Time management has become an elusive thing for me lately. I am struggling to understand where all my time goes. Each day has become a tug-of-war for time, with the limited commodity being pursued by limitless tasks and projects.
I want to do it all. I want to read more, exercise more, see friends more, sew more, blog more, cook more, spend time with my family more, pray more, clean more (well, I need to anyway), work more, and on and on the pull goes.
I have always analyzed my time like an accountant. There are six hours in my day from when my youngest leaves for school until my oldest gets home. Six hours seems like so much, but it has become like trying to hold on to grains of sand! It slips through my grasp so fast each day and leaves me feeling like I have so little to show for it! By the time I exercise, plan dinner, read a bit, walk the dog, call my mom, do some laundry, run an errand, and answer some emails, the time is done and gone. Is that logical?
In my accounting approach to time, I've tried to force myself into various time constraints. I made equations like this: 1 hour exercise + 1 hour cleaning + 1 hour emailing + 1 hour reading.... you get the idea. Or, I've tried to assign certain tasks to only certain days--like errands only on Tuesdays. But somehow, the practical application of these formulas never comes to fruition for more than a day or two. Part of that is because my life is so unpredictable. There is no formula to account for sewing skirts for the dance studio for 120 hours or making cake pops for a class presentation for 6 hours or designing a new website for a friend for 60 hours or the panicked cleaning marathons before company arrives for 30 hours, or even for the countless hours used up by dentist and orthodontist appointments. I am grateful for the ability to be so unpredictable with my time, don't get me wrong! I love that I am able to take on some crazy projects because I don't exactly work for a living.
But, I am starting to think (and I feel funny admitting how long it has to taken me to realize this) that being a stay-at-home/work-from-home mom has to be approached more like a job than I realized. I need to do a better job of treating it like a job. I've always given the excuse that I am a "creative person" who needs to be free to create, but in that freedom, I need more structure.
So, while the accountant formula is too rigid, the "creative freedom" approach is too loose. And now, I am on the hunt for the middle ground, where I am doing the "job" of stay-at-home mom alongside the actual jobs I get paid for. But where the creative liberties that fuel my soul are not squeezed out by the rigid rules of cleaning that must be done on a certain day or else I'm not doing it right.
Anyone else work at home? Have you figured out the right balance for this?
