How I Plan My Week as a Working Homeschool Mom
Working and homeschooling requires juggling a lot of tasks and a lot of information. I find that if I don’t regularly take time to plan, I can easily get off track and start focusing on work tasks that don’t move the needle. And if I don’t have a solid homeschool plan, my homeschool consistency starts to slip and I find it easy to say, “Eh, let’s just skip school for the day.” Having a set rhythm for planning my weeks makes a huge difference in preventing things from slipping through the cracks and, ultimately, keeps me from feeling like I’m failing at both work and homeschooling.
How I Plan
While I have a lot on my plate, I really only have to plan a portion of that because I’ve built out rhythms for the things that are recurring. For example, my housework tasks are the same every week, and I’ve built out a system for managing those tasks so I never have to plan them anymore.
The only things I need to plan each week are my work, my homeschool, and my business tasks. In this post, I’ll cover how I plan for my work week and my homeschool week.
If you’re interested in hearing about how I plan for my business – product creation tasks, content plans, etc – send me a DM over on Instagram and I can write a post specifically about that in the future.
My Weekly Schedule
Before I move into the details of how I plan my week, I first want to say that I try to follow the same general schedule every week, with specific blocks of time for different activities. For example, I have established times that I set aside for homeschooling, cleaning my home, and working. Because my schedule stays the same every week, I don’t have to plan when I’ll do things, only what I’ll do within each planned block, which does wonders for lessening the mental load.
Related: A Day in My Life as a Working Homeschool Mom
How I Plan My Work Week
I do the vast majority of my weekly planning for work on Monday mornings. I’ve set aside time every Monday morning for a planning block, and I make sure to protect that time for meetings or other distractions.
Review My Calendar
Reviewing My Work Calendar
My first work planning task is to check the calendar for that week.
I look at any upcoming meetings and make sure they don’t interfere with other responsibilities. Occasionally, I have to rearrange childcare or daycare pickup duties to accommodate certain meetings. For example, my girls have to be picked up from daycare by 4:30pm, and I typically pick them up. But if I have a 4pm meeting, I need to communicate that to my husband and ask if he’s able to pick them up that day.
Then I check to see if any of my meeting require prep. If there’s a meeting I’m leading or need to prepare for ahead of time, I make sure those tasks are on my task list for the week.
Reviewing My Personal Calendar
While I’m checking my work calendar for the week, I also check our personal calendar and make sure my husband and I are on the same page about what’s happening that week.
I also think through any additional activities we might want to add to the calendar. For example, if there’s a nice day weather-wise, maybe we want to do a dinner picnic at a park as a family that day. I don’t do this alongside my husband, but if there’s anything we need to discuss, I just send him a quick text.
Review My Master Task List
My task management system allows me to easily see all of the tasks I need to do this week, along with any I didn’t get to last week. I quickly look over my tasks and assign each of them to a day. If there are too many tasks on my plate this week, I consider which ones can be moved to next week and then go ahead and move them to next week’s list.
Here’s a peek at my task management system. Each task can easily be dragged from one date to another to rearrange my tasks for the week. I can click on a task to bring up a more detailed view with notes and links needed to complete the task. When a task is completed, I check the “Done” box and it gets removed from my list for the week.
Choose My Weekly Top 3
As I review my tasks for the week, I choose my top 3 tasks for the week. These are the 3 tasks that I must get done, even if nothing else gets accomplished. Typically, at least two of my top 3 tasks for the week are work tasks. The third is oftentimes a home tasks or a business task. I make sure to mark the top 3 tasks in my task management system.
Choose My Daily Top 3
Similarly, I then choose my top 3 tasks for each day. Again, these are the 3 tasks I must get done, even if I don’t get anything else done that day. These also get marked in the system so I can easily see them later in the week.
And that’s it for work. After following these steps, I have a clear plan of what needs to get done for work for the week. Overall, this planning process takes me no more than an hour on Monday mornings. And that’s only because I allow myself to get distracted and go on little dreaming and planning tangents to really make the week the best it can be. Otherwise, this could easily be done in 10 minutes.
How I Plan My Homeschool Week
Homeschool planning for me is a little different than work because I plan in two sessions. The first session is on Wednesday of the week before, when I plan the lessons for the week, and the second session is on Sunday evening, when I review my plans and finish any needed prep for the week.
Here are the homeschool planning tasks I do on Wednesday.
Create Weekly Plan
Within my planning system, I have a weekly template already created with the activities we typically do each day of the week. I create a duplicate of that template and fill in the specifics for that week. For example, I fill in which Bible verse we’ll be working on that week, but other tasks, like our calendar work, don’t need to be filled in because it’s already there from the template.
Make Prep & Supply List Notes
As I review our curriculum for the week, I make a note of everything that needs to be prepped ahead of time and add that list to the weekly lesson plan.
I also make a note of any supplies that will be needed for the week, especially if they’re supplies that will need to be gathered or purchased.
Place Books on Hold
Our curriculum, My Father’s World Kindergarten, provides a book list for each week that can be gathered from the library for that week. Once a month, I go through the book lists for the next several weeks and create a list for each week on my library account. (There’s more about how I do this in my Library Holds highlight on IG.) Then on Wednesday each week, it only takes about a minute to put the entire list for that week on hold.
That is everything I do on Wednesday the week before. Then on Sunday evening, I make sure I’m ready for school on Monday by doing the following.
Review Weekly Plan
First, I take a few minutes to review the weekly plan that I created on Wednesday. This helps make sure that I’m not caught off guard by any special projects for the week. I also like to walk through the following day in my mind. It feels like it helps each day run a little more smoothly and minimizes the amount of time I have to pause to review the plan while we’re actually doing school.
Reset Folders
I use a folder system for organizing each week’s worksheets. At the beginning of the year, I separate out the worksheets by week and create a folder for each week. Then on Sunday evening, I pull out the folder for that week.
I also keep a “Today” folder where I store the worksheets only needed for the next day of school. So, on Sunday evening, I reset that folder by putting any of last week’s worksheets back in their folder and moving last week’s folder to the back of the storage bin where I keep them all.
Then I review my plan and move only the worksheets I’ll need on Monday from this week’s folder to the “Today” folder. There are some worksheets that mostly live in our “Today” folder because we use them daily, like our calendar worksheet, which only needs to be switched out once a month.
Prep Supplies
I then review the prep and supply list I created on Wednesday and gather supplies that we’ll need for the week. I have a homeschool cart where I keep everything, so I move any necessary supplies to the homeschool cart. If any extra prep is needed, like cutting out worksheets, I go ahead and do that, too.
Switch Out Books
We keep our book list books on a shelf in our living room and typically read one or two of them together as a family at bedtime. On Sunday evening, I put last week’s books in a pile to return to the library and then fill the shelf with this week’s books.
One Last Note
With the busyness of working and homeschooling and managing everything in between, planning is essential to ensuring I don’t burn out or drop one of the one thousand balls I’m juggling. When I keep up with these rhythms, I notice an incredible difference in how consistent I’m able to be with homeschooling and how productive I’m able to be at work.
