The Johnson Crew!

Some days homeschooling can feel chaotic, and by the end of the day you're asking yourself, "Did I actually get anything accomplished today?" I've been there, too. I'm Sarah, a homeschooling mom of four, and I run a small business with my husband from home, and I know how hard it can be to juggle all the things. I'm going to share seven simple habits that will help you stay productive as a homeschool mom so you can finish lessons early and still have time for work, homemaking, and fun.

Number one, leave your phone in the other room and on silent. This used to be my biggest weakness. I'd hear a text or an email come in, and I'd open my phone innocently to respond to it, and before I knew it, I was scrolling Instagram. And once I'm on Instagram, it's going to be a minute. They really know how to reel us in. One of the biggest time sucks for me is social media, and so I actually tend to just keep those apps off of my phone most of the time because I just can't be trusted.

But seriously, it has saved me so much time, and I'm way more productive. One tip I recently heard is to treat your phone like a house phone, like from back in the day when we were kids. So when you're home, just keep it plugged into the wall like the good old days. And don't worry about missing important phone calls, you can select certain people to allow to break through if they call or text under the Do Not Disturb settings on the iPhone.

If you have a different kind of phone, I'm sorry, I can't help you. You may also be thinking, "What about needing my phone for certain apps we use in our homeschool?" Don't even be in trying to sneak your phone back in there. I'll tell you what I started doing this year, which may or may not help you, but I downloaded those apps onto one of my kids' iPads, and now we just use that.

It's not connected to my iCloud account, so none of my notifications are coming through. Problem solved. Number two, teach kids to work independently. Over the years, I've taught my kids to do assignments on their own, which is huge. If you have more than one kid, this frees you up to go and work with another kid and get them started on their lesson. And that way they're not waiting around on me for too long.

We can work through all of their lessons so much faster if I stagger them like this. Plus, it helps keep the peace when kids know what they can get done while mom is busy working with someone else. Before they're proficient readers, the amount of actual school work they can do on their own is pretty small. So, during those years, it's helpful to teach them to play independently.

You can even reserve certain toys or games for school time. That way they get excited about getting to play with those things while they're waiting for you to work with them, and it's more likely to hold their attention longer. Number three, create work blocks during screen time. You've got to take advantage of their screen time. Make it work for you. This is my best hack. Every afternoon, we have a built-in screen time where they can play their iPad or Nintendo, and this is when I get my most focused work done.

So, this is about an hour each day, and then I've already prepped them that the afternoon is my work time. So, even when that time is up, they know that this is their time to go play together or independently, and let me keep working. It's not perfect. It doesn't always work out perfectly. They're usually coming in and asking me questions, and that's fine. But, just setting those expectations goes a long way.

As Gary Keller puts it in one of his books, The One Thing, success comes from learning to focus, not from doing it all. That's why I protect this afternoon work block. Before I go into the next tip, if you're finding these tips helpful so far, I'd love for you to subscribe to my channel. I share more practical ideas like these, so you're going to want to stick around.

We home school moms got to stick together. Number four, use a predictable, simple routine. Our school days run so much smoother when our kids know the general routine of the day. Having a consistent start time to the day helps all of us be on the same page and keeps me from waiting on anyone to get started. I don't like to have to continue with book work and lessons after lunch, so that's when we aim to have everything done by.

My kids don't like to continue working after lunch, either, so it's a great motivator for them, too. When they were younger, I used to reward them with a movie lunch, which I honestly needed more than them, but it was something fun to look forward to. And we all need to be rewarded for our hard work, or we just don't want to do it. Number five, do your lesson planning once a week.

I like to spend some time on Sunday to get prepped for the week. Whether I need to print some worksheets, order some materials for a science experiment, or get ingredients for a recipe, whatever it is, I just like to know what's coming in the week ahead so that I'm not wasting time during our lessons scatterbrained trying to figure it out because that's when the chaos happens. That's when we lose them.

We've got everybody at the table, and now of a sudden I've got to go to my room, find the file, print it out, bring it, and by that time they've all gone in different directions and lost all focus. This prep usually takes me about 15 minutes, and I feel 10 times better, so much less stressed knowing that I'm prepared. Number six, meal plan and prep in advance.

Honestly, this one saves my sanity. Weren't you so surprised as you grew into adulthood how much mental energy it takes to plan out meals? What in the world? So, this one really saves me. I take some time, again on Sundays, to create a menu for the week. I've been writing my menu in my notes app on my phone for years. So, recently I copy and pasted that whole joker and put it into ChatGPT, and now I ask it to pull from those meals to create a new menu for the week.

I told it some other specifics like I like to have one to two leftovers nights every week, and one night should be rotisserie or pizza every other week. You can be as specific as you want. And this saves me a lot of mental energy. And then I can go ahead and make my grocery pick up order. And then we are just ready for the week. I don't have to waste time during my work block in the afternoon, that precious work time, being distracted trying to figure out what we're going to have for dinner, or having to go to the store again.

This just saves me so much time. It's also super helpful to have easy-to-make lunch stuff on hand. Dinner leftovers is a favorite of mine, not always for the kids though. Number seven, reflect and adjust each week. Every week or so, I think through what worked and what didn't from the previous week. My husband is usually my sounding board for this conversation and we'll just take some time to think through and analyze how things are going because we don't want to be stuck in a system that's not actually serving us, right?

So, we'll maybe take a walk or go sit on the back deck together, somewhere where the kids are not and where we can have a little peace and quiet so we can actually do some problem solving and some brainstorming about how we can maybe just do a little tweak here and there to make things a little better next week. None of these habits makes our days perfect and things definitely don't always go according to plan, but together, they give our days enough structure to help us finish school, make progress on my work and still have time to have fun together.

If you're feeling overwhelmed, don't try to change everything all at once. Choose one habit that could make your days a little easier and start there. If you found this video helpful, please give it a thumbs up and share it with one of your home school mom friends who could use some encouragement. And YouTube thinks that you will really love to watch this video next. See you in the next one.