Productivity tips for homemakers

If life feels chaotic and everything seems to be out of order, then this post is for you. Here is a 5 step action plan so that you can get a handle on the housework and become a more productive homemaker.
If you need a little help managing your time as a homemaker and don’t know where to start, then this quick start productivity guide is for you, too!
If you are a homemaker who some routines in place, but are looking to improve what you already have in place, you will find lots of helpful tips here as well.
As one old fashioned homemaker from the 1920’s said it best,
“Let the housewife read, investigate, and be willing to try a new method until she proves that it is better or worse than her own.” ~ Lydia Ray Balderston, Housewifery, P. 240
So let’s get to it! Here’s my 5 step action plan for time management to get your time and tasks in order to help you be a more productive homemaker.
Prepare for change
Set yourself up for success. Life is about to change for the good, and there are a few helpful ways you can prepare your household for this change so that they are less resistant to the change and may actually jump onboard with you.
- Communicate with your husband. – Let your man know that you are trying an experiment to help you get on top of the housework and time management. No doubt, he will be totally supportive of you becoming organized and less stressed, but let him know and talk through your plans with him so that he is not caught off guard when you start to make changes. You never know, he might even offer to help watch the kids or help in some other way so that you can get life organized.
- Plan for simple meals. If you want to get things under control, it’s going to take some work and when meal time comes around, the last thing you will want to do is cook. However, you all still have to eat so make a list of easy meals that you can throw together without much hassle and in a short amount of time. Tacos, frozen pizza, sandwiches, pasta, take out, etc. Don’t forget to have some good snacks on hand because you might need it a little extra boost.
- Pray. Don’t forget to ask the Lord’s blessing on your efforts and to help you be patient and kind even as you set about getting life in order.
- Patiently, keep on. Although most of these steps can be done in a day, the actual work of getting life in order and becoming a more productive housewife will not happen in a day. See it as a journey and commit to patiently go on in the process no matter what comes up. There really is no magical answer or wand you can wave to make this a smooth and sustainable change for you as a homemaker. Be flexible. Adapt. Change your plans as needed. Simply keep going on the journey of getting your life in order no matter how long it takes.
Now that you have set yourself up for success and are ready to go, let’s get into more practical things to help you get your life in order so that you can become a more productive housewife!

Create a daily structure
The first thing to do after you have set yourself up for success is to create a daily structure. What is the natural flow of your day? What are things that happen everyday without fail?
There are three things that we all do everyday…
- Wake up
- Eat
- Go to bed
This is the most basic structure of anyone’s day. These things happen on a recurring basis no matter the day. When these things actually happen may not be ideal, but that’s okay. Let’s start with what is already happening and work on making it better as we go.
There may be a few other things that happen regularly like your kids’ naptime and their bedtimes or perhaps some homeschool. Take a few minutes and jot down what concrete things happen everyday with the approximate times that they happen. For me this looks like…
- Wake up around 7
- Eat breakfast around 7:30
- Eat lunch around 12
- Naptime at 1
- Eat supper around 6
- Put the kids down around 8
- Go to bed around 9:30
Related Post: Daily Routine: A Simple Daily Schedule for Homemakers
This is your daily structure and the flow of your daily life. If you would find it helpful, I have a daily routine printable included in my weekly planner bundle that is set up with your day divided by meal times.
Let’s call the time between when you wake up and when you eat breakfast your morning routine, the time between breakfast and lunch the business of the day, the time between lunch and supper free time, and the time between supper and bedtime as your evening routine.
I don’t know about you, but the afternoon is not ideal to try to get stuff done. The goal is to get all the tasks done during the morning business of the day time frame so that you can relax and make supper before you man gets home. That way you aren’t so frazzled when he walks through the door, but more on routines later.
Once you have written out a simple daily structure with the in between times labeled, let’s talk about what to do during the in between times.
Identify daily tasks
To start filling in the gaps in your daily structure, let’s identify what your daily tasks are. These are the things that need to happen for the survival and happiness of your family. I talk about them more in my post 5 Daily Homemaking Tasks, but here is what I think the 5 daily tasks for every homemaker are…
- Make Food
- Do Laundry
- Wash Dishes
- Organize/Reset
- One task my man finds necessary – Perhaps your man doesn’t have any preferences as to what makes home feel calm and liveable, but most men do appreciate order in the very least. I once asked a friend how to make homemaking easier and she simply replied, “Know your man.” This could be a whole other post, but to keep it simple here, ask your man what is one thing that he would really appreciate you doing everyday. For me, my man appreciates coming home to clean floors. That means everything is off the floors and the floors are swept so this is one of my daily tasks. Even if you can’t get to the task everyday that your man would appreciate being done, strive for it and make it part of your daily tasks as much as possible because he will feel respected by it.
If nothing else happens in a day and if all else gets interrupted, we will be fed and clothed and have survived another day as a household.
Daily tasks stay the same no matter the season of life you are in. Eating, wearing clean clothes, and washing dishes have to happen for us to survive. While organizing/resetting and an extra task are not exactly necessary for the survival of our physical being, they are, I believe, necessary for our sanity.
Now let’s stick these daily tasks into our daily structure.
- Make Food – The food component is already built in since the day is divided by meal times.
- Do Laundry – A simple way to keep up with laundry is to just do a load everyday. I like to start this first thing while I am making breakfast so that it has time to dry and possibly get put away before lunch. That is the goal at least so that it stays within the “business of the day” block of time. If I don’t get it folded and put away before then, the best time to fit this in is the next day’s business of the day.
- Wash Dishes – You will have to figure out what works best for you (as in how many times a day and when you do them), but at the bare minimum get them done before you go to bed every night. Remember for the survival of your family, you will need clean dishes the next day. I also like to call this my kitchen reset since I do other things like wipe off the counters and such and not just wash dishes.
- Organize/Reset – By this, I mean putting everything where it goes. The best time to reset your home is in the evening before your kids go to bed. Here’s a super helpful podcast to listen to on this idea. Basically after I reset my kitchen, I put my living room back in order by picking up toys, closing curtains, and replacing the pillows, and then the kids room by simply putting away their toys. You could also do the bathroom then or while you are brushing your teeth later on in the evening if you find this necessary, but I don’t find this necessary in this season of mothering only toddlers. They don’t really make messes in the bathrooms yet, but someday I’m sure It will be necessary to make sure everything is put back to order in there, too.
- One task my man finds necessary – This does depend on what your man says, so take what he says and stick it where it appropriately fits in your day. For me, I try to at least pick up and sweep the living room before he gets home as part of my afternoon routine.
Don’t forget to write down these 5 daily tasks and add them to your daily structure before we move on to talking about how to actually implement these things into our daily life.

