Time Management Without a Schedule
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photo sourceRemember the love-hate relationship I have with schedules? Well, a few months ago I gave it a go. I really did. I wrote up a schedule and I ran it through the paces.
And ya know what? It really didn’t support what the players on my team were doing. It wasn’t good for morale. It really rankled the coach. So, I cut it from the team.
Yes, yes, I did.
But, am I throwing all caution to the wind? Have I thrown in the proverbial towel? Have I given up in the last quarter of the game? No, no, I haven’t. But, I’ve found a way to manage my time without an hour-by-hour schedule.
And it. is. amazing.
Time is Our Currency
Years ago, this song by Chris Rice was on my regular playlist. And even then, I wondered how to budget my time. We’re given 24 hours. How do we spend them? At the time, I was really struggling.
I remember that season of having moved cross country, selling a house, and knowing no one in a new town. I remember having a newborn. I remember having six children under twelve.
But, I really don’t remember much else. It’s all a blur. And, it has been really, really hard to get back on my game.
Yet I know the days are fleeting. My eldest child is going to be 14 in a few months. Surely, he was just a newborn. I don’t want to miss out on these days.
One help has been to put my household notebook in order. Every six months or so I need to give it a makeover, but a household notebook and planning pages help me keep things in order.
Another thing to help me manage life better has been to investigate other methods of time management. I’ve consulted with friends, read helpful posts, and examined books on the topic.
Between things that I’ve learned from my friend Crystal and what I gleaned from the ebook, Tell Your Time by Amy Lynn Andrews, I’ve put together a little system that I is helping me, basically it’s a time budget.
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Budgeting My Time
Following Amy and Crystal’s lead, I made a list of all the regular things I do in a day:
- Sleeping
- Bible Reading/Journaling/Praying
- Reading
- Exercising
- Shower/Dressing
- Laundry
- Schooling
- Coupons/Meal Planning/Shopping
- Writing/Blogging
- Meal Prep/Meals
- Housekeeping
- Margin (Crystal had to remind me on that one)
Then I alloted each of those activities a time limit or allowance. The numbers had to total 24 hours, no more and no less.
And quite honestly, it took me awhile to learn this. I read Amy’s book. I read Crystal’s series on Time Management. It wasn’t until Crystal and I were on the phone talking about it that it finally sunk in. That’s when she reminded me that it all needed to add up to 24 and that there needed to be margin for error/emergencies/whatever. Apparently, I really was trying to accomplish more than 24 hours of stuff everyday.
Yes, I’m a little slow.
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Having an allowance
I tend to be an “all or nothing” kind of person. I want to finish all the laundry. I want to give the kitchen a thorough scrubbing. I want to answer every email.
But, if I did that, nothing else would get done in a day. So, by limiting myself to 30 minutes of laundry each day, I am able to work on the task and feel like I can mark it off my list, even if I haven’t matched every sock. I’m doing the laundry. I’m just not doing all the laundry.
This allowance of time helps keep me efficient and moving from one task to the next.
Not only that, but I feel the freedom to spend time on things I wouldn’t normally think I had time for. For instance, I gave myself 30 minutes for shower and dressing. Each morning I set the timer on my phone for 30 minutes. If I’m showered and dressed, but the timer hasn’t rung yet, then I have time to do “extras” like give myself a facial, paint my toes, or put on lotion — things that I usually neglect.
Since I’ve given myself this “allowance,” I’m feeling more “put together” and practices that I had relegated to the “pre-children years” are happening again.
But, I don’t have a “schedule.”
The one thing that I’m not doing is assigning times of the day to when these things should happen. I’m not even creating a sequence of when these tasks should be done. No schedules, no “routine.” THAT makes me always feel behind.
I realized in all this time management study that if the important things are getting done, then it doesn’t really matter when they happen or in what order.
This has been so freeing to me.
Remembering to DO it
Now the trick to any kind of budget, whether it is time or money, is to actually follow it. And I confess, since I am slow and easily distracted, some days I forget my time budget exists. But, there are increasingly more days when I remember. And I’m trying really hard to remind myself.
I even went so far as to print it all out on a card so that I could remember what I needed to be doing throughout the day. It’s a condensed version of my daily to-do list. And I carry it around with me. It’s small enough to fit in my pocket so I have no excuse for not consulting it.
Yes, I am slow and easily distracted. But, this helps me.
Living without a “schedule” but still being productive and responsible in my home is a great feeling. I haven’t “arrived,” but I feel like I’m on the right path.
