Managing time and scheduling for moms becomes very important when you are dealing with multiple children, a husband, pets, and various interruptions during the day. When you view your time as a commodity, like money, you can look at your days and identify whether you spend too much in one area.
If you constantly feel breathless and behind, this page is a good place to begin reading to find ways to restore sanity to your life and managing time and scheduling. Think managing-timeback to yesterday. Did you lose an hour at the grocery store because you went at a high-traffic time of day? Did you talk too long on the phone with that friend who bends your ear about her problems when you really needed to spend time with your son? Where you late for an appointment because you spent an hour looking for your daughter's ballet shoes because she hadn't put them in their designated place? Can you think of other ways precious minutes slipped through your hands? If so, don't get down on yourself. Recognizing the problem is the first step to solving it.
Taking some time to think about how your time is spent every day is an important exercise. It will help you identify your priorities--whether you're living according to yours or someone else's, for whatever reason--and it's the first step necessary for becoming a good manager of the minutes of your day.
Minutes is the key word in that last sentence, because to be a good manager of your family's calendar and daily schedule, you must see not just the hours but the minutes of your day as valuable.
One of the best ways to keep track of minutes in your day is by using a personal planner. Here's one of my favorites. The great part about this particular personal planner is that it's an undated weekly planner that lets you start planning from any time of year, so you can start right now!
Wouldn't it be helpful if someone invented a way to stop the clock for a full day so we would all have a large, uninterrupted block of time to catch up with everything we're behind on or accomplish a big project? This might make a good story line for a film, but when it comes to reality, we have to catch up and keep up in real time--which for most of us means seeing small bits of time as treasure.
Managing time and scheduling can be very difficult for moms but you'd be surprised how much you can accomplish when you start using the snippets of time you grab here and there. Granted, you may not be able to scrapbook every age and stage of your 10-year-old daughter's life, but you'll make progress every time you work on a page--which will make you feel better about yourself--and eventually the project will be finished!
It's also important to live in the present as well as the future.
Living in the present has everything to do with living one day at a time--being prepared for the day's responsibilities, using the minutes of the day wisely, and being alert for and enjoying each day's blessings.
Living in the future means thinking ahead about what you want to happen--tomorrow, next week, or next month--and what needs to happen for a goal to be met, using small bits of time along the way to prepare for the future event.
An excellent way to keep track of living in the present and the future is by using a family calendar that is available for everyone in the family to see and use. You could try a dry erase monthly wall calendar that is a simple way to plan your month. Or you could also try a wall calendar that allows you to separate your schedule from that of your children and then hang it up for all to see.
When you view your time as a commodity, you can look at your days and identify whether you spend too much in one area.
Once you start living in the present as well as the future, you realize the importance of protecting your time. When you anticipate future needs while managing those routine yet vital tasks, you naturally want to guard your minutes and spend them on what's most important to you and your family.
Yet even with the best of planning, we all can end up frustrated when projects and people who weren't even on our radar screens take up time we hadn't planned to spend. Being a mom requires flexibility and guarantees interruptions. In many ways our time is not our own, and that's one of the sacrifices and privileges that comes with being a parent. Children--and life events--are predictably unpredictable. Every hour of every day brings events, episodes, and exchanges we cannot control. But some we can. Before we can get a handle on them though, it is imperative that we know what's most important to us.
The articles below will help you organize your day, identify time wasters, take advantage of small chunks of time, and discover new ways of multitasking. In other words, help you with managing time and scheduling like a pro!