More Me Time

Kids being Kids

 I almost missed this moment.  Not that there is anything specifically special about it.  It is just my two kids playing in our sprinklers on a random weekday.  But I almost missed it by cleaning the house or (more likely) reading a blog on the internet.  It is one of my favorite pictures to date.

Lately I’ve been doing A LOT of thinking about my time management and responsibilities.  As noted in a an earlier post, we have had our share of craziness this year.  Even so, my struggle has always been feeling like I have so much I want to accomplish and not enough of me to get it all done.  A lot of you responded to my post of making more “me” time.  And I do have to say that Tuesday was pretty darn wonderful…but it got me thinking that maybe one day isn’t enough…maybe I want some “me” time most, if not all, days.  So to delve even further, I started two lists: one with all the “things” (responsibilities, hobbies) that I would like to/need to put time towards.  The second list contained the things that are essentially stealing my time away.  So here is what I started out with:

List one (Responsibilities): Housework, Kids, Church, Exercise, Sewing, Quilting Business, Photography

List two (Time stealers): Sleep, Facebook, Blog Reading

Some of you might note that my husband is not on list one (or two for that matter).  I am only talking about my daily life here.  I stay at home with the kids.  My goal here is to make the most of my time while hubby is at work in order to spend more quality time when he gets home.  So he’s on a list…just not any of these…

Also, let me interject here…I am far from an expert in any time-saving, soul-searching matters.  I’m just showing you how I’m working thru this process in my head and hoping it might help some of you out there.

So that is step one in the process.  If you want to follow along, take a few minutes and just write down all the things that you either have to or want to do in your day.  To me, a happy existence is getting those things that have to get taken care of done and out of the way, so I can get to all the stuff that I want to do.  Very rarely (if ever) have I thought to myself, “gee I really want to get those dishes done.” 

In the next posts, I’ll show you how I went from List to diagram (Have I mentioned I am a visual person…and type A…but that will be for another post.)

Happy Listing!