SISTER WISDOM : build a better life

{from 11 April 2009} I am getting the hang of this, I think. It's much easier to go from 2 to 3 than from 1 to 2. I am moving slowly today; not much sleep last night. I need to work on keeping Zeke awake a bit more during the day so we can have a better night tonight. Hey, he's got a lot to figure out for only having been here 4 days. He's doing good.

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday, and apart from being tired I feel good enough to go. I'm sure we could manage to get there, maybe even participate on the worship team, but I don't think we should. When Robbie was born I didn't miss a Sunday on stage. Okay, that's great, pat myself on the back. I think I was trying to prove something.

With Zeke, I'm really over proving anything to anyone. I want to take advantage of this time when we are excused from taking part. I want feed my baby, snuggle with my husband, rest in our bed, play with our children, and have a relaxing morning with no obligations.

Ironic how not restful Sundays often are. I enjoy them, but for many people they are work more than rest. I love our church, I love participating, I love the worship, I love the people; but it is a busy and somewhat complicated time of coordinating church responsibilities and parenting responsibilities. I don't feel like I can really enter into rest until Sunday lunch is over.

I'd like to think about how to change that. Actually - I need to think about how to change a lot of things. I can feel the introspection coming on.

Time to plan. I love planning. I'm weak in the application. Right now, though, I'm excused from the application so I'm taking advantage of the time to think, sort, plan. And I want to be thorough, gain strength, and then start sticking tot he plan. That's how I see progress. A little progress encourages and produces more of the same.

Yes, the inner geek has struck again. I'm learning to embrace it, though. At this point in life, I'm fairly confident that no matter how geeky I get my husband will still think I'm cute, my babies will still think I am the source of all goodness, my sister will just laugh, and my friends will still love me. (They already all know I'm wierd, anyway.) So why hide it?

I've come to this conclusion about schedules: love 'em or hate 'em, if you're going to have smallish children and get anything other than diaper changing and nose wiping done in a day, you have to have one. And follow it, kind of dogmatically. I've been scratched mine out on several different pieces of paper, tweaked it, and scratched it out again. I'm still trying to find a good balance for all the stuff: Mommy stuff, Writing stuff, Me stuff, and other random but important stuff like paying bills and washing clothes. Oh, yes, and Sleep. (Occasionally.) Inevitably, just when I really get on a roll and start getting comfortable with my schedule, one of the kids starts one of those "I've just hit a new phase in life and my sleeping and eating patterns will now be completely different" surprises. Love those. Yum, yum.

Mara, for example, no longer needs two naps a day. She will still go to her bedroom, but she usually stays awake for the entire two hours during either the morning or the afternoon "nap." Fortunately Robbie sleeps through most of her noise. Unfortunately, she starts getting bored when he doesn't wake up and "talk" to her. Bored + 2 year old = Not Good.

A few days ago I was tapping away at the keyboard, racing through a last article, trying to get finished before lunchtime. Mara is talking away in their bedroom, but she's fairly quiet and happy and Robbie isn't crying. It's about half an hour before naptime should be over, so I'm just going to leave her in there. Until I hear three very distinct words: "Uh-oh. Poo-poo. Mawa."  She kept repeating them: "Uh-oh. Mawa poo-poo. Uh-oh. Poo-poo. Uh-oh. Mawa." Time to go check in.

So I open the door to see Mara squatting in the rocking chair, holding her diaper in her hand, pointing to the floor. "Uh-oh." Yep. There are little piles which should have ended up in her diaper had she kept it on her bottom. She knows how to get herself a new diaper from the changing table; if only I could teach her how to put it on...

Time to adjust the schedule again. Not that I don't love my little pooping daughter, but those two hours of morning nap are my most productive writing time. Not worth cleaning up piles off the floor every day, though. Here's to flexibility.

(Oh, yes, that picture at the top is my schedule that I finally moved from various pieces of paper to an actual pretty spreadsheet. I made it a .pdf, then Joe showed me how to take a screenshot so I could make it my desktop background. Geeky, I know, but now it's there all the time. And it still has photos on it, they're just smaller...).

SCHEDULING, SCHMEDULING (YAWN). WHAT'S THE POINT?
Some of us resist schedules because they seem restrictive, anti-creativity, control-freakish. Certainly some schedules are that way. If you're scheduling your time down to ten-minute sections, I think we might need to work on your control freak tendencies. On the other hand, if you schedule nothing and live to follow the natural flow, you not only stifle productivity but you will also end up stifling creativity as well. You live by a schedule whether you admit it or not; a schedule is simply a matter of doing a certain thing at a certain time. When you take initiative to set your own schedule, you can do so according to your own priorities. When you don't set your own schedule, you are not only at the mercy of your own whims (which very often do not line up with your bigger goals and priorities) but you are also at the mercy of others who will not hesitate to impose their schedules on yours... or your lack thereof. So it really comes down to whose schedule you want to follow: yours, thoughtfully laid out, or some haphazard construct of circumstances. Seems like a no-brainer to me, but take the time to think it over if you must.

