where wildly different is perfectly normal
#168Hours Challenge: Day Four
#168Hours Challenge: Day Four

#168Hours Challenge: Day Four

Okay, day four. Things are going well, I’m noticing some stuff. Wrapping my brain around it all. I’ll paste here what I wrote this morning on Laura Vanderkam’s 168 Hours Forums page on Facebook:

Halfway through the week, I’m surprised and not by what I’ve found. I spend a lot more time than I thought cleaning up after my boys. At 9 and almost 6, they can do more. I’ve also started making them make their own breakfasts; I’m tired of the whining in the morning over what I’ve made. Okee dokee then, you’re on your own. I spend a lot of time running around: taking the boys places, running errands. Even though I do stack them up to mostly do on one day, it adds up. And I multi-task waaaayyyyy too much. Eating while checking email, or catching the headlines on my iPhone while combing out my wet hair. It’s not terribly efficient, and makes me feel like I run around like a crazed chicken and get nothing done. I’d like to work to the point where the only multi-tasking I do is hearing the washing machine run as I do something else.
What I *would* like to do more of is easy. I’d like to write more, scrapbook more, read more. When it’s something that’s important to me, something I truly love to do, I tend to put it off until everything else is done. Then I either never get to it or I’m too tired to follow through. This was a problem in college when I was a flute performance major and often had that feeling about practicing for hours on end. (Work around: schedule a lot of recitals so you HAD to practice).
What I’ve noticed as I keep the log is that I’m a lot more aware of what I’m doing with my time. I’m keeping my online play time down (though it did creep back up yesterday). I’m finding that 15 minutes isn’t too little to do a quick weed of the garden boxes or brainstorm with the boys what we want to do this summer. I’m looking at time in a different way.
Now. To just *finish* the book! In my defense, I have to wrest it from my husband first…

So there ya go. Insight mid-week. Here’s today’s log.

7:00 am: Up, cleaned up, start laundry
8:00 am: Breakfast (damn, mornings are soooo peaceful when you insist the boys make their own breakfasts and you just get to sit and watch and drink coffee! Ahhhh…)
8:30 am: Plan the day, emails
9:30 am: Playgroup
11:30 am: Lunch
12:15 pm: New job paperwork
12:45 pm: Boys to camp
1:15 pm: Work at new job
3:45 pm: Get boys from camp
4:00 pm: Get veggies from CSA, Walmart. Here you see the two facets of my split personality: organic vegetables from a local farm, and the world’s largest merchant of crap. Yes, I did indeed check my soul at the door, thanks for asking
5:00 pm: Reboot laundry, feed dog, random household stuff (ok, honesty check here…I really can’t remember what the hell I did for this hour…)
6:00 pm: Tastefully Simple party at a friend’s house. Here I not only fell off the detox diet wagon, I leapt off head first with a smile on my face. That was one fiiiine drink. Or three.
8:00 pm: Tuck boys in, check on A who is having the Allergy Attack From The Black Lagoon. Poor kid looks like he’s been slugged in the eyes repeatedly with a frozen carp.
8:30 pm: Wash and prep the CSA produce….and this is only the beginning. Dum dum dummmmm!!!!! It gets harder and takes longer as the summer goes on. In fact, I have stuff cooking upstairs that I might want to go check on before the house is nothing but a pile of organic cinders.
9:30 pm: Write this post, IM on Facebook with a dear friend of mine. Actually, the oldest friend I have, we’ve known each other since kindergarten. Facebook, for as much as you suck privacy donkey danglies, I love you for reconnecting the two of us.
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The rest of the night will be me turning off MacDreamy and falling face-first onto the pillow. Well, maybe a wee snack first, but then, definitely, face smack.

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