How to Avoid Chaotic School Mornings

It’s been quite the awkward start to a school year with social distancing rules and kids adjusting to life as we now know it! School mornings have also been a little trickier with the kids returning to routines after 6 months of living indoors. With a partial return to office, I find the morning shuffle pretty painful and it is often the most disorganized part of my day. I almost always forget something I should have added in the kids’ bags and after a few reminders from the teachers and daycare, I decided to apply some of my PM skills into organizing my mornings.

In this article I highlight a few project management skills and tools that can be adopted to help get through these new routines like a champ and avoid chaotic mornings.

Identify daily goals - This might be stating the obvious but I think it’s a really a great place to start. My goal for each day is get the kids to school on time and without forgetting anything. I find though that some days the goals might expand a little especially with different school activities scheduled each week. Identifying daily goals is important for setting ourselves up for more focused morning routines. To identify the daily goals, I recommend taking a few minutes each night to search through agendas and school communications to identify the activities required for the week/day.

Kanban it - Once we have the goals identified, I’d divide them into the smallest units of achievable tasks and create a visual for tracking. This I do with a Kanban board – I have attached a snapshot to show what it looks like. It’s pretty simple and takes away the pressure of relying on my brain to remember everything I have to do. 

To set this up, you need; A plain white board, some sticky notes, a marker and something to attach the board to the wall if you like (I used duct tape).

First step is to write all the tasks (those we identified when we broke down our goals into smaller tasks?) on the sticky notes and divide the board into 3 columns – Backlog, In Progress and Done. The backlog contains all the tasks written on the sticky notes and in my backlog I added every task I could think of from prayer time to packing face masks - if it needs to be done then it goes into the backlog. My backlog also contains tasks that I begin the previous night like reviewing the communication logs or agendas from school. Also tasks like checking the kids’ bags to find out if anything has been misplaced or forgotten – my first grader seems to be on roll with losing his water bottles lately. Finding out the night before gives enough time for me to prepare a plan B.

As I begin each task, I move the sticky notes to the in progress column and then move them to the done column once completed. This gives a neat visual of all the tasks to be completed and helps you track everything/ensures you don’t miss any of those critical tasks like adding a fork in the kids’ lunch bags.

Create a schedule and use a timer - Now that we have our back log, it’s pretty easy to see the tasks to be completed each morning and estimate how long each task will take right? For me, this helps me determine what my start time should be each morning and for those days where I have a few extra tasks to complete, I set my alarm a little earlier. I also assign buckets of time to get through items in my backlog e.g. making and packing the kids lunch is grouped in the same time bucket.

One trick for keeping on track with the schedule is using a timer. This might seem silly but my baking timer has helped me keep tasks moving and I avoid distractions by time boxing my tasks while working through the backlog. It also helps me stay ahead of my schedule so I have some extra minutes for unplanned tasks and tantrums which happens when dealing with kids as you can’t plan everything right?

Food schedule - A food schedule is another great tool for staying on track. I view the process of creating a food schedule as a bulk thinking activity which I do once and don’t worry about for another week or 2. This saves me the minutes spent pondering what to make for lunch daily. You could create a weekly or monthly schedule based on preference, my weekly scheduled also feeds into my routine shopping schedule and gives me a better sense of what needs to be purchased for every grocery run. Yay, efficiency!

Assign roles and responsibilities - After a few feuds with hubby, I realized that if you don’t assign it then it doesn’t get done. It’s a very key step and it involves enlisted help wherever possible. Get your partner involved in some of the morning prep and the kids can chip in too – my first grader can dress himself and prepare his breakfast bowl while I work on getting the lunches ready. This way, multiple tasks can be done in parallel while I supervise the outcomes where necessary. 

Check your resources - Frequent audit of resources can save morning disasters like finding out you are out of snacks, juice boxes or socks. I do my audits on the weekends and plan to restock required items as part of the next shopping trip. Any items to be purchased are added to the backlog and moved to the in progress and done columns as they are restocked.

This post had been stewing in my head for a while and I hope you found it insightful. Are there any other tips for getting things moving during the precious morning rush? Please feel free to share in the comments.