Articles for appointments
Guest post by Paula Constable
I love routines to help me make the most of my time. It’s about picking a day or time of day to do recurring tasks or activities. By doing this you take control and decide, based on what works best of you and your schedule, when you want to get stuff done.
It’s all about having a game plan. Of course that plan can always be done away with when you are a mother, but I find it’s helpful to start with one; you can always adjust as needed.
Here are some examples:
• Meal planning for the week on Sunday night and shopping on Monday.
• Paying the bills every Thursday or on the 15th and 30th of each month.
• Washing 1 load of laundry everyday or all of it on Wednesdays.
• Planning your next day the night before or first thing in the morning.
• Devotional and prayer time in the morning.
• Checking email at the kids’ nap time and after the kids go to bed.
• Returning phone calls between 9 and 10 a.m.
• Vacuuming on Mondays, dusting on Tuesdays, and washing the floors on Wednesday.
• Starting meal prep 1 hour prior to dinner time.
• Opening and sorting the mail everyday after dinner.
• Filing your “to file” pile the same day every week.
• Waking up 30 – 60 minutes before the kids to get yourself ready for the day.
• Exercising on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.
• Eating out with the family on Thursday nights. Read More→
The following guest post offers tips for parents looking to help their teens learn study and time management skills;
It’s About Time -Changing Behavior to Improve Student Study Habits
Students live in a world of endless opportunities to learn, socialize, volunteer, work, and travel among a long list of things. Good study skills and time management are key to learning how to balance priorities and opportunities in your life as a student.
With all these options and new found freedom, a student might become dissatisfied with how they are managing their time. Perhaps they have developed a bad habit of procrastinating or maybe they have too many activities on the go. Changing behaviors is a difficult task but following the recommendations below will help any student improve their time management skills.
A student can start by doing a self assessment. Do I skip class? Do I set goals for myself? Am I easily distracted from school work? Own up to your short comings and bad habits. Set goals you would like to achieve this semester, this year and in life. This will help you determine what is most important to you and help set your priorities.
Starting to plan. Plan each day. You can do this the night before or first thing in the morning. Set out what you would like to accomplish today and prioritize the items on your To Do list. The best tool is a day planner. Read More→
Some of us are blessed with an internal alarm clock. A little voice that wakes you up two minutes before your alarm goes off. This may be a blessing if that little voice also alerts you ten minutes before your son’s soccer game or before the school bell rings. However I don’t have that blessing.
Of course I have the internal ability to wake up 30 minutes BEFORE I have to wake up after only five hours of sleep. Unfortunately that alarm doesn’t seem to carry over into the waking hours. A thirty minute heads up would be handy.
Not having that constant heads up, instead, I wear the super mom cape as I leap over shoes, bags and the cat in a flurry of movement. Knowing full well that the school bell is going to ring in ten minutes and the drive is a minimum of 11 minutes and three seconds if no one is in the cross walk and that light isn’t red. Of course, I will have to drive laps to locate a place I can stop to let my son in. All the parking spots are taken by those nannies with an internal clock.
I thought I had the alarm clock before I had children. As a professional Nanny I was never late for a soccer game, a music lesson, or birthday party. It turns out there are two types of internal alarm clocks. The one reserved for those of us who don’t have children under the age of 18. This one allows you to roll out of bed just before your alarm goes off after a night of 8 hours of restful sleep.
Then there’s the other alarm clock. The one called the mom alarm clock. This internal alarm wakes you up at three minutes before the baby needs to be fed, or two minutes before your toddler wets the bed, or 8 minutes before your five year old wakes up with growing pains. Sometimes these alarms are all in the same night. The mom alarm clock results in a pure hatred of the real alarm clock that wakes you up at 7 am as the children are peacefully sleeping telling you to start your day.
Luckily I have some other time management tips under my cape to keep me on time and organized as a mother. Despite the internal mom alarm clock working against me at night, my children make it to their soccer games and birthday parties, usually with the present and cleats in the bag. Was that the blue bag or the red one?
*I wrote this last year – feel free to share it on your blog or website, just link back :)