A Stay At Home Mom Schedule For When You Hate Routines (+Template)

Embrace a simple & easy stay at home mom schedule plus ensure that you SURVIVE this routine no matter how disorganized/inconsistent you are right now!

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Love & Hate A daily Schedule For Stay At Home Moms?

How do these ladies stick to ONNNE stay-at-home mom routine, like, daily??

(Click this link or the image below to download your freebie.)

I know, I know research says the difference between real achievers and daydreamers is more about their daily routine than their intelligence, but the sad truth for me has always been this:

…following a daily schedule always felt strict, boring, and somewhat stifling.

Finding a perfect routine was only the easy part of my journey to organizing. The real challenge hit (hard) once I struggled to keep at it! The struggle continued as my baby grew into a toddler and then into a preschooler. I wanted discipline in life at home with a kid.

All the consistently inconsistent routine boggled my mind to death!

The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change, the signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency. ~Great by Choice

First Things First… A Sample Stay At Home Mom Daily Schedule

Before we move on to building consistency with a schedule, if you’re in the first stage and looking for a sample daily schedule, I’ll share how my typical day goes (mine is a work-at-home mom schedule) and yours may be different.

You may have more kids or more/less help at home. Regardless, here is my current one so you can build an idea.

Know that I don’t follow it down to the minutes, it is just a rough estimate of what is happening in our house around each hour most days.

Also, my husband is in the military, plus he’s working on his MS project this year, so he can rarely join us in our routine or have a consistent one of his own. Your husband’s presence/absence and the resulting help/workload will impact major areas of your days too.

• 5 – 6:00 am – Me Time (Wake up, bathroom, prayer or scripture study, treadmill or exercise)
• 7:00 am – Wake up my kid, prepare and have breakfast
• 8:00 am – Bathroom session for my son, shower if summers. Get dressed. Put away toys, fix the bed and room, pack bag
• 9:00 am –  Drop him to pre-school, get back home and work on my blog
• 12:00 pm – Pick up my son, return, prepare lunch as I keep an eye on my son, while he plays with his toys or completes any homework
• 1 – 2:00 pm – Have lunch, wash him/or quick shower if summers, put him to sleep, take a nap if I’m tired or I else work on my blog. If my son doesn’t want to nap, he still stays inside the room.
• 4:00 pm – Outside play time
• 6:00 pm – Night routine for dinner and bath time begins
• 7 – 8:00 pm – Depending on the season if it’s summers or winters. We are in bed very early!
• Entertainment/Hobby/etc: Sometimes, okay, a lot of times, I wake up in the middle of the night to work on my blog or watch movies/dramas whatever my mood calls for. Social media goes into tiny pockets of the day whenever one is available. But I have not been very social after I left my day job. I just need to check FB for any bloggy stuff I think I may be missing out on. I have no real life friends or relatives in there. Goodness, I don’t even have WhatsApp but I promise I love human beings!

You can start creating your own routine right now. Just fill in the daily schedule template and you’re good to go! To access this free printable, fill in the form, print out on a US letter size paper, fill in and commit to it for one day. Notice the difference it makes. Rinse and repeat.

If you want more sample routines, here’s a bundle available that you can check out ( -of sample stay at home mom schedule with infant, or for toddler and infant, or kids of various age groups!). Also, there is more than one sample schedule for each of the various age groups and age combinations.

Click this link (or the image below) to get these sample routines. I wish I had found it a couple years back when my son was tiny and the time management struggle often got beyond my control.

Now…

‘Staying’ An Organized Stay At Home Mom

Being a chronically disorganized person, I understand first hand how difficult it can be to stick to one course of action every day, but the following changes have turned my life around just as they have helped others I learned these from.

And even if you’re not a SAHM, in order to be an organized working mom schedule your tasks consistently each day using the tips below!

I know they will work for you just like they changed my life.

1. Know Your Enemy  

Don’t leave yourself unguarded!

Let me explain myself:

You know those second thoughts that follow right after, and I mean the exact next second after we remember we have work to do?

Let’s just say, they are the devil’s whisper! And definitely a distracting enemy you should be conscious of.

