8 Genius Organized Mom Hacks You Need to Try Now

Do you dream of living the organized mom life?

After all, being a mom is messy most days. There never seems to be enough time to do all the things you need to do.

You’re responsible for taking care of kids, keeping the house clean, meal planning and doing all the other mom chores.

You may also work a 9 to 5 or run a business or side hustle from home, which puts even more of a crunch on your time.

If any of that sounds familiar, then you probably know that the struggle to be an organized mom, not an overwhelmed mom, is all too real.

As a work at home single mom of two, I know how hard some days can be. So if you’re trying to stay on top of everything and feeling frustrated by it, I feel your pain.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. You can be an organized mom and feel less stressed with the right plan.

To help you, I have eight mom hacks to help you be more organized every day.

8 Organized Mom Habits to Start Right Now

1. Start with a solid morning routine

A morning routine can make your efforts to become a more organized mom so much easier.

Having a routine, for yourself and your kids, helps you start the day right. And that can make a huge difference in how productive you are and how well you manage your time each day.

If mornings are a chaos-filled scramble at your house, here’s what you can do to fix it:

• Pick a wake up time that’s at least one hour before your kids get up.
• Spend the first 10 minutes of that time organizing your thoughts for the day.
• Choose a set order for getting ready and follow it.
• Stagger your kids’ wake-up times if possible.
• Delegate tasks that need to be done each morning.
• Skip any tasks that can be done later in the day.

Getting into a routine that works for the whole family can take time so don’t be afraid to adjust as you go along.

2. Bookend your days with a nighttime routine

Your morning routine is the way to start your day feeling organized and a nighttime routine helps you end it the same way.

The steps for creating a nighttime routine for your family are kind of like the ones you did for the morning, only backward. So that includes:

• Setting a time for kids to do necessary tasks, like evening chores or bath time.
• Staggering bedtimes for kids so you can spend time with each of them without it turning into a free for all.
• Doing the end of the day picking up and putting away so you don’t wake up to a mess the next morning.
• Creating a wind-down and bedtime routine for yourself, then doing it in the same order every night.
• Planning your to-do list for the next day.
• Packing kids’ lunches ahead.
• Picking out clothes for yourself and the kids to wear the next day.

Bonus tip: Set a time every night to turn off your phone or laptop. Spend the last 30 minutes of your day winding down screen-free and maybe include a little self-care.

3. Make lists for everything

I love lists and I use them for everything.

If you want to be a more organized mom, lists are your best-best friend. Try keeping lists for things like:

• Daily, weekly and monthly to-dos for around the house
• Grocery shopping
• Blogging and business tasks (if you’re a work at home mom)
• DIY/home improvement projects
• Money-related tasks, like side hustles you want to try
• Holiday to-dos
• Weekly or monthly yardwork/chores
• Birthday/holiday shopping
• Doctor and dentist appointments
• Books you want to read
• TV shows or movies you want to watch
• Crafts or art projects you want to make with the kids
• Recipes you want to try

Once you decide which to-do lists you need, decide where to keep them. You can add them to a notebook, use a planner or try an app like Evernote.

If you’re looking for planner ideas, here are some of my favorite options to try:

• Commit30 planners
• PowerSheets from Cultivate What Matters 
• Erin Condren planners
• inkWELL Press customizable planners
• Happy Planner (This is what I’m using right now to be a more organized mom!)

When setting up your to-do lists in your planner, it’s helpful to order your to-do’s by importance.

So start with your most important tasks, followed by moderately important tasks and those things that can wait until later. Working your way down the list this way can help you stay focused so you can knock out those must-do items.

Related post: 11 Best Planners for Moms to Get Seriously Organized

4. Simplify your family finances as much as possible

One of my favorite ways to be a more organized mom is to stay on top of my finances.

When I don’t know what’s happening with my money, I feel completely out of sorts. Messy money = messy life.

So, how do you simplify your finances and get a grip on your money? Here are my best tips:

• Automate your finances as much as possible, including bill payments and savings deposits.
• Use just one debit or credit card to spend.
• Get rid of unnecessary expenses. (Trim Financial Manager is a huge help for cutting the fat from your budget.)
• Paring down the number of bank accounts you use.
• Use a budgeting app to manage all of your financial accounts in one place.
• Schedule a regular time each month to go over the family budget.
• Take advantage of apps and other money tools that make managing your finances easier.

These are small things you can do to simplify your money situation.

If you’re looking for some bigger steps you can take, paying down debt is at the top of the list. I recently paid off the last of my student loans, meaning I now have no debt other than my mortgage and it’s a huge relief.

