the best investment ever! Yes they are rather noisy especially as they age but you can always programme it to run when you are out of the house or just bring the little ones to the playground for that hour or so that it runs around the house cleaning it while you bond with your children.

7. Use only one room and pack it up nightly

Instead of having toys everywhere when the children were little. They were only allowed to play with their toys in the living room. The bedrooms were only meant for sleeping. Even till today. This limits the mess to just one room. And I made sure this room is packed up nightly before they go to bed. I have become more lax (lazy?!) nowadays though….

You can use this same principle if you have more than one toilet.

Productivity Tips for laundry

8. Invest in crease-free clothes

Don’t buy clothes that crease easily. Period. Seriously. This doesn’t mean you only wear t-shirts. Nowadays, even work shirts and pants are made/treated so that they do not crease like the work clothes of old. They may cost more than the “normal” clothes but it is a one-time cost. It can either lessen the amount of time spent ironing or even eliminate the need to iron them altogether! Now that is priceless!

Some people swear by the dryer method – pull out clothes from the dryer, shake them out and hang immediately. I do not have a dryer and do not intend to get one soon. So I cannot verify if it works for all clothes.

9.  Wash only what is truly dirty

For example, we do not wash our towels daily. :::gasps::: I remember an older mother making this comment in a large family forum many years ago : our towels are used to dry our clean bodies. So why do we need to wash it daily??? That struck me as a piece of genius! Since then, we wash our towels weekly. We do air dry them completely on towel racks placed outside the bathrooms. They are not left hanging on hooks in the bathrooms. This way they get to dry out completely and don’t smell due to the dampness.

Sorry, not for germaphobes and superstitious folks

If you are not a germaphobe, have the children wear their clothes at least one full day (unless extremely sweaty or dirty) before being allowed to throw the clothes into the laundry basket to be laundered. Seriously. I know here in Singapore it is hard because of the heat and humidity but if we are going to be just going out for a 2 -3 hour sitdown dinner in an air-conditioned place, the kids are required to hang up that outfit and wear it again.

We only sort our laundry by colour only. Not by gender, and not by whether they are underthings or not. Sorry, mom. And baby’s clothes are washed with the adults’. Since we don’t use the usual detergents like Persil due to our sensitive skins, I don’t see why I can’t wash the baby’s clothes with ours. Currently we are using Bio Kleen. We buy it from iHerb because the price is really reasonable. You may use my code LIM018 for a $10 discount if you are a first time customer.

10. Enlist the children’s help

Last tip and tool. Enlist the children’s help. Be it for meals, housecleaning or laundry chores, enlisting the children’s help in all these areas is so helpful! They are a huge untapped resource!

Don’t shy away from teaching your children do household chores. They are truly more capable then we think they are! And it isn’t child abuse! Besides, it builds character – theirs and yours! Yes, it may not feel very productive while you are teaching them. Trust me on that! But they do learn and you do learn, and in the end you get the help you need. And they get the life skills they need so we won’t have to worry about them when they set up their own home. If you are generous, you may wish to give some monetary reward. We don’t reward our children for helping out in the house. The house is a family home. We are family. We help each other. No monetary rewards. But different strokes for different folks.

Read : Maids – Essential or a luxury?

Your tips?

So these are some ways I have learnt these past 18 years of running a busy household of 9 persons who oftentimes make more mess than clean them up! Have you tried any of these tools and have they been helpful for you? Maybe you have other tools that you would like to share with the other readers?

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