deciding what “to-do” May 3, 2011

So I had a busy weekend. Family in town, chasing children, husband out a couple nights in a row, etc. It was tiring, but it was worth it.

Monday morning, I sat down and wrote a to-do list for myself. It was astronomically long. There were things I usually do over the weekend that had not gotten done, things that need to get taken care of on a daily basis, things that I usually do on Mondays, things that needed to be done this week, things that needed to be done to “recover’ from my house having three times as many occupants as usual over the weekend. The list was over a page long. I had no idea where to start.

I would imagine that I’m not the only person who has ever been in this situation. So when your to-do list has more than you can reasonably accomplish on it, how do you decide what to do first? How do you get through it all without getting completely overwhelmed?

Ditch the list and draw some boxes.

I’ve seen this type of chart used before in time management books and articles, usually related to workplace productivity, but it will work for your personal stuff, too. Take a fresh page and divide it into four sections, and label each like this:

Then divide up your list:

URGENT/IMPORTANT: These are things that have to get done first, and will produce unpleasant consequences if they are not done. “Urgent” in this case does not mean “emergency.” Washing the dishes may fall into this category – they’re piling up, you’re only going to mess up more dishes when you make dinner that night, you’re in danger of losing the ability to use your sink, the stuff on the bottom will get gross. “Urgent” may also mean time-sensitive – you need to pick up the dry cleaning today because you have an important meeting tomorrow.

URGENT/NOT IMPORTANT: These are things that are time-sensitive, but it’s not necessarily a big deal if they don’t get done. Taking advantage of a sale that ends tomorrow could be an example here. It’s easy to confuse urgent with important – a deadline makes things seem more significant than they actually are. The key difference is whether the outcome will be bad if the task goes undone.

NOT URGENT/IMPORTANT: These are things that need to get done, but can wait if needed. If you need to get to the grocery store, but you have enough food to get you through the next day or so, making the trip is important but not urgent.

NOT URGENT/NOT IMPORTANT: This is the household equivalent of busywork. Maybe you have a catalog you’ve been meaning to flip through, or you want to transfer information from an old address book to a new one. These are things you would like to do, but technically don’t need to do. They can wait, pretty much indefinitely.

Once you have everything divided up, tackle your list in the following order:

1) URGENT/IMPORTANT: These are the tasks that will have the greatest impact if left undone. If you get only these tasks complete, you will at least be treading water and heading off calamity.
2) NOT URGENT/IMPORTANT: These will become urgent/important tasks if left undone long enough, and have the greatest potential to become emergencies.

The rest, honestly, don’t matter. They’re not important, and you’ve admitted as much when you categorized them. These are things you can do at your leisure, when you have the time, if you get around to them. Focus on what’s important first. Get it out of the way so that you have time to focus on the unimportant (although possibly more fun) things on your list.

5 Tips: Organized Grocery Shopping July 15, 2010

In honor of the trip I will be making to the grocery store tonight, here are 5 tips for keeping your food shopping experience organized:

take inventory
Take a look through your fridge, your freezer, and your kitchen cabinets. What’s there? What’s still good? What’s been there for three months because no one in your house really likes it? Clean out what you can – if you don’t think you’ll ever use it, and its unopened (and unexpired!), drop it off at a local food pantry. Pitch the expired food, or anything that looks like it’s passed the “ok to eat” phase. This will accomplish two things – it will keep you from buying duplicates of things you already have, and it will keep you from not buying enough because you think you have things that you don’t.

make a menu
A little meal planning goes a long way. Come up with a menu for the week. Think about all your meals, not just dinner. If you tend to eat breakfast in the car, add your favorite grab-and-go meals to the list. If you pack the kids sandwiches for lunch, write that down, too. Make sure you keep your schedule in mind when planning meals. A night when you have a late meeting and have to pick the kids up from karate and your husband has a class in the evening is probably not the best time to plan something very time consuming to cook. Don’t forget to include extra for nights when you have company!

make a list
Your list will have two basic parts to it – things you need for your menu, and things you buy regularly. Write down the ingredients for your meals, as well as any other food you might need such as lunch meat and bread for those sandwiches, cereal or eggs or whatever for breakfast, and whatever snacks you like. When you’re writing down your ingredients, include the amounts you need. No one wants to be standing in the produce section wondering how many tomatoes they are supposed to buy.
Your list will also probably have things you buy regularly – milk, a favorite snack, etc. (My family goes through an obscene amount of string cheese. Hell hath no fury like my kids if they open the cheese drawer and it’s not in there.) A great way to keep track of what you need is to put a piece of paper on your fridge. You can even get a pad with a magnet on the back – most dollar stores have them, and also some grocery stores. When you notice you are low on something, or you use the last of it, or even if you get a craving for something, write the item on the list. This way when you sit down to make your full list, it will already be halfway done!