When you think of your next chore, if you pause long enough instead of getting up right away, you WILL get a second thought, and it will try to justify a delay. You can even try this now…

And I call such second thoughts the devil’s whisper because they’re subtle, seemingly in your favor, and soooo in-line with what your heart may desire or prefer right now… that you quickly fall into this trap, and the dishes will also sit there in the sink… happily ever after.

Don’t!

Just stop yourself thoughts right there and get yourself up for the task.

Another thing that helps me in conjunction with going-getting is when I remind myself whatever time I have right now is the only real time I can trust.

Future is the most fickle, disappointing, get-you-into-trouble, humiliating thing to rely on.

Here’s the proof:

Whenever I delay something, later on, the work becomes more difficult as the rest of the day unfolds. (Yes, a stitch in time saves nine!)

For example, if I did not vacuum now when I should as I know someone’s visiting in the evening, either my vacuum won’t work later or the electricity will go out or something (ANYTHING!!!… but really, SOMETHING) will go wrong, as if all the powers out there want me to fail!!

I used to complain, why God, why can’t I work when I am ready. Why do you always catch me for the smallest of things? Why do things always go wrong when I don’t act right away?

Late Dr.Covey explained it best. He said there are consequences tied to our decisions. And each decision we make and the consequence tied to it is like two ends of a stick. You can only choose to pick an end of a stick or not. The other side of the stick always follows!

So next time remember: those deceitful second thoughts, delays, procrastination etc will never result in peace and an accomplished day. You only get what you choose.

Practice Time: For the next big chore that’s waiting for you, literally, get up, drag yourself there and do it now. 

2. Stop Banging Your Head Against Parkinson’s Law 

This law says a task WILL stretch to the amount of time YOU give it for completion.

So, set a time boundary to complete your chore and don’t let one task expand through your entire day when it could have been managed in half the time! Pick the earliest time possible because you want to be relieved now and spend the remaining time without carrying the unnecessary weight of worrying ‘I have to do X in a while! + this face —> ?‘.

For example, I REALLY hate doing the dishes especially because I don’t have a dishwasher. So I tell myself: out of today’s 24 hours, I’ll only give the dishes 30 minutes. Once the time’s up I’ll leeeeave even if the sink is not clean.

Now here’s the trick, who wants to leave the last couple of spoons unwashed when you’ve already convinced yourself to stand there this long? This doesn’t imply you’ll always be late, you can take it as a challenge to finish work before your time is up. I often finish the chore just in time.

Practice Time: Pick up one big chore you’ve been pending. Assign a time limit to it, start and race through it until you are done.

3. Stay Fueled 

You need two things to make your schedule happen:

• physical energy in the body (learn more on how to boost your energy using natural remedies here)
• and motivation to get that body up in the first place

If inspiration made you create a schedule, then do more inspiring things, such as sign up for this limited time FREE goal crushing course to turbocharge yourself.

Or use these cute positive affirmations as reminders around your house.

Put them on the fridge, tuck them around the mirror, or anywhere you will see them as you go about doing your work.

I also like to take out time to read books or listen to podcasts from people who I know will fill me with excitement as I stick to my busy mom + blogging schedule.

Note: Please know that inspiration should not be the only thing you should depend on for building routines. Because it is unstable by nature and will not always remain the same. It will rise and fall.

That said, it IS a fun thing to be inspired and using some will help for sure.

Practice Time: Listen to this podcast by Ruth Soukup as you vacuum or do the dishes next time.

4. Use Moma’s Method

Set rewards and punishments for sticking to your routine just like how mom mades us do (or prevent from doing) things.

But don’t choose what you only like as a reward for a day spent as planned. Choose something you’re addicted to! And let that be your reward (or the lack of it as your punishment).

Practice Time: Choose a reward or punishment for sticking to your plan each day e.g. coffee, your book, Netflix, a call to your grandma.

5. Train Your Feelings

Feelings can prevent you from achieving your goals. But they can also help you, depending on what you allow to pass through your heart.

What stopped me most from sticking to my schedule was that I didn’t feel like doing the same thing every day.

Here’s what I do now. I direct my focus to the feeling I would like to feel after doing my work for the day. I want to feel accomplished, at peace and relaxed. So I’d think about those as my target feelings and focus on them only.

