Break it down!

I'll begin by introducing myself.  I am a mom of 3 kids and a step mom to 3.  Yes, the real life Brady bunch!  I am also a home baker. Even though I currently hold 2 college degrees I settled for the stay at home mom profession for now.  Having the titles of  "Wife", "Mom", "Business Woman"  can be over whelming and striking balance between them can be difficult. The ongoing:  "Mom, do you know...", "Mom, can I...", "Honey, let's....",  "Can you bake a cake for..tomorrow!" Sound familiar? I would love to have a formula that will allow all of the above to happen without wishing I had an extra 12 hours a day!

How do I do it?  I really don't know.  All I know is that prioritizing, holding a schedule and being very, very flexible with myself allows me to accomplish more.   I found this great system many years ago that allowed me to manage two jobs and a personal life before I became a wife, mom and business woman.

It's a system called KANBAN that allows you to visualize, prioritize and to complete tasks. There is a wonderful website that helped me create my KANBAN go to:  www.personalkanban.com .  Creating a KANBAN is easy but I will let the experts in that topic better explain how it's done.

This has become my household organizing system for everyone so that said each one of the kids, hubby and me have our own.   No system is perfect but the flexibility it allows makes it easy and fun to use.

Now I know for a fact I can only bake when the kids are not home or when they sleep. So, I took a task and timed how long it took to complete. Once I timed how long each step took I was able to determine how much time I needed to achieve the overall task.  Now if only I wrote "Bake a Cake" and it was as simple as that I would be happy.

So, Lets break it down!

Estimated time table for "baking a cake"  task

 I'm a highlighter freak and color coding is a game for me.  All it does is help visualize by group what needs to be done in one day (at least for me).  Notice how baking time is not included in the total minutes but acknowledged in the time table. This is because during baking time I do other tasks (ding, ding... multitasking).

Now total your estimated time (which in this case totals 173) and divide it by 60 (which is how many minutes are in an hour) and you will get how long it takes to "Bake a Cake".

Example:    173 / 60 = 2.883 , which is almost 3 hours.

Do the same with all your baking tasks, while your at it do it with everything and even though it won't be exact,  it's way better than guesstimating! I know when I started I had no idea how long it would take me to do a cake but now I have a good idea of how long a task will take and it helps me prepare and price accordingly. 

So break it down, time yourself, and find out how long it really takes you to do a task. Avoid procrastination and be successful!

I hope you take the time to estimate how long each tasks takes.  It might mean some work in the beginning but well worth it at the end. 

A kanban is a tool to visualize, organize, and complete work. - See more at: http://www.personalkanban.com/pk/primers/what-is-a-kanban/#sthash.yTMf8Xbw.dpuf

A kanban is a tool to visualize, organize, and complete work. - See more at: http://www.personalkanban.com/pk/primers/what-is-a-kanban/#sthash.yTMf8Xbw.dpuf

A kanban is a tool to visualize, organize, and complete work. - See more at: http://www.personalkanban.com/pk/primers/what-is-a-kanban/#sthash.yTMf8Xbw.dpuf