organize your list
If you frequent one store, you may be able to organize your list in the order of the aisles in the store. Even if you can’t, group like foods (meat, produce, chips and cookies) together. This will help prevent missing items on your list and having to criss cross the store over and over because you forgot something. Don’t be afraid to take a pen to the store with you and cross off items on your list as you pick them up – it makes keeping track much easier, and missing items much harder.
I have to put a plug in here for Wegman’s. They have a grocery list builder on their website. As you add items, you can add in notes regarding quantity, and the printout includes the aisle the item is located in. It also has prices on the list, which is an invaluable tool if you are grocery shopping on a budget. If you have a Wegman’s in your area (and I pity you if you don’t), I strongly suggest you give their tool a spin.

use coupons with care
You can save money with coupons, but you can also lose money. Coupons can encourage you to buy things you ordinarily would not, which pretty much negates the savings. Also, if your coupons are store-specific, you can lose a lot of time running from one store to another to take advantage of the lower cost. It may not be worth it. Couponmom.com is a great site for manufacturer coupons that you can use almost anywhere. There are a number of other good coupon sites online as well, plus you probably get quite a few in the mail – either in magazines or newspaper inserts. Keep in mind that not all grocery stores will accept coupons printed from your computer, due to fraud concerns. If you come across a really great coupon for an item you have no use for, consider using it and donating the food.

Happy Shopping!

Time Management Tip #5 – Cut Back, Delegate, or Just Say No. June 21, 2010

Organization doesn’t just apply to your physical possessions. It’s easy for your personal life to become cluttered and disorganized, too. Effective time management is key to keeping your home and personal life in order.

Time Management Tip #5 – Cut Back, Delegate, or Just Say No.

OK, so you’ve got your calendar, you’ve got your to-do list, you’ve thought about how you organize your tasks and you’ve made changes to work more efficiently. And you’re still swamped. What do you do now?

You do less. There’s only so much time in a day, and there’s only so much that one person can reasonably accomplish in a given amount of time. If you are constantly behind the 8 ball, worrying about undone tasks, and realizing that you are so busy that you have no time for yourself or your friends and family, it may be that you are simply trying to do too much.

Take a good look at your to-do list and see if you can remove or delay what is not necessary. You may have been meaning to clean out your attic forever, but the Christmas holidays may not be the best time to try and tackle the task. There’s too much going on. Can it wait until the new year? Maybe your calendar is jammed with meetings for volunteer groups – do you really need to be involved with all of them? You may need to take a look at which causes mean the most to you, which groups you have the greatest impact with, and what volunteer work you truly enjoy, and ditch the rest. Better to do two things well than five things poorly. You may need to lower your expectations of yourself. When I was on maternity leave with my youngest son, I found myself frustrated at the end of every day because so much of my to-do list was left undone. One day, I realized the list was too long. It was a list I would make if I was home for no particular reason, with my daytime hours free from work obligations. I wasn’t home for no reason. I was home to recover from a c-section and care for an infant. These things are physically limiting, and time consuming. I wasn’t taking them into account when planning my tasks. I was trying to do too much. Once I pared down the list, I found that I was able to get through much more of it in a single day. I didn’t go to bed frustrated every night, and the world did not fall apart from the things that were left undone.

