After four kids, taking care of my parents, and all the rest, I’ve developed some serious ninja mom skills. They let me survive the insanity of having multiple children in different places doing different activities. These tricks have ensured I’ve got through motherhood only semi-scathed and mostly unscarred.
Use some of my suggestions at your own risk.
7 ninja mom skills
- Make your family help with chores. I’m not perfect at this, but we have a chore chart, and when we insist the kids do their chores and do them correctly, things go much more smoothly. That includes having them come back and finish anything left half-done. One person cannot do all the housework for six people.
- Develop an easy arsenal of dinners. A baked potato and salad counts as dinner. So do chicken nuggets, pancakes, omelettes, or hot dogs.
- Plan bath times strategically, especially when they’re younger. Schedule them for nights with fewer activities. Most children don’t need a bath every day — it dries out their skin. Bonus points if a trip to the pool counts as that night’s bath.
- Get used to dust. Lower your standards. Accept that there will be dust bunnies and mess, and your house will not be perfect. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you stop pulling your hair out.
- Make hard rules about where food is allowed. At my house that means the kitchen table, sitting down. Food doesn’t get dragged into the living room, because that attracts ants and produces spills. The harder you are about this rule, the easier messes are to contain. Any child over about three who makes a mess contributes to cleaning it up; over about seven and they clean it themselves, supervised.
- Sort the mail at the front door. Recycle catalogues and flyers immediately. Everything that takes more than about two minutes goes in one pile, to be worked through at a set time — about once a week for me.
- Get rid of clutter. The hardest one for me, but the less there is, the easier everything else becomes. That means periodically going through everything under the sink, in the closets, throughout the house. I always have a bag ready to be donated.
What these actually have in common
Written out like that, they look like housekeeping tips. They aren’t, quite — and the underlying pattern is the same one that makes a business work.
Every single one of them is a decision made once so it doesn’t have to be made repeatedly.
The chore chart removes a nightly negotiation. Without it, every evening contains a discussion about who does what. With it, the discussion happened once.
The dinner list removes a daily decision. Not what’s for dinner, but what are the acceptable answers to what’s for dinner. Five options you’ve pre-approved beats an open question at 6pm when everyone is hungry.
The food rule removes an argument. Hard rules are easier to keep than flexible ones, precisely because there’s nothing to debate.
Sorting mail at the door prevents a pile. The two-minute rule is a decision about what deserves attention now versus later, made before you’re looking at the envelope.
That’s what all of these are: reducing the number of decisions a day requires. Not being more disciplined, or trying harder, or being better organised as a personality trait. Deciding once, in advance, so the moment doesn’t require a decision at all.
The same thing runs a business
Founders drown in small decisions, and it rarely feels like the problem because each one is trivial.
Should we take this client? Should I reply now? Does this discount make sense? Can she leave early Thursday? Which supplier? Each takes ninety seconds and none of them is hard. A hundred of them is your whole week, and you end it exhausted with nothing built.
The business version of a chore chart is the same move:
- Decide who your client is, once, in writing. Then enquiries that don’t fit stop being a judgement call.
- Set your prices and your discount policy, once. Then negotiation is a lookup rather than a decision made under pressure.
- Give people authority with a limit. “Spend up to $500 without asking” removes dozens of small approvals from your week.
- Have standing answers to recurring questions. If you’ve explained it twice, it should be written somewhere that isn’t your head.
The parallel holds for the awkward one too. “Get used to dust” is the household version of deciding what you’ll let be imperfect. Every business has areas that aren’t excellent and don’t need to be — and choosing them deliberately is very different from feeling guilty about all of them simultaneously.
The rule underneath
You don’t become a ninja overnight, and there are always new ways to do things. I like the cleaning tricks from FlyLady, though the volume of emails drives me batty.
Know your limits and stick to them. Nobody is perfect, and you should rule your gloriously imperfect household — and your gloriously imperfect business — rather than being ruled by either.