BASIC SCHEDULING
I like to keep my schedule pretty basic. It includes 1) A Beginning and an End and 2) Time Blocks. There are multiple planning calendars in as many formats as you can dream up. I find them all too complicated for my simple living preferences. This is not true for everyone; my husband loves his Franklin Covey planner and uses it faithfully. I feel restricted by all those boxes with lines and titles. The perfectionist in me just can't leave well enough alone, so I spend more time scheduling in all the pretty boxes than I do actually implementing my schedule. Since the point of a schedule is to simplify and to increase productivity, and I find that the more complex planners accomplish neither goal for me, I stick with my basics and forgo the professional leather-binder look. You might find that a combination of methods works best for you. My advice is this: start simple and be diligent with your simple scheduling techniques. Once you know they work for you, you can tweak and add on and adjust to your heart's delight. Don't start way at the top of the complex calendar hierarchy. The very complexity is too overwhelming to keep up when you're first learning how to schedule, and you'll get discouraged and drop it all.

A BEGINNING AND AN END
This topic makes me think of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, when she first attempts to teach the Captain's children how to sing: "Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start..." Of course, she drops her little Happy Beginnings song in favor of the inexplicably popular Do-Re-Mi. We, however, shall carry our Happy Beginnings all the way to Happy Endings.

What needs a beginning and an end is your working day. Your entire day is capped on both ends automatically by your bed. You wake up and get out of bed, your day begins. You get sleepy and get back in bed, your day ends. I see no reason to mess with that kind of perfection, unless you need some help on the waking up and getting out of bed part. We'll get to that in another article. For now, we're dealing with the workday itself, the part of the day that begins after you've been awakened by the sound of bluebirds (or the alarm clock) and, I hope, have eaten a halfway decent breakfast. Oh, also, you should get dressed. Maybe even before breakfast.
Your workday beginning may be set in stone already. You have to be at the office at 9:00 am. There you go. 9:00 am it is. For those of us who work in more flexible fields, in which the office hours dictate next to nothing, setting a Beginning is a matter of choice and convenience. If you're a stay-at-home Mom trying to wake, dress, and feed three kids, then give yourself enough time to do that before you try to get down to the rest of your work. If you're a work-from-home small business owner who likes to start the day with a two-hour gym session, then set your workday beginning accordingly.

The End of the workday is just as important as the beginning. Again, this may be dictated by office hours, or it may be a matter of choice and fitting in with what happens in the rest of your day. Perhaps it's 3:00 pm when the kids get home from school. Perhaps it's 6:00 pm when your spouse gets home from work. Perhaps it's 9:00 pm when you realize you haven't eaten anything since noon. (I don't recommend that last time option, by the way.) Choose an End. Put a cap on your working hours. Sure, you can always choose to do "extra" work or finish up projects in the evening if you want to, but that should be something you do because you really want to, not because you have to, and it should never interfere with your family time or social obligations.

My workday beginning is 8:00 am and my workday end is 5:00 pm. Of course there is more that happens before and after those times, but it is within those times that I block out time for work and have specific goals to accomplish.

BLOCKING OUT YOUR TIME
I learned this one from my husband, who implements the concept with his Franklin Covey planner in a way I can only admire. The idea itself is Read the rest of this entry »

04 February - Home and the Lights Are Dimming
I am so awake this morning! Progress. I got right up and out of bed today. No snooze for me, because I left my phone - which is my alarm - on the kitchen table. A good move, and one that helped me wake right up. Other things that helped: I went to bed at 9:00 last night. I am home and slept in my own bed beside my husband. I am at home and as soon as I wake up I immediately start seeing things that I need to do, especially when I've been away from my routine for a while.

The real help in waking up today came from the pile of mail beside my phone. There on the top was the electric bill, the one I forgot to pay! A little jolt like that (no pun intended) will help you wake up. At least they didn't turn off the electricity on Joe while I was gone. "Why is everything getting so dark all of a sudden...?"
I have so many projects for February. Too many. I know it is too many, but I still want to get them all done. One thing on the list is to hang curtains or pictures, something I should definitely do since we've lived here now for two years and I have put up curtains in only two rooms and hung a total of two pictures on the walls. I guess that's one per year: rather a slow rate of progress. I know Joe would definitely appreciate a curtain over the window above the shower. (It's really not a priority for me; I'm only 5'4". Heh heh.)
I have this tendency to wait on things (procrastination) until I figure out exactly how to do them right (perfectionism). Procrastination + Perfectionism = Nothing Gets Done. I'm working on it. Imperfect progress realized is better than perfection imagined. I just have trouble remembering that sometimes.
Two principles for my life and home while I work on overcoming my P+P issues: 1) NO COMPARING. Comparison is never helpful; it just makes me think I can never achieve what I'm comparing myself or my home or my life to. I don't see the imperfections of what or whom I am comparing myself with, so it reinforces that perfectionism tendency. Bad, bad, bad. 2) JUST DO IT. Sometimes we really do learn from advertising. Nike is right. (So is Yoda.)
And now I must go do something like breakfast.