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Working at home while also homeschooling and raising kids is hard. I was looking forward to learning more work at home productivity tips while reviewing the Balancing Diapers and Deadlines course created by Lisa Tanner Writing. If anyone knows about balancing working, homeschooling, parenting, and managing a household, it’s Lisa. She is currently homeschooling her eight children while running her own business and managing a farm! I find that so impressive. I’m frequently exhausted just trying to manage my own two children, small business, and 0.1 acres.

Lisa created an online course, Diapers and Deadlines, to help teach other working homeschool moms her tips.

Balancing Diapers and Deadlines

Balancing Diapers and Deadlines is an online course that is made up of 6 main units:

Building Your Foundation with the Basics
Minimize Your Decisions
Minimize Your Decisions: The Annual Meal Plan
Sustainable Growth
Growing Your Business with Your Kids Around
Boost Your Productivity

The lessons are all text based. This is my favorite format for online courses because I can go at my own pace – skimming where appropriate and really focusing (and re-reading) where necessary.

Each unit contains multiple lessons and at least one actionable step. There are also many printables to help you get organized.

Applying the work at home productivity tips

I spend many hours each week running this website. One of my passions is encouraging and equipping parents to take control of their child’s education. I consider this to be my job for the foreseeable future, so I want to do it well. Over the past year or so, I have read many books on time management in my never-ending quest to squeeze as much out of each day as possible.

My days are generally pretty well organized because I function best when everything is run in an orderly fashion. There is always room for improvement though and I’m always up for tweaking things.

Many of the tips in this course are small tweaks on common time saving techniques. For example, I already meal plan every week in order to get healthy meals on the table three times a day. Lisa suggests ways to make meal planning more efficient such as assigning a theme to each night or meal planning for an entire year at a time. I think these techniques will definitely save a bunch of time. The annual meal planning strategy isn’t for me though. I like trying new recipes. I even like grocery shopping. Assigning a meal type or theme to a night is a time-saving tweak that I can do though, especially on weeks where planning time is limited.

My absolute favorite of the work at home productivity tips is to end your day well by preparing for the next day. In general, I already do that. My house is tidy before I go to bed because I like to come downstairs to a clean house in the morning. My kids are responsible for cleaning the kitchen after dinner each night. Hannah unloads the dishwasher and Ben loads it back up. I can not tell you how many times I have forgotten to start the dishwasher after it was loaded though. Our main living area is an open concept, which means that a loud dishwasher gets in the way of relaxing in front of the TV at night. I always mean to start it before I head upstairs, but more nights than not, I forget.

Lisa had the genius suggestion to set the dishwasher on a delay. This is perfect because I can set it while I’m still tidying up and thinking about it. It is such a simple change, but it means that my dishwasher is clean in the morning.

I think Balancing Diapers and Deadlines is a great beginners course full of work at home productivity tips. The bite-size actionable tips make it perfect for someone who feels completely overwhelmed trying to manage working, homeschooling, parenting, and household management. Most of the tips are fairly basic though, so this be a lot of review for someone who already has a pretty good system and just needs a little tweaking.

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