I feel guilty if I don’t pray on time during my routine. So now when I think of the prayer time, I remind myself of the guilty feeling I don’t want. And also the peace I want to feel after I’m actually done praying!

Practice Time: If you struggle to start with a task at hand, shift the feelings from discomforting ones you’re feeling right now to how you ultimately want to feel once the work is finished. Also, think about the bad feeling you don’t want to feel if you didn’t complete your task.

Do this in writing.

6. Leave Nothing On The Table

We all do our best to maintain a healthy stay-at-home mom schedule. But having to take care of an entire house and ever-hungry bellies andddd a blog etc becomes too much for me. After all, we’re only a human with limited strength for accomplishing so many things each day.

Well, guess what’s limitless?

God’s help!

And it always comes when we seek it, as my friend Amber Fox says, in ways we understand or not. Ever since I read her book, which I think every SAHM mom must, I have gotten back to my praying-for-everything habit which I had lost in the middle of so many other things I had to do.

Let me share a few beautiful quotes from the book with you:

• Daily, I need to seek Him and ask Him to change my heart, to keep me focused on Him and the priorities He has for me. When left to my own ways, I would always choose to do what I most want to do. My priorities would not be the way they are if it were not for God’s grace in my life.
• ‘Let God have your life; He can do more with it than you can’ – Dwight L. Moody
• …It’s all about surrender…

So pray for everything you’re struggling with.

Practice Time: Don’t wait for the perfect time, bow your head now and pray to God to help you build consistency with your stay at home mom schedule.

7. Physically Track It

Research says things that get written down have better chances of getting done.

As you write your schedule, write your progress too. It takes less than a minute to track your progress. Here are a few options you can use:

1. physical planner like this pretty one I use. 
2. free habit tracker printable template
3. free habit tracking software
4. A vertical habit chain drawn (with a pencil!) on your bedroom wall where you as well as others can see it. The vertical chain that builds upward shows how tall and solid my integrity has grown.

Practice Time: Start visually tracking how consistently you stick to your schedule from today.

And If You Fall Back…

Our lives are already busy. Sticking to a schedule is a big challenge but once we know what we want done, we shouldn’t stand in our own way. Things will go wrong but accept that it is human. Forgive yourself and forget it. Do all these things in three seconds max. Pick up from where you left and just continue forward.

Staying Sane With A Stay At Home Mom Schedule

You could find the best daily schedule for stay at home moms from Pinterest, make the perfect one yourself, ask your best sister/friend to help you map out a weekly schedule for stay at home moms, but the only thing you can’t take others’ help with is in learning how to stick to a schedule.

That only you can do. There’s no one out there to blame or seek help from. The first habit of highly effective people is being proactive or response-able. (from 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People).

Respond to your situation instead of enduring it!

More than outside tweaks and remedies, you need a shift in your thoughts and feelings. Overpower things that prevent you from getting up. I like to tell myself that Satan doesn’t physically pull us up to do things like we hold our kids’ hands and make them do stuff, he only convinces us (remember second thoughts?) and we decide to make our bodies act on his suggestions or not. We need to know if what we’re thinking is in our real favor. The biggest question to determine if a feeling or thought is from him is this, ask yourself will it benefit me later? The devil makes us bargain now for future. Keep your eyes on how you want to feel or be later instead of now.

Also, feed your spirit some motivation daily just like you would feed your hungry belly; reward (or punish?!) yourself for every day you make it through, and the best one, physically track your daily (sticking-to-a-schedule) progress. And if you fall back, quickly get back on track.

Whip up a nice stay at home mom schedule for yourself for the rest of the week with the knowledge that as a mom daily routine will be your best friend! (Even better, make one corresponding toddler daily home schedule for the little one too.)

Just close your eyes and take 5 minutes to imagine: if you stick to the schedule, imagine how would you feel at the end of the week? If you like what you saw in your mind, then get going now, you got work to do.

Stay At Home Mom Daily Schedule Template

Use the box below and get a free stay at home mom daily schedule template. The printable has a standard size of 8.5 by 11 inches. Use it to design a day YOU want to live!

You got this, momma!