Manage Your Time Wisely – Time Stewardship for Homemakers

Learning to manage your time wisely as a homemaker can be a challenge. With so much noise telling you the best schedule and homemaking routine it can be overwhelming. But we are going to talk about what actually matters in homemaking when it comes to time management.

When I quit my job to become a stay at home mom, I was surprised to find out how difficult it was to manage my time well.

I had never been my own boss before and had always had someone else telling me what to fill my day with. When you have a fully open day full of unknown factors that can be throw in, it’s difficult to figure out how to use that day well.

It’s taken me a few years of homemaking to figure out what actually matters when it comes to using our time well. I’m sharing all my tips to help you manage your time wisely in this post!

What it actually means to manage your time well…

I used to think that managing your time wisely meant being as productive as possible. But the truth is, this isn’t actually true. While we should strive to be peacefully productive in our homes, productivity in itself isn’t the standard for a well managed home.

So what is?

Our hearts.

Because you can have the most productive home. You can have systems in place for meals, toys, cleaning, homeschool and all the other things that make a house run. But if the one thing left unorganized is our attitude, none of that actually matters.

Jesus spoke to this directly when he addressed the Pharisees about the way they presented themselves righteous on the outside while having prideful hearts.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.” Matthew 23:25-26.

When we get to heaven at the end of our lives we will take account for our life here Earth. Yes, we already forgiven in Christ, however that does not give us license to follow our pride right into neglecting the souls God has entrusted to us. A truly well managed home always puts others before self, humbly striving to bring glory to the Father in all we do in our homes.

Too many systems… what our homes actually need

I can’t tell you how many different “systems” I have tried in my home. From time management systems to meal prep systems to cleaning systems. Yes I have gleaned some wisdom from them here and there, but not one has stuck.

That’s because our home doesn’t need a new system to solve our homemaking woes; what it needs is for us to have the self-control to do what needs to be done.

Often we operate backwards in our homes. We let things spiral to a point where they feel completely overwhelming and require a multi-day, exhausting reset to be put back in order. We feel motivated at first to finally tackle the issue in our homes, only to leave us feeling completely burnt out by the end of it. And thus the cycle begins.

Mystie Winckler calls this the “boom and bust cycle”. We get motivated for the change only to be left totally drained by the end of our great reset.

Instead of waiting for the perfect system, the free day to overhaul an entire area or just to feel the motivation to get started, we need to try a different approach…

We need to pray and ask the Lord to give us the self-control to do what needs to be done. To do the daily tasks that often feel overwhelming when left undone for too long but truly aren’t that difficult if we have the discipline to tend to them regularly. To reveal to us where we are wasting our time, where we have lacked discipline and self-control. It is a humbling but necessary prayer if we want to run our homes well.

The reason new systems don’t work

Expecting a set of rules and routines to be plugged right into our homes and work seamlessly is a homemaking strategy that never seems to give the desired results. Yet most of us continue to operate our homes that way.. why is that?

I believe a huge reason is that we live in a society where half of our social media feed is playing on our need for order in our homes. But when you see five different people a day telling you the “one thing you need to get your home organized” it can cause confusion and overwhelm.

So what do we do then? Our homes need order, but the advice from the social media experts seems to not work for our real lives.

We must go to the Lord.

He is good to give us the wisdom to run our homes well, we just have to ask. Scripture tells us clearly that if we ask God for things that will bring glory to His name, He is sure to give it to us.

“Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.” John 14:13-14.

Why homemakers don’t manage their time wisely…

This is so unique to every homemaker that I feel the need to zoom out and hit a few different angles. We don’t all struggle with the same lack in our homemaking. This is why asking the Lord to reveal it to us, instead of blindly taking one viewpoint from an Instagram account, is so important.

There are a few different camps a homemaker can fall into when she finds herself lost in her own homemaking. Let’s talk about them.

Perfectionism

I think it is important to talk about the ditches of perfectionism before talking about laziness, because they can look similar at first glance. I used to think I was lazy. I would let things go for so long, that had to be the reason right? Not necessarily. Homemakers can be truly lazy, but often it’s actually perfectionism they are battling instead.

Perfectionism keeps you from doing the thing you need to do, because you know you can’t do it the way you want to do it.

You want the house to be clean, but you don’t want to start until you know you can do it all at once.

