How Am I Expected To Get All Of This Done?!?

Each of your children is in 2 different sports. Your daughter takes violin lessons. Your son wants to take guitar lessons. Your husband works late most days. You have PTA meetings, responsibilities at the children’s schools and dinner to cook.

How in the world can you get all these things done? Is it even possible to get them done well? What about the housework and all that laundry piling up in the laundry room? Will you ever have time to get to that?Now you have to buy special cleats for your son for soccer. You don’t have time to drive to the sports equipment store right now…yet he needs them tomorrow morning at 8 am. Not to mention that it’s your turn to bring snacks for the team practice.

If your life is anything like mine you are super busy. You have more things on your daily to do list than you have time for. And heaven forbid if you wake up even one morning feeling sick. I don’t have any time to get sick and I’m sure you don’t either.

So what can you do about it all? How do you juggle all of your children’s activities, all of your own activities, all of the house responsibilities and family responsibilities?The answer is Organization. It’s the key to accomplishing all of those things you are facing each day. You need to organize your spaces so that they are easier to manage and you need to learn how to manage your time, so that you can actually succeed at accomplishing all of those things you need to do each day.

As a Professional Organizer I am often called into a family to help them function better. My typical client is a housewife, with 3 kids, a hard working husband and a household and schedule that is slowly falling further and further behind.

Here, briefly, is a checklist I help my clients to learn and implement to help them get a grip on all of their responsibilities:

1. Organize your home. I know that it takes time to get your entire house organized and in tip top shape, but it is the one of the most important things you can do to get control of your life.

When your home is unorganized it is hard to find items. Time is wasted searching for them.

You want your home organized so that each member of your family can quickly locate any needed item and also know where to return that item when they’re done using it.

So you need a plan to organize your home. Perhaps tackle one room or area per day. Perhaps you need to hire a Professional Organizer to help you get it all done quickly. Either way I highly suggest you get started on this task.

2. Organize your time. In other words you definitely need a planner or calendar that you use religiously to record every single little thing you need to accomplish every single day.

Your planner should be one that is easy enough for you to use, so that you will use it every day.

This is how I manage my own planner. I have a paper planner myself. I tried those electronic Palm units, which my husband swares by, but I am a paper kind of girl. I like to flip through the pages back and forth quickly. So I use a paper planner.

I make a list in a column of all the things I need to do that day. Then I plug every single item into my time schedule. I block out the adequate time needed for each item that must be done. I take in consideration things like drive time, waiting time etc.

Most days I have more items on my list than I have time for in the day. Don’t get discouraged if your planner ends up with the same phenomenon. Just make sure that the items that MUST get done each day are scheduled first, and the things that can be rolled over to the next day are scheduled last.

The next day, start by transferring all the things from the day before that didn’t get done onto your list and add to the list with today’s items.

When you find that you are completely backed up and behind with your list you may have to spend a weekend day once in a while playing catch up. This really isn’t that big of a deal. The wonderful thing is that by using this method you are able, each week, to tackle and accomplish all the MUST DO items and even if you didn’t get to all those items that need to be done, but just weren’t a priority you know what they are. You have the list before you. You know if you can roll the items to the next week’s lists, or if you have to spend a little extra time taking care of them in the evenings or on the weekend.

3. Don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop trying to get your home organized and don’t ever stop trying to keep it organized. Yes, it is an ongoing job, to be sure. But it is a necessary ongoing job, just like brushing your teeth every day.

You must work every day at having an organized home. Same is true for your time. If you find that one day nothing goes the way you planned, something comes up and your entire day is shot don’t worry about it. It happens to me all the time. I will wake up and schedule my day. Then one of my kids will call and need to be picked up and brought to the doctors. Or my husband will call up and ask me to bring some forgotten but important item to him at work.

Stuff happens to wreck havoc on your schedule from time to time. Just go with the flow, and then make sure that you go over your list and try to reschedule everything over the next few days.

The point is when you get thrown off schedule to get right back to it as soon as possible. Don’t spend time beating yourself up over slipping; just get back to planning your time like nothing happened.

Don’t ever give up. This is your life. It isn’t something you can win or lose at. It simply is your life. These are the things you need to do every day to get through each day successfully.

So if you too are an over scheduled, overly demanded person with way too much on their plates, way too many activities they need to show up for and too much laundry waiting for you every day then you need to think seriously about the above plan for conquering the chaos in your life.

Organization is the key to it all. Get your surroundings organized and get your time organized. Always keep working on being organized and your life will run much more smoothly.