Identify and address the pain points of the daily tasks
After you have identified your 5 daily homemaking tasks, let’s discuss what makes these things hard to get done every day. Take some time and think through each one. If you find this to be overwhelming, you can skip to the next paragraph where I share how you can just get to it. You may find it helpful though to consider these questions…
- What makes preparing and getting food on the table hard?
- Why is laundry so hard to just wash, dry, and put away?
- What makes doing dishes difficult?
- What is it that keeps me from keeping things organized?
- Is there something that keeps me from doing the one task my husband would appreciate me doing every day?
You may not know the answers to these questions or maybe you just need a simple way to go about addressing some basic pain points in all these areas. So here’s how you can simplify these things so that they are manageable and easier to get done.
- Food – Choose simple meals that are easy and quick to prepare. Even if you are committed to cooking food from scratch, there is still a range of meal ideas as far as how much it will take to make and put those dishes on the table. Some of my go-to’s are tacos, pizza, breakfast for dinner, Roasted Chicken and Instant pot “Baked” potatoes, etc. Reserve a nice or more fancy dinner for one night a week and stick to simple meals on most days. There are also lots of ways to dress up simple meals if you really want to get into it. In a way, it’s like decluttering your meal plans down until it is simple and manageable.
- Laundry – Read my laundry routine or laundry tips here. The biggest game-changer in making laundry more manageable was decluttering my children’s and my own wardrobes. This means only keeping what is decent, fits, and that we love to wear. Without even hardly touching my husbands wardrobe, this has drastically reduced how much laundry that I have to keep up with.
- Dishes – Here’s how to create a simple dishwashing routine that works for you. Again, decluttering my kitchen really simplified the amount of dishes I have to keep up with on a daily basis.
- Organize/Reset – Once again, the simple answer to this is declutter. I am definitely not an expert in this area and I don’t consider myself a minimalist in many ways, but I have found it to be absolutely necessary to declutter toys, as well our wardrobes and kitchen inventory.
Yes, the literal answer to all of these is declutter. Declutter the menu, the closets, the kitchen, and the toys. Simplifying the amount of stuff I have to manage as a homemaker has been key in my homemaking journey.
I finally feel like I’m in a place where housework is manageable simply because of decluttering. The Minimal Mom Youtube channel is my go to resource on this topic and it definitely was a slow process for me, but very vital.
Create routines
I had an epiphany today as I thinking over this post. It took me a long time to implement routines into my homemaking because I thought routines didn’t work for me. I thought I had to take the exact framework of what other homemakers were sharing and do exactly what they said.
I often hear other homemakers say routines don’t work for me and I was there once as well, but I have since found that this mindset is wrong and here’s why…..
- I thought I had to take the exact framework of what other homemakers were sharing and do exactly what they said. I know, I’m a perfectionist. I’m shaking my head at myself as I write this, because that is a terrible idea and will not work for anyone.
- I was not willing to discipline myself to create the habits that routines require. I thought it would be too much work and too hard. Routines are simply habits that we strive to keep.
- I thought I had to do it all at once. Talk about overwhelm! I have now learned that the best way to implement a new routine is to have an idea or list of all that you want that routine to hold or accomplish in your home and then start be just implementing one thing for a week or so until it feels sustainable and not stressful to do. Sometimes if they are small things, doing more than one is not overwhelming.
Final Thoughts!
Well, friends I hope that this post was insightful and encouraged you that you can be a more productive homemaker. Just remember that homemaking is a journey, and any system that you add to your home will take time to take root and for you to work out the kinks.
If you are finding yourself overwhelmed, don’t lose heart! Take it one day at a time and determine to have the old fashioned grit homemakers of yester years had and stick with it! Make it work for you and your household.
Your housekeeping doesn’t have to be perfect either. As scripture put it, “Let everything be done decently and in order.” If you’re feeling the pressure that it has to be perfect, here’s permission to relieve yourself of that extra stress and find a little grace for yourself (and your family members).
Enjoy the journey of learning to manage your time and home and if you need more help, check out my eBook on systems and routines! These 5 steps are included in there as well as much much more.
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