photo credit:
angelocesare
I’ll just up and say it, because I hate those posts that build up a huuuuuge secret (to $1000 a month! to work-at-home secrets! to twice the productivity for half the effort! for perfect children! for great summer hair!) and then just let you down with something lame after you’ve made it through the whole-entire-not-really-worth-reading post.
The Big Secret to Getting Things Done as a Busy Mama
<drum roll>
People can wait.
People can wait without damage to their eternal well-being, developing psyches, or sense of relational importance.
Things can wait.
Things can wait without much damage at all to um, anything, including their non-eternal well-being.
The Right-Now Fallacy
Does Junior need his sippy cup right now? Does your best friend need you to return her call this very instant? Will the laundry disintegrate if it is not folded and put away immediately? (Regular scientific studies performed at my house say No, so you can breathe a sigh of relief on that one.)
The Right-Now Fallacy says
- if you don’t do it right now, it doesn’t count.
- if you don’t do it right now, the world will end.
- if you don’t do it right now, it means you don’t care.
- if you don’t do it right now, you’ll forget and never do it.
That little tyrannical monster looms big in our lives because we let it.
My husband will ask me to do something minor: return a call, schedule a get-together, sew on a button, pay a bill. And I think, for some reason, that I have to drop everything and do it right now. Which isn’t, as it turns out, what he means at all (most of the time).
My children will ask for a thousand hundred things in the course of a single moment, and they do mean right now.
Hold me, look at me, watch me, listen to me, help me, read to me, be with me, snuggle with me, get me a snack, get me a drink, get me some lunch, get me a treat, wash my hands, comb my hair, I need a ponytail, I need help with my shoes, I need to reach that toy on that high shelf that I will forget about approximately 20 seconds after you get it down for me, and so on.
Valid needs.
Who am I to discount the need to hold the tantalizing toy for 20 seconds? (Um, I”m the MOM, that’s who. But never mind. That’s not the point here.)
The point is, even very valid and real and important needs (snuggle! read! help! change diaper!) can wait for a little while without causing any major catastrophe. (IMPORTANT EXCEPTION: exploding diapers should be dealt with immediately or dire consequences will result. I am warning you, straight up, don’t wait around on those. IT GETS UGLY.)
The reason this is important…
(because I hear you, you’re probably all like Ummmmkay, how is this helping me to get things done?)
…well it’s like this.
Much of our frustration as busy mamas is due to the continual interrupting that is part of life with children (and, ahem, husband).
Now interruptions are not necessarily evil (that point could be argued), but the result is that we wander off to meet urgently expressed need without finishing or even wrapping up our current thing-in-progress, and by the end of the day we wander dazed through the house and see about fifteen dozen things-in-progress that we were never able to get back to doing all the way, and it is frustrating, disheartening, and overwhelming.
And we begin to resent those interruptions, and it is our own fault because, darn it ladies, we take them too seriously. And that is our own fault.
Try this and see how it effects your ability to get things done.
Next time you are interrupted, answer courteously with a “Yes, sure, I will be happy to take care of/help you with/draw twenty-seven blueredandpurplerainbows for/etc as soon as I finish this thing.”
Then: finish it.
THEN, and only then, go take care of the request-in-queue.
You already know the outcome, don’t you?
If you took the extra five or ten minutes to finish emptying the dishwasher, paying the bills, writing the article, playing the song on the piano, putting away the baby’s clothes, having the conversation with your sister, writing the note, mopping under the table, reading the chapter, editing the draft, or whatever it is, you wouldn’t have fifteen-leventy-dozen unfinished things at the end of the day.
And probably, nobody will be worse off for it.
Yes, of course there are exceptions. And yes, of course there is one valid danger that I admit to, the danger that you will completely and totally forget the request-in-queue while you are finishing the task at hand.
A real danger.
I have a solution for that, too, which I was going to write down as soon as I finished writing this… and, um, I forgot it…
Get back to you on that.
whatever you’re hooked on. It has helped me keep track of what’s going on with my day (I kind of use it as a scheduler plus a goal tracker). I can see progress. I can put in little checkmarks.