Using our time wisely, pt. 2

Earlier this week, I left you with the question, “what are YOU doing with your time?” I asked you to make a few mental notes about how you spend your days as a family and a homeschool. I hope you’ve come prepared. If you’re anything like me, you probably forgot about it. : )

I have a few tips to offer today on how we can get control of our time and use it to better benefit our families.

1. Pray about it!!! Ask God to show you where you need help. Trust Him to make perfect your efforts in blessing your family. You will NOT do everything perfectly, but He can make your feeble efforts bless your family perfectly.

2. Know where you’re spending your time. Here’s where your mental list comes in. But more than that, take a day and actually write down what you did that day. Include everything… everything. You will be inclined to include things like washed dishes, threw in a load of laundry, read to the littles, made lunch. But there are things you’ll probably leave out or just forget about – like checking your email and the message boards, the 5 minute phone call to your mom, the moment when that news item on tv caught your eye, checking the mail and flipping through it. These are tiny things we don’t think about in our day. We just do them. But they’re also what I call “time busters”. The email and message board checking can easily take up 30 minutes to an hour (don’t kid yourself, facebookers!). The 5 minute call to mom can become 15 – 30 minutes. The news – 10 or 15. The mail, another 10. Just with these few things we’ve managed to whittle away almost 2 hours. Not to mention the 10 minutes of interruptions from the babies when you were helping the older children with their math. Does any of this sound familiar? Write down everything, including all those “time busters”. Find out what’s going on all day! You’ll be quite surprised where your time is going.

3. Next, after you’ve recovered from the shock & horror of all your wasted moments, it’s time to start rearranging and eliminating. You probably won’t need to eliminate much, if anything. But you may find a few things you can adjust. Such as checking your email 10 times a day. There is, at the least, one laptop running in our house at all times. I like to keep tabs on emails and facebook, etc. throughout the day. But it can easily become a major “time buster” for me. Plan to do this type of computing once in the morning, once at lunch and one more time close to dinner. If you don’t need to do it that often, don’t. The point is this, plan it. And plan to spend no more than 20 minutes each time. This eliminates the hours you spend pouring over that awesome new site you found. (I’m confident you can bookmark a site) And you won’t feel guilty about taking time to check your email. It’s in the plan! What are some other things you can do without or plan with a time limit? Phone calls. Don’t take calls all day long. Get an answering machine or voicemail and call people back at a designated time. If you were at a job, people would have to leave messages. The time you give to your homeschool is just as important, dare I say more, as the time you would spend at a job. Other things to consider – major cleaning jobs you finally notice, running to the post office, reading a few pages of a good book, catching your favorite television show. Plan to do these things, don’t just sneak them in. It’s all just a matter of planning and purpose.

4. Decide to schedule. Now, don’t freak out, all you free spirits! Wandering through your days will create a great deal of wastefulness, so have a game plan. I’m not saying you must schedule every second of everyday and throw yourself off the top of the minivan if you fail to follow along perfectly. Just put some thought into your day. Get as detailed as you want – be vague if you need to, but some things must be planned. All time busters must be planned. A schedule is a tool not a master. Make it work for you. A great resource to have is a scheduling kit called Managers of their Homes. I have found this to be an indispensable item for me. Major improvements have been made to our homeschool by working a schedule and this book was the main help I had in implementing one. I highly recommend you get it.

5. Do as many things as you can in groupings of time.

• morning chores – load the laundry, load the dishwasher, make breakfast
• make phone calls, bring in the mail, pay bills, answer letters
• have the older children do their independent work while you teach or read to the younger ones
• give instruction to all the older children in the same block of time (if each child will require 15 minutes or more of your time, while you are teaching one, have another play with a younger child/children)
• midday chores – make lunch, load the dryer, unload the dishwasher
• make your grocery lists, cut coupons, clean out the refridgerator
• combine running errands with trips to the store or outings with the kids
• make your bed when you put away folded laundry (it’s better to let your bed air out in the morning anyway)
• check your email while you make dinner
• when you get out of the shower or freshen up in the morning, wipe down the sink and toilet. (keep a bottle of cleaner and some paper towels in the bathroom)

6. Do a little each day. Tell me if this ever happens to you. Your husband wakes up in the morning and discovers he has no ironed shirts for work. So you scramble to find a clean shirt to iron for him while he showers. You discover all his work shirts are sitting in a basket you’ve designated as ‘stuff to be ironed when I get the time’. Now you’re frantically ironing away thinking to yourself that he probably thinks you do nothing all day but sit around watching soap operas and eating bon bons. You’re wondering to yourself why you didn’t get the ironing done last night like you said you would yesterday. But you were sooo tired from all the work you had already done that day like… hmm, you remember feeding the kids, washing the laundry, you finally cleaned out the kids’ closet (which took forever! ughh). Your husband walks out of the bathroom, thankful for his crisp warm shirt and you give him the look of death that says ‘Yes, mister, I do work around here!’ And your poor husband can’t figure out why you’re so mad at him for not getting your work done! Anything like that ever happen to anyone else besides me???

My husband gave me a wonderful piece of advice once – work processes, not projects. Meaning don’t wait til all the laundry baskets are full to do laundry. Do a load everyday. Don’t wait til it’s 5 pm and dishes are falling out of the sink before you load the dishwasher. Load them as they are dirtied. Clean up messes as you make them. Does that sound like something you’ve said to the kids? Maybe you need to listen to yourself sometimes. I know I do. : )

7. Make outings planned events. Only you can decide how often your family needs to be away from home during school time. Generally, planning a whole day for running around & other ‘fun’ is the easiest way to do this. Not everyone can work their school this way, so don’t fret if you can’t. But at the least, plan a block or blocks of time during the week for these things. Knowing you’ve made time for activities will allow you to say no when you want to do too many things. It will also hold you accountable to do something when you’d rather do nothing. (ps, if your kids know that Tuesday is outing day, they will hold you accountable too!) If you have nothing planned, make something up! Go for a walk through the neighborhood and pick up trash. Help a neighbor with a task or just nature walk. Meet some friends at the park. Invite them over to play games. There’s always something you can do and you probably have a mental list or a slew of websites bookmarked with activities you want to try.

Whatever you do with your days, plan it. I know this can seem like a daunting task, but do it a little at a time. You don’t have to make a full weekly schedule in one sitting. Take it a step at a time. Work on it for 15 to 30 minutes a day. Keep a notepad laying out so you can jot down ideas and thoughts that come to you throughout the day. Then, when it’s time for your 30 minute planning session, sit down with your notes and dig in.

Keep in mind these scriptures as you’re planning,

“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13);

“My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (II Cor. 12:9)

Lean on Christ and the wisdom of the Holy Spirit to carry you through.