Use Your 24 Hours Wisely

Balanced life is something I crave to achieve. This is even harder for me as I am a young mom and do work on the Internet. There is no clear separation of at-work-time and at-home-time as it is when you work somewhere else. There are so many tasks to do during the day, and I should organize everything myself as nobody is going to do it instead of me. As everything is my own experience, you’ll find that observations and advice are given from the perspective of my lifestyle. Here comes the post I've promised to write in my article Is a Balanced Life Even Possible? Let's See!.

This post and kind of thoughts were also highly inspired by the article The Most Valuable Currency You’re not Investing Properly by @mrs.steemit.

I would like to share some of my experience which I gained during half of the year working from home, being a mom and managing to do all the house chores being done, not to mentions some personal needs, interests and hobbies.

The first thing I quickly found to be very important and helpful was to plan my day in advance. I use trello to plan my goals and set some long running tasks. I use it mainly to deal with my job, not the house chores or personal stuff, but you could do that as well. To plan my next day I take a sticker in the evening and plan things I have to do the next day, including the order of the tasks and the time that is planned to spend on them. To do so I check trello for tasks I should do for my work, then I think of some routine work and some other tasks that should be done during the day, I include the breaks into the list. When it’s all well-planned I find it much easier to get the work done, as I know exactly what I have to do and what are the priorities.

Then, as sometimes I end up doing some things I never intended to do and failing to complete the tasks I was determined to do during the day, I’ve understood that major concentration on the job at hand is needed. Usually I get distracted with other tasks that I happen to remember to do while doing the priority task... And I just go do them because I'm afraid to forget to do them later. In this way I drift far away from my initial task and get disappointed in the end of the day that I didn’t manage to do something I’ve planned to do. At this point my husband acquainted me with a management tip they use at work: when you remember to do something while being busy with other job, you go do that task only if it’s quicker just to do that thing than write it down to the to do list. I’ve tried it for several weeks already and it really helps me with my time management. The possible drawback here could be that you can keep remembering some small tasks many in a row, but honestly, this didn’t happen to me, and if it does I would decide to do the more important small task from the bunch, and the others leave without attention in order to keep focused on the main task.

It happened so that some basic Agile Scrum was introduced to me, and very quickly I've decided that it’s really cool to use in everyday life, which I do:

• Firstly, it’s crucial to focus on delivering value – do not do any tasks that are unimportant at the moment, but rather focus on things that are priority at the time.

• Secondly, deliver fast. Here comes an interesting strategy that could and should be adjusted to the specific need of each business/person, etc. The idea is to divide the task into several smaller tasks. For example, if I have to clean the bathroom as my house chore, I would rather divide it into two tasks. For me the first sub-task is to clean the bath & toilet & sink and the second sub-task is to clean up the shelves & change the towels & clean the floor, etc. In such a way firstly I’m going to estimate more precisely how much time I need to do the work, and also, if for some reason I would not manage to clean all the bathroom, there would be psychologically different perception, as most probably I’ll manage to finish one of those tasks rather than “not finishing the job at all”, even if I did clean the bath & sink & toilet. :) Here I mostly see to it that the tasks are taking 30-60 min to finish them, as there are big variety of tasks to do during the day, and I cannot allow myself a luxury to focus on some particular kind of tasks.

• For now the last thing which I’ve borrowed from Agile is retrospective – once a week I sit down and think, how did I perform my work? I think of both positive things that worked for me and some problems that need to be solved. It’s very important to look for good things, because very often we disregard them and in such a way we actually don’t know what should we do, what was good. Then, if we have several problems, take one that is the most important and try to change it for the better. Do it till the next retrospective. :)

• Here you can also use 5 WHY technique. It’s a technique when in attempt to find the real cause for the problem you ask the question “Why?” five times on each previous answer. In such a way the last answer on the fifth “why” will be the actual cause of the problem and the one that should be solved.

Another thing to consider if you’re in similar situation as I am in everyday life is to use other work as means of rest. Yes, it sound a bit weird, maybe even more than a bit (my husband totally does not understand me), but for me – I have no other choice than do it this way: when I feel too tired from doing some mental work and my head is likely to blow up, very often I am still quite able to go and do some physical work as house chores - ironing or dish washing, or to spend some quality time with my daughter, etc. This keeps the work being done, at the same time I switch between tasks that require different type of work put in, and in such a way it could be regarded as some kind of rest.

Nevertheless, in times when I decide that I’m not able to do anything else, I just need some REST, then having some rest is all I do at the time (okay-okay, I have a baby-daughter, never works for me like that anymore, but still I do my best in trying so!). The point is not to worry about the job that needs-to-be-done. You have to decide before you’re going to have some rest: do you really need to finish the job? If yes – go do it, no excuses, have some rest afterwards. If you decide that the work can wait – then let it wait and set your worries aside. Otherwise you just throw your time away – you neither get your work done, nor you have some quality rest.

Similar as in business – in everyday life you can also delegate your work. You do not have to do everything yourself, although I know that it’s kind of expected from a woman to handle all the chores herself. If you think you don’t have money – think again what you can do with the time that you’ll gain? Maybe during that time you’re able to earn even more money that you’ll be paying for the chores getting done for you. Or maybe you can do something with more value for your life than the money you pay.

At the very least, you can exchange some your k=help for the help from your friends or relatives. For example, my sister and I live nearby and we always help each other out with cleaning the house after a party and arranging the things for the party. It saves loads of time and cleaning in a great company could actually be fun. :) Maybe, you can go even further and do the ironing at somebody’s, for example (if you like it) and get some of your chores done for you, as bathroom cleaning, or whatever. If you’re in no need for a temporary baby sitter and need her just from time to time, maybe you can find a friend with a kid and do babysitting with her in turns.

You also should delegate some tasks to your husband and kids, of course you better discuss it with them first. :)

Do use your 24 hours effectively and wisely! Share you experience - will appreciate it a lot, as am looking for more ways to manage my time even better!

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Photos from Pixabay

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Thanks! :)