Loved this post….especially the pic of the UCLA scoreboard…go Bruins!!
Seen Crystals link to this post and had to read it… I so needed this for the season of life I am in right now!!! I am fighting a long uphill battle with Lyme Disease, and do not have energy for the many tasks in my day. I have 3 boys 5, 3 and almost 2, so you can only imagine the busyness of my days.
It’s so easy to feel discouraged and down when I don’t get anything more then laundry done and my boys fed… only doing that much wears me out and I struggle to find time/energy to spend with my boys.
You have helped me put into perspective that I need to lower my expectations on myself. I have too much of a perfectionist view on what I want to do… and I need to just let it all go!!!
I need to prioritize the things that NEED to be done and then let the rest fill in the cracks, if it gets done it gets done. If not so be it!! I don’t NEED to ‘be like everyone else’ and have a detailed schedule, just the basics. I love crossing things off a list… so this would be a good compromise!!
Thanks again!!
@Lois, hang in there. Your priority needs to be to get well and to love on your kids. I think you are wise to revisit your expectations of yourself.
God bless you!
Your kids are almost exactly the same ages as mine! 🙂 (I am still holding on to the fact that my baby isn’t 2 for another 3 weeks!)
Thanks for the different perspective on scheduling. I, like most of the other people here, have tried a schedule only to abandon it within a short amount of time. I don’t like feeling rushed or frustrated because something isn’t getting finished in time. I will be trying this more relaxed, yet still somewhat structured approach very soon. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!
Thanks for a great post! I like being organized, but feel like I “fail” with the set schedule. Thanks for a wonderful word!
I’m a working mom, and my other half – he’s a working dad. What on earth is time??!! We already thought we “had no time” before our daughter was born. Neither of us are the best homemakers – we both are capable of cooking and cleaning, but after 8 hours at work and 90 minutes+ of commuting, you want to get home and relax, not figure out dinner, much less vacuum or dust anything. Our family doesn’t live extremely nearby. Most weekends we have plans, either visiting family, or going out somewhere together to relax.
Needless to say, my house WAS a total disaster area most of the time. I was lucky if we dusted once every few months, and we basically live in the country and have cats. We really should be dusting much more often than that!!! Having the house in disarray and being unorganized at home was making me cranky and depressed. I finally decided to do something about it.
I tried scheduling out our time as most people do – but our schedules vary so much from day-to-day, let alone week-to-week that it always looked good on paper, but it never really worked in application.
I tried downloading chore schedules and task list from other websites. Trouble is they were all geared toward SAHM’s. I have nothing against SAHM’s by any means – I envy them in many ways… I learned the hard way after a lto of frustration and tears that a schedule for a SAHM is not the same as a schedule for a working mom… (should have been a no brainer, but I like t othink I’m super woman!)
In the end I gave up and decided I needed to do something myself and not try to lean on anyone elses ideas. I actually ended up doign somethign similar to what you did. I took an inventory of EVERYTHING that needed to be done, how long it would take to do it and how often I needed to do it. I put together a schedule for things over the course of all of 2011. I had a list of what absolutely had to be done each day (1 load of laundry, wash yoru face, brush your teeth, run the dishwasher, prep for tomorrows dinner, etc) and then added in chores – everything from cat litter and taking the trash out to dusting, decluttering, cleaning the garbage disposal, flushing the water heater and anything else you can imagine. Anythign that was going to take more than 15 minutes was broken down into multiple days if at all possible…. Cleaning out the entire fridge at any point in time is a daunting project for me… but cleaning off one shelf of the fridge? I can do that.
Normally I’m an all or nothing person, much like you mentioned… but knowing that I have the other shelves scheduled to be done over the next couple of weeks, I can just let it go and be happy about it. And if we miss a day? I only have at the VERY most 2 hours of chores on a weekend day, most weekend days are closer to or 1 hour (not including the normal daily stuff that wouldn’t need to be ‘made up’). It’s not hard to make up those other chores, I can find an extra hour a week if it means I get to go out to dinner with friends… or if it’s something that I’ll have to do again in a week or two, I’ll just let it go and refuse to feel guilty about not getting it done this one time.
I also made sure to put things on the checklist that were easy to complete – brushing my teeth, taking vitamins, etc. The amount of satisfaction I get from being able to check off ANY box on my tasks is amazing, and it somehow seems to psychologically help with everything when I can tick off more boxes even if I don’t get everything finished!
