So I've been struggling, for a few weeks...ok, months....OK, for quite some time, with keeping on top of life. I make a plan of what seems like a reasonable amount of things to accomplish in a day, and then I'm not even CLOSE.
I know, it's just life. But some people make it look SO EASY. They do their daily chores and the house looks great and the list is checked off and they aren't cringing when they look at their to do list.
PLEASE tell me it's not just me.
Some of it is that I think I just budget the wrong amount of time. I need to get a better sense of how much time something actually takes.
Let's look back to a couple of weeks ago. Adam and I knew we were going to go to the car dealership to do the paperwork and officially put in the order for the new car. We knew the dealership was an hour away, and we knew we didn't want the girls with us, being bored and asking for snacks and generally causing mayhem. So we booked a sitter to take the girls to their regular pool activities and told her we'd need her until just after lunch time. To be quite honest, I figured we'd do this, go out to lunch, I'd drop Adam off at home, then run some quick errands.
In actuality, we were at the dealership for well over two hours - close to three. Add the drive in and our date lunch turned into the drive thru as we rushed to get Adam home and me back to the sitter before she had to leave for her other activities. So there was definitely no time for anything else.
I asked Adam to take the girls out of the house so I could get some big chores done. He obliged, happily, and had them out for HOURS. Did I finish? No, no I did not. Not even close. I budgeted one full day to clean out the basement while the girls were at camp. It took the full week.
Errands, laundry, housekeeping, paperwork. I don't know where I got my time estimates, but I know that they are wrong, wrong, wrong.
So, my bedfellows in poor time management, how do we fix this? Do I need my old school psychologist to stop by and do a time on task assessment? Do I need to time myself doing everything from grocery shopping to writing an article to sorting laundry to get baseline times?
Or do I just make my way through the day, thinking that I'll get it together eventually?
