*Recently changed from 30min to 15min

Dear shambolic reader,

Are you finding it hard to balance all that life throws at you and your responsibilities? If the answer is yes, then you’re in the right place. Not only is this one of my own personal biggest challenges but it’s also one of the most stressful.

I do find that what adds to the stress is my lack of discipline. The husband and I allow for the stress to dictate how we will make some of our decisions. For instance, “I’m too tired. Let our body rest” = no gym. Or “I’m mentally fatigue, let’s go watch a movie” = late night and late start to the morning which means a hectic one. All these little decisions can add up to us not checking off one more thing from our list of to-dos. We could have chosen to still go to the gym and do something more low impact, and we could have chosen to stay home to watch a movie and be able get to bed early, so we were rested and ready to start the next day. But no, we decided to hold ourselves back thru lack of discipline.

So, first things first, we need to refer back to The Design Phase, let’s filter our next moves through our goals to make sure what we’re doing is going to get us closer to them. One of my goals is to have more open time on weekends. Right now, I work so much and am so tired throughout the week that there tends to be a long list of things waiting for me on the weekends, washing clothes, meal prepping, cleaning the house, washing dishes, grocery shopping, cleaning the yard, washing the car. Ugh, just listing it gets me tired!

How I would prefer to see the weekend, would be 1/3 of the time resetting for the next week, 1/3 writing, and 1/3 spending time with my husband and pup. That equates to about 5 hours of doing each. Whatttt!!!???? I don’t feel like I have all that time, lol.

That essentially gives me 10 hours on the weekend to knock out the 1/3 resetting (once you back out sleep and a workout). Okay, I’m going to break this up a little further. If I spend 4 hours (I’m trying to leave a cushion of unallocated time) each on resetting, writing, and then doing something with the family then that’s actually 12 hours, give or take, per day accounted for. I think I can swing that. I hope you can too!

This is process is called time blocking. You’re essentially doing just that, blocking off time to do something specific during that time. Once that time is up, you move on to the next task/block of time- no Ands, Ifs or Buts. If you didn’t finish, better luck next time. In addition, for me to only need 10 hours of resetting on the weekend, means I need to take care of some the tasks during the week. Which means I need to start time blocking 30 15-minutes every day to address a chore. For example,

5-Days a Week: 5:30am wake, 6:45am-8:15am gym, 10am-8pm work, 9:15-9:30pm <DO SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE>, 10:30pm sleep

This will give me a total of 2.5 hours weekly of knocking something out. Now, we have to be mindful of the tasks we choose as we need to try and stay strict to the 30 15 min task. So, I’m going to choose things like, wash dishes, put a load to wash, clean half a room and then clean the other the next day. To help with staying on track, I’m going to ask Alexa to set a time for 30 15 min and stay true to that. I hope that will keep me efficient and accountable for how I’m using that time.

Now, I do not plan on this being a part of my life forever, but this will certainly work for now. I have high hopes that this structure will eventually give me more time moving forward to start addressing the other pillars.

As a reminder, this is a slow journey. It’s all about the little steps. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it was built. Let’s continue to keep laying down our building blocks for a sturdy foundation.

-Lucille