(Continued from Part 2)
Having realized I was putting off making a to do list because I was so concerned about how much would be on it, I realized I was just going to have to make one. So shortly before my trip out of the country, I forced myself to sit down and make a full list of all the things I needed/wanted to do. I tried very hard to be as comprehensive as possible.
Categories range from this blog, cleaning my house, maintaining my house, vehicles, and personal health, Alice’s Business, the website I’m building with a friend (Stitchy), the children, and tons of other random items and categories, ranging from things that will take a few minutes to do up to things that may take years to do in total. Things that needed to be done the next day, and things that may never be done. In short, I wanted EVERYTHING. That’s a good starting point from which I can start to organize, prioritize, and track what I’m accomplishing each day. As I get to some of the bigger, long term projects, I will be breaking them down into smaller tasks so that I can make measurable progress on them.
It’s…um…rather a lot. I very nearly filled four sheets of lined paper, with two columns per sheet. So a very large number of tasks. It took a long time to get everything down, and I’ve still been occasionally coming up with things I forgot (AND WRITING THEM DOWN!), but it’s a very good start. Not long after that, we reached the point in time where I was suddenly in crisis mode – our trip was coming up very soon and there was a lot of very specific time sensitive things that had to be done before we left.
So I extracted all the items that had to be done before we left, and added a few “nice to do if possible” items as well. And so began a flurry of extremely focused activity. In the end, I accomplished most of the list, and all of the “had to do” items, although my grandmother’s sudden hospitalization did stretch me a bit thinner than I had intended. Fortunately Alice was able to pick up some of the pieces that I wasn’t going to be able to do in time. I also decided to start trying to track details on the number of things I had accomplished each day, and add that to my daily report on this site.
Here’s a quick rundown of what I got done before the trip:
7/12: 16 total items completed, including dealing with all the financial preparations (scheduling online bill payments, etc.) that would be needed prior to the trip, plus while we were gone.
7/13: 6 total items completed
7/14: 16 total items completed, including printing out documents needed for the trip, packing, gathering digital media for the children to enjoy on the cruise, and various other last minute things.
And then the actual trip:
7/15 through 7/23: No to do items completed. Out of town on vacation.
And since the trip, up through but not including today:
7/24: 4.5 loads of laundry, grocery shopping, taking the children for a nap, taking a small nap myself, trying to get myself back in some semblance of order for returning to work on Monday.
7/25: Settle back in at work, visit Grandma in nursing home, one load laundry.
7/26: Date night with Alice (dinner/movie). One load laundry.
7/27: Take kids to Splash Pad, did some dishes.
My intent going forward is to indicate how many to do items I complete each day, with some details when appropriate. I still have more work to do on my lists to get them cleaned up and organized more logically so that I can more easily identify “the next thing I should focus on”. But what I have right now is semi-workable. The point, ultimately, is to make sure that when I get home from work each day, I accomplish SOMETHING. It doesn’t have to be more than one thing necessarily, but I should complete at least one full thing every day. I hope to actually get items off my list faster than they appear on it, going forward.
The way I’m living right now is messy, complicated, and confusing. I don’t really want it to be that way – I’m a very tightly organized person when it’s possible for me to do so. Part of that is going to be knowing when to let something go and properly prioritizing everything I have to do, while not spreading myself too thin. One of the biggest areas of focus right now is getting the house clean and organized again – it helps keep me motivated in other areas of my life.
I have a long way to go before I feel like my life is under any form of control again (parents of children are currently laughing at this statement, I’m sure) but at least I can see a path forward and can start down it.