Staying Productive as a Work-At-Home Mom With a Newborn

Although it’s always best to remain at home and take time off when you have a newborn child, there are some mothers that just can’t stay seated. Whether they want to work, do chores or even go out shopping, they’ll do everything they can to get up and move around so that they don’t feel trapped sitting at home with their newborn child. While taking care of a child is incredibly important (especially during their infant weeks) it is still possible to stay productive while going through the usual routine of being a mother.

To help you out, we’ve prepared some useful tips that will help you stay productive even as a work-at-home mom with a newborn child to look after.

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Prioritize Your Day

It’s important to set a priority to the tasks that you have. Of course, your child should be the most important thing to consider and those priorities should be above everything else. However, for other tasks such as work, shopping and so on, you need to effectively organize these tasks by deciding which of them are most important to you and which can be dealt with later. For example, if you find it hard to prepare dinner for the rest of your family while also taking care of your work and your child, then you may want to make it a priority over cleaning the windows or tidying up your bookshelves.

You can also give your easy tasks to other people in the household. For example, if you need to go shopping to pick up groceries or something similar, then it might be best to send your partner or ask your kids to pick up those groceries instead. If you need to clean something in the house, then ask your kids if they want to help you out. You could also do this the other way and ask your partner, family members or even neighbors to take over for you at times.

In short, prioritize your day so that you have better time management. You never want to be in a situation where you need to choose between two seemingly important tasks, but it’s important that you set a list of priorities so that making those types of decisions becomes easier on your mind. Don’t forget that you can ask friends and family members for help when it comes to prioritizing your day as well. The more resourceful you are, the easier it will be to remain productive while looking after a newborn child.

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Making Use of Your Resources

And speaking of being resourceful, knowing how to is the key to making it easy for you to look after your newborn while remaining productive. It was mentioned briefly in the previous section, but you can always ask for help from family members and close friends. Whether it’s to help you babysit or to just watch your newborn for a few hours while you head out to a meeting, it’s important to know who can give you a helping hand in these tough situations.

There are also other resources that you can make use of if you want to be efficient while still looking after your child. For example, if you’re running low on Similac formula to help supplement your newborn’s feeding, then you might be able to purchase it online and have it delivered to you. To add to these orders, you could always purchase other newborn supplies like diapers and you could even do the grocery shopping while you’re at it. In short, it’s important to remember that you’re not alone in the world. Even if your friends and family are too busy to give you a helping hand, you can still use services like a delivery company or even a babysitter service to provide you with some assistance.

Being resourceful doesn’t come naturally; it takes a lot of patience and it requires you to be in tough situations in order to learn how to be resourceful. However, with these tips, it could be relatively easy for you to see where you can optimize your everyday schedule.

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Going Mobile With Work

Working at home typically means that you’ll be working on a laptop or a similar device. Whether it’s answering emails for your clients, creating pieces of artwork as a freelancer or even just doing company tasks in the comfort of your own home, a computer is a great way to help you earn a living while looking after a child. However, it’s also important to be mobile with your work so that you’re not confined to a single office space within your house.

The best way to go mobile with your work is to simplify your workflow so that it can be done on a tablet, a smartphone or even a laptop. A laptop would be the recommended choice because it will come with all the software and convenience of a laptop, just in a smaller and more portable form factor. You don’t exactly need a powerful laptop (unless you’re doing heavy video editing) so it’s a small investment for what could potentially be the ultimate productivity tool for someone that is working long hours in their own company at work.

To give you an example of the use cases, you could bring your laptop down to the living room to look after and cuddle your newborn as you work. Additionally, you could take your laptop into the kitchen so that you can answer emails and calls as you prepare food for the rest of your family. Look for a lightweight laptop that is easy enough to carry around with you wherever you go, and ensure it has great battery life so that you don’t have to plug it in on a regular basis.

So no matter what you do for productivity or a career at home, don’t neglect the possibility of doing it as you look after your newborn child. Some people will find this incredibly difficult, but others simply can’t sit down in one place for too long without making a bit of money.

Disclosure: This is a contributed post.