I put my task list into a spiral bound book. On the left side its all my tasks, on the right side it’s the meal plans for the week. I love it. I dont’ know how I lived without it… We still don’t have a perfectly spotless house by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s so much better than it was, and I’m able to wake up in the morning in a good mood (most ofthe time) so it’s definitely doing it’s job!
Thank you for this post — I love that the concept I ended up applying is something that someone else out there already knew about, just wish I had seen this post before I racked my brain for weeks about how to make a ‘schedule’ work for me!!
Good for you! I’m so glad to hear your story!
@Amber,
Amber,
Thank you SO MUCH for your candid comment here. I, too, work full-time outside of the home and it feels like more than half of my day is “eaten up” by my office hours and commute. I am home by 6pm and just want to crash. But, alas, there are dirty dishes in the sink, a hungry (and also tired) husband and son to feed, laundry staring me in the face, homework that needs to be done, etc.
I feel like a hamster on a wheel. It’s a never-ending cycle of chaos. And most weekends, I find myself in tears as I spend all of my “free time” trying to get my housework caught up, instead of going outside and spending time with my son. We aren’t the most organized people and it’s amazing how much can pile up when you’re constantly in a hurry to go, go, go.
This is not the lifestyle I want, but I have accepted that God has placed me where I am in this season of my life for a purpose. I am trusting in Him that after this season is over, I am be at home full-time, which is where my heart already is.
Words can’t express just how encouraging it is to know that I’m not alone. I look forward to trying these time management tools, in hopes of bringing back the peace in our home.
May God bless you for sharing.
Thanks for this post. Tears are in my eyes now as you have helped me realize that I don’t have get everything done in one day and follow a picture-perfect schedule to be productive. You have been an encouragement to this Mommy living in the world of a newborn + 2 preschoolers.
@Rhoda, no, you don’t have to have it picture perfect. You have to find the way that fits you and your peeps. I feel confident that you’ll find it, though.
I came over from Crystals’ blog, and I just wanted to thank you for sharing your struggles and what is working for you. I too have had many struggles with scheduled activities, but time budgeting sounds like it may work well for me as well. I’m going to be re-reading Crystal’s series and buying Amy’s book. With three little ones and another one on the way, I need to reach some kind of compromise with myself in this area, something that will help me feel like I’m actually accomplishing something, yet keeps my family and my home as peaceful as it can be!! Thanks again for sharing!
@Rebekah, finding compromise with yourself is a wonderful way to phrase it. Yes, it is exactly that, coming to terms with our own expectations.
Yes, thanks for “saying it out loud” that this is the way you “schedule”. I try to have realistic blocks of time for our every day life also, but the order can be amended according to what is happening that day. A flexible schedule is one of the main reasons that we are homeschooling…so that we don’t have to follow someone else’s schedule. Plus it fits with my husband’s variable work schedule. It has taken me a while to be confident that this system works for us, but I am so glad that I can enjoy the simple, spur of the moment pleasures without worrying about my carved-in-stone time table. The only thing that we try to stick to is a realistic bed time for every one…including the adults!
I enjoyed reading this! Much better way to organize my day. I have found that anytime I plan out my days, scheduling minute by minute, it only lasts a short while. It is just too structured for any normal person to follow it! The way you are suggesting allows me to get everything in for the day, yet do each task in the order I feel like doing them for the day. I think this will work perfectly!
Enjoying your post today…At our house we love that Chris Rice song too…. : )
For me, survival mode is my quiet time with the Lord first; I don’t put a time on that part. Laundry, we try to do one load a day, depending on circumstances. Some days our girls have the wash room though for their many loads. At least a 15 minute nap with my feet up in the afternoon. I really try to do a 30 minute creative project lately, it helps my mental if you know what I mean. Supper is a must, so we usually do a simple dinner or crockpot. That must include at least one green veggie. Sometimes my daughters will cook as well. And of course doing some dishes done by my daughters on rotation. I will say, there are usually dishes in our sink since we cook quite a bit. I’ve learned 70% works. I just put the big rocks in first, then whatever else fits. I like a sweet loving, laughing home not a museum. : ) I used to think there was something wrong with me because my home wasn’t as sterile and model-homish as others but I’m learning I’m okay, it’s okay. From talking with other happy moms who cook a lot, who homeschool etc. I am normal! I am happy. : D
Thanks so much for the links and such, today I’ll have to treat myself to a nice gleaning session! I love learning new ideas from others, even at age 50. ; )
Bless you!
@Amelia, I’d say you’re better than normal. 😉 Ours might be museum quality — but only as a picture of “The Lived In Look.”