Organization

One of my biggest struggles over the past few weeks has been trying to find time to fit EVERYTHING I need and want to do into my days: cleaning, preparing meals, paying bills, laundry, dishes, Charlie's school, working out, working, blogging, spending fun time with the boys, spending time alone with my husband, spending time with friends, reading, spending time with just myself and sometimes, just doing nothing, the list goes on and on. I'm sure there are things in there that I'm forgetting! :)

Last week, I started writing everything down on paper. I had purchased a blank, college-ruled notebook at WalMart a few weeks ago (I couldn't help myself - this time of year, all of the new school supplies everywhere make me drool!) and I was trying to decide what to do with it. I hadn't planned it at all, but I opened it up one night last week and it quickly became my to-do list notebook.

Every night before I climb into bed, I've been writing a list of everything that needs to be accomplished the next day as well as a few things I'd like to accomplish. The first week of writing everything down was quite successful. My favorite part, so far, is that I have divided the house cleaning into separate tasks for each day. Bathrooms on Monday, bedrooms Thursday and so on. My hope is to spread the project throughout the week rather than attempting to clean the house in one day. I LOVE doing one small thing a day and plan to maintain my new cleaning schedule. I'm curious if my hubby will notice if I don't tell him.... :)

The one thing that didn't work quite so well was scheduling "work" into my day. I've been attempting to work at home for a few of the real estate agents I used to work with when I worked full time. There are a few of them who contact me on a regular basis with tasks I can do from home (i.e. posting blogs, adding listings to craigslist, maintaining client databases, etc.). Previously, I had been doing some work in the afternoons while my oldest was napping. However, my dearest darling will no longer nap for me *sigh* and the quiet time I've been enforcing in the afternoons has not been conducive to sitting down to complete any work. Therefore, little, if any, work (that hasn't had a specific deadline) has been done in the past few weeks (months?) as I've been too tired at the end of my day to squeeze it in.

The other difficulty with work has been not knowing where to start with certain projects. I have a few projects to complete for one agent and I just haven't been able to figure out what to do first. So.....

My plan for this week is to similar to how I'm handling cleaning the house. I am going to split the projects up into manageable little chunks. For example, on my to-do list for tomorrow, rather than scheduling in "work," I've actually scheduled in the exact task that I would like to check off. I'm hoping that being more specific in this aspect will help me get more done in less time. We will see where it takes me!