You want to declutter the closet, but you don’t want to begin to it until you can have it perfectly Pinterest organized.

You want to read your Bible every day, but one or two verses while your kids wiggle on your lap doesn’t sound like it counts.

These are all examples of letting perfect be the enemy of progress.

Trust me, I’d love nothing more than to give the entire house a clean and have that perfectly satisfying weekend of enjoying it. That sounds like my idea of fun! But the more children I have had, the more I realize that’s just not our reality anymore. One day I will have a perfectly clean house that stays that way majority of the time, and I bet it’ll break my heart.

You see we perfectionists are always so worried about doing things the right way, that we think there’s a wrong way to do it. But the truth is, there’s really not.

Is spending 5 minutes a day decluttering the closet until it’s done wrong? No.

Is doing a quick wipe down of the bathroom after you get ready for the day even though you don’t have time to do a full clean wrong? No.

But these are the things we tell ourselves in our head. That if we can’t do it the “right” way, there’s no point in trying. That’s textbook perfectionism.

So instead we avoid it until it becomes too much for our perfectionist self to bear any longer, and then we enter into the boom and bust cycle of spending all of our time and energy for days or weeks on something (often at the expense of our other homemaking duties) only to be worn out and watch it pile right back up because we are too tired to deal with it again.

How to beat perfectionism

The simple answer is this.. we must do what needs to be done. We must be okay with things being imperfect. And we must not let our homes suffer at the hand of our pride.

Because truly that’s what perfectionism is, right? It’s saying, “If I can’t have this exactly how I’d like, I’m not even going to try”. Yikes.

Pick two tasks that you can let go of perfectionism with. Stop folding the kids clothes and just shove their clean laundry right in the drawer. Give yourself a 15 minute chunk of the day to work on decluttering something that’s been weighing on you.

Ask the Lord to show you how to be a better steward of your time and pull you out of your prideful perfectionism. He is sure to do it!

Laziness

Often laziness in homemaking is just a true disregard for the needs of the home. Laziness values pleasure over sacrifice, comfort over discipline.

Scripture is clear to condemn laziness. And it specifically instructs the homemaker to avoid it.

“She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.” Proverbs 31:27

If a homemaker is allowing herself to indulge in her own pleasures while allowing her home to suffer for it, this not good. But, the Lord is merciful and kind, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

If you are prone to laziness, you can go to the Lord and seek His wisdom. You can repent of the disregard you have had for the home he has entrusted to you and ask for Him to give you strength to pull out of the slump of slothfulness and become a diligent, hard working homemaker that glorifies Him.

The homemaker that can’t think straight…

Two years ago I was in the most intense phone addiction. My screen time was at an insanely unhealthy number and I was completely addicted to the dopamine that was social media.

I started to realize that when I finally looked up from my phone and took in my real life, it was like I could barely form a thought. Unfortunately, I think this is only becoming more and more common with how fast paced all of the content online has become.

I remember knowing I had so much to do, but not being able to think through how to get it done. Everything felt so overwhelming, and I couldn’t quiet my brain down long enough to think rationally.

If this is you, run to the Lord in prayer. Ask Him to give you eyes to see how beautiful your real life is. Ask Him to take away your desire to constantly look at your phone. Ask Him for His strength.

There is so much about going offline these days. And maybe that truly is what some people need. But after taking almost two years off of social media what I found is that I was simply filling my time with other addictive behaviors. Watching too much Youtube, listening to too many podcasts, scrolling Zillow or whatever else I could do to check out mentally from the overwhelm I was feeling.

This is why I don’t think there is a one size fits all answer. I think we all need to humbly place our homemaking struggles at the foot of the cross and ask the One who lacks nothing to help us where we lack.

How to manage your time well as a homemaker

Managing your time well will look different for each person. Some may need to slow down, some may need to speed up. Some may need to let go, some may need to dig in.

Because we are all unique, our sins and struggles are unique too. We know where we fall short, and only we can make a petition to our perfect Lord to help us be better stewards of our time in our homes.

I am not one to hand out blanket advice. Cookie cutter schedules or routines that promise to fix all of your homemaking problems overnight is never something you will get from me.

But I have been exactly where you are, and I’d like to offer a few of the things that helped me learn to manage my time wisely and bring glory to the Lord in my homemaking.

I hope this helps you in how to manage your time wisely in your own homes. Click here for more biblical homemaking encouragement!