Credit Karma offers lots of helpful resources and tools for creating your ultimate debt payoff plan if you’re not sure how to get started.

5. Get on a cleaning and decluttering schedule

Cleaning is one of my least favorite things to do but it has to be done. If you feel the same way, then having a cleaning schedule is key to doing those chores you’d rather put off and becoming a more organized mom.

Here’s what a sample cleaning schedule might look like:

• Pick up and put away (Daily — and don’t forget to get the kids involved!)
• Sweeping (2X a day)
• Dusting and mopping floors (1X a week)
• Bathroom deep cleaning (1X a week)
• Bathroom tidy up (Daily)
• Laundry (2X a week)
• Clean out the car (1X a week — since we spend quite a bit of time in the car going to soccer practice and games and doing homeschool activities, this one is a must for me.)
• Cleaning baseboards (1X a month)
• Clean out closets (1X every three months)

Remember, this is just an example. You can create your cleaning schedule to fit your life.

For example, I always do the dusting, mopping and laundry on Friday afternoons so I can relax in a clean house over the weekend. The key to being more organized is finding a schedule and a routine for cleaning that you can stick to consistently.

6. Plan out meals

Meal planning and prepping is a lifesaver if you’re a busy mom who’s trying to corral kids, run a business and do all the other mom things each day.

If you’re brand-new to meal prepping, it just means planning your meals for each day ahead of time. You can meal plan weekly or monthly, depending on what works best for your family.

This strategy can help you be a more organized mom and it can also help you save money if you’re not picking up lunch or dinner on the go because you’re too busy to cook. And meal planning can also help you to eat healthier as a family since you’re creating meals more intentionally.

Here’s what you’ll need to get started with meal planning and prepping:

• Ideas for meals, including breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks
• Some containers to store your pre-prepped meals (This set from Prep Naturals is amazing but reusable bags can work just as well.)
• A crockpot or Instant Pot for batch-cooking soups, sauces and other meal prep basics
• A shopping list for the week or month that includes everything you need to buy for each meal

If you need some budget-friendly meal plan ideas, check out these resources:

• $5 Meal Plan
• eMeals
• 36 Easy Meal Prep Recipes (Dinner at the Zoo)
• 51 Quick Prep Meals for Big Families (Taste of Home)

Also, consider buying things in bulk and planning meals around what’s on sale for that week. It’s an easy way to save money on meal prep.

7. Use time blocking to manage your days

Time blocking is something I only discovered in the last year or so, but boy, what a difference it can make if you’re trying to be a more organized mom!

Time blocking just means breaking up your day into chunks, then assigning each of those chunks to a different task or activity.

For example, if you have younger kids still at home, you might create blocks for meals, blocks for nap time, blocks for playtime, blocks for tidying up, blocks for running errands–you get the idea. You can keep track of your time blocks using a timer or clock app on your phone, or an egg timer if you want to go old-school.

Since I work at home, my morning time blocks are devoted to freelance writing work. Afternoons are for homeschooling and evenings are for family time or extracurriculars, depending on the day.

I block off the time after my kids go to bed to work on blogging tasks or read if I’m too tired to blog.

It’s a simple system but it works like crazy for helping me be more productive and get things done each day. If you want to get started with time blocking, I’ve got some free time tracker sheets you can snag in the freebie library!

8. Use an app to manage the family schedule

I saved what I think is the very best tip for being a more organized mom for last.

Here’s the truth, keeping up with different schedules can be a real pain. You might have one kid in one activity, while another kid is doing something different. And your spouse might help you out with getting kids here or there or doing household chores, all of which requires a foolproof system for managing it all.

That’s where an app can help you out.

Cozi is an organizational app that’s designed for just families. Everybody in the family who has a mobile device can download the app to keep track of activities so you know who’s supposed to be where and when.

You can also store your grocery lists, meal plans, shopping lists and to-do lists right in the app, which is great if you can’t get the hang of managing a planner.

Cozi is also great for single moms (and dads) who co-parent and need a way to keep tabs on things like pick up and drop-off schedules, vacations, birthdays and other kid-focused events.

You can use Cozi free as long as you don’t mind seeing ads in the app. If you’d prefer to go ad-free, you can upgrade to Cozi Gold and unlock even more features.

What’s your best tip to be a more organized mom?

I hope these tips help if you occasionally suffer from a case of hot mess mom syndrome like me. Because as busy moms, we could all use things that can make life a little easier, right?

If you’ve got a killer tip for being more organized as a mom, drop a comment and tell me about it.

And of course, please show this post some love and pin and share it if it helped you!