Working mum life
Full-time job, toddler, two courses at once
A list of everything I'm currently doing, the systems that stop it collapsing, and one honest thing I probably need to hear as much as you do.
I want to preface this by saying I don't have it together. I have it moving, which is a different thing, and some weeks it's a close-run contest.
But people do ask how any of this fits into a week, so here's the honest version — the systems that work, the pockets of time nobody thinks to use, and the bit at the end where I admit what I'm getting wrong.
The actual list
Currently on the go, all at once:
| What | Status |
|---|---|
| Full-time admin job, 8 to 4 | The baseline |
| A two-and-a-half-year-old | Also full time |
| Swim teacher course | In progress |
| PT course | Also in progress. At the same time. Yes. |
| Job hunting — project officer roles | Ongoing |
| Accommodation photography | One job in, chasing more |
| This website and the content | You're reading it |
| A round-the-world points project | 94% funded |
Written down like that it looks unhinged. It felt entirely reasonable at every individual point of deciding.
Why I did this to myself
Here's the honest engine underneath all of it: I get bored.
Not in a cute way. In a genuinely difficult way, where a job that isn't stimulating starts to feel like wearing a coat that's too small. My current role is fine. It's stable, the hours suit a small child, and it is not remotely interesting to me.
So I signed up for a swim teacher course. And then, because apparently one wasn't enough, a PT course. At the same time. While looking for a project officer role, because project work is the part of my job I actually enjoy and I'd like more of it.
None of this was a plan. It was a series of individually defensible decisions made by a person who needs something to think about.
Every one of these felt sensible on its own. Nobody was in the room to point out I was doing them simultaneously.
Where the time actually comes from
This is the practical bit. There is no secret extra hour — there are pockets, and most people waste them because they're too short to feel useful.
- The train, both ways. This is my single most productive window and I'd defend it fiercely. It's uninterrupted, it has a hard start and end, and nobody can ask me for a snack. Course reading, drafting, planning, admin.
- Lunch breaks. Not every day, and I try not to make it a rule, but a spare thirty minutes is enough to knock over one small thing completely.
- After dinner. Once he's down. This is the biggest block and the lowest quality — I'm tired, and I've learned not to schedule anything that needs real thinking here.
- Weekends, in pieces. Not whole days. An hour here, a nap-time there. Whole free days aren't a thing that happens.
The reframe that helped most: stop waiting for a proper block of time. It isn't coming. A twenty-minute train ride, used consistently, is more hours a month than the mythical free Saturday you keep planning for.
The systems that hold it up
Talk instead of type
Genuinely the biggest one. I get far more out of my head by talking than typing — voice notes on the train, dictating ideas while cooking, rambling into my phone and sorting it out later.
Typing requires both hands and a surface. Talking requires neither. If you've got a commute or a kitchen, you've got a working method.
Batch everything
I don't make one piece of content. I make five in a sitting, then don't think about it for two weeks.
Context-switching is the thing that actually kills you when your time is fragmented. Doing one task badly across five sessions costs far more than doing five of the same task in one.
Automate anything that repeats
This is the same principle underneath the entire points project, and it's why I bang on about it constantly. Set the conversion up once, and it earns in the background forever without a single decision from me.
Apply that everywhere you can. Any recurring thing that needs you to remember it is a thing that will eventually get dropped.
Write it down somewhere that isn't your head
I keep everything in one place — plans, drafts, numbers, half-formed ideas. Not because I'm organised, but because I've accepted that I will absolutely forget otherwise, and the mental effort of holding it all is more exhausting than the tasks themselves.
Lower the bar for "done"
A carousel that goes out is worth infinitely more than a perfect one still sitting in drafts. I have a folder of beautiful unfinished things that have earned me precisely nothing.
The bit I'm less good at
Someone asked me recently what I'd stopped doing to make room for all this.
I laughed, and then I realised I didn't have an answer.
That's the part I'd change if I were being sensible. Everything above is a system for fitting more in — and none of it is a system for taking anything out. I've optimised my way into being able to carry more, which is a slightly suspicious skill to have developed.
Two courses at once was probably one course too many. I'll finish both, because I'm stubborn and I've paid for them. But if you're reading this and doing the same arithmetic, the sequential version would have been fine, and I'd have enjoyed both more.
You can do a lot at once. I'm proof of that, most weeks. Just don't mistake "I've built a system for this" for "this is sustainable indefinitely" — they look identical right up until they don't.
What's on your list at the moment? Tell me I'm not the only one.