Another thing to consider is whether everything on the list has to be done by you personally. Do you have the money to hire a cleaning service to come in every other week? Is grocery delivery available in your area? (This is surprisingly not expensive. I did this for awhile while I was car-less in Washington DC and it cost $6 a delivery on top of the cost of groceries). Is there a neighborhood kid willing to wash your car or mow your lawn for spare cash? Can you split drop-offs and pickups at play practice or little league with another parent?
You should also enlist the help of the people you live with. Women, especially moms, tend to fall into the trap of thinking that they have to get everything around the house done on their own. Men are just as able as women to contribute around the house, but generally won’t do it if you don’t directly ask them to. Simply looking at your significant other and saying “The bathrooms desperately need to be cleaned, but I don’t have time to do it today because I have to get to the grocery store before we starve to death. Can you help?” may yield surprisingly spectacular results. Include your children as well. Even very young children can help clean up their toys, clear their dishes from the table, and match the socks in the laundry basket. They may not be able to complete every task (they can put the toys in their container but need help getting that container on to the shelf), but let them do what they can. For a child of seven or eight, leave their folded clothes on their bed and tell them to put them away/hang them up themselves. Make them responsible for organizing and gathering their sports equipment for practice. They’re perfectly capable of keeping their glove, hat, and bat in their baseball bag and getting it out when it’s time to go to the field. Older kids can pitch in as well. You want to borrow the car? You’re responsible for washing it. Need your favorite jeans washed for a party this weekend? The detergent is over there. This not only teaches responsibility and basic life skills, but takes another thing to do off of your plate.
A word of advice: don’t delegate something you are very particular about. I have a friend who is very particular about how the dishwasher is loaded – which way the plates face, where things are located, etc. Every time her husband would try to help out and load the dishwasher, they’d end up fighting about it because in her eyes, he had not done it right. The solution? Loading the dishwasher is her job, and he helps out elsewhere. This way the job gets done to her standards, but she still doesn’t have to do everything in the house on her own.

Finally, know when to say no. If your day is already jam-packed with tasks and obligations, don’t agree to take on any more. You are not a bad mother if you decline to chaperone a field trip or work the bake sale table. You can still be an effective member of the PTA without signing on to be secretary. If you don’t have the time to walk in a fundraiser, don’t walk this time. Just make a donation. The world will not fall apart if you are not the one holding it together. People can, and will, step up to fill your shoes. In fact, there may be someone waiting in the wings to do just that. Let them.

Remember that when you’re planning your time, you need to plan time for yourself. If you don’t have that – even for half an hour at the end of the day – you’re doing too much. Don’t sacrifice your relationship, your family, your friends, or your sleep in the name of getting more done than you need to. Relaxation, conversation, family time, and down time are just as important as getting things done. If you’ve managed your time and schedule to the best of your ability and you still don’t have time for the fun parts of life, chances are you have taken on too much and you need to revisit your obligations.

This is the last of a 5 part series on home and personal time management. You can read part 1 here and part two here. Part 3 is over here, and part 4 is here.

Time Management Tip #3: Organize Your Recurring Tasks June 18, 2010

Organization doesn’t just apply to your physical possessions. It’s easy for your personal life to become cluttered and disorganized, too. Effective time management is key to keeping your home and personal life in order.

Time Management Tip #3: Organize Your Recurring Tasks

Once you have your to-do list up and running, you’ll notice that there are a few things on it that will show up over and over again. This generally includes tasks like paying bills, housework, and certain errands. Things that you have to do over and over, even though you got them done adequately the first time, are recurring tasks. It’s worth it to put some thought into how to accomplish these tasks most efficiently.

1 – recurring paperwork
There are several ways to organize your bill paying, depending on whether you pay by check or online, how frequently you pay your bills (monthly, weekly, even daily), and your personal financial situation. That’s another topic for another day. For now, the main point to remember is that all of your bills should be in the same place, and that place should be near where you will pay them. Whether you have a physical location for your paper bills or a folder in your inbox where you file the reminders, all of your bills need to be in one place. If you pay your bills from a home office or computer desk, get a small basket or file folder and put the bills in it, then keep it by the computer. If you pay bills from your laptop while sitting at your kitchen table, keep the bills in your laptop bag. The important thing is to know where they belong, and to have them all there. If you will need envelopes or stamps in order to pay your bills, those should be easily accessible (possibly stored with your bills) as well.
You should also be able to verify that all of the bills are, in fact, there. Take a look at your bank statement from last month and list all of the bills that you paid. Not every transaction, just the recurring ones – debt payments, mortgage, utilities, etc. Write them all down. Check the list against the bills you pay this month, adding as necessary. You now have a master list of monthly bills that you can check off each month, ensuring that nothing slips through the cracks. No one wants to pay late fees.

2 – recurring housework
However unfair it may seem, no matter how well you clean your bathroom, it will eventually need to be cleaned again. Basic home upkeep can be a time consuming task, but it has to be done. There are a number of tips and tricks you can employ with the actual cleaning tasks to make them take up less of your time, but the first step to all of these is organizing your chores.
Many people swear by a set cleaning schedule. They either assign chores to a given day (Monday = laundry, Tuesday = dusting, etc.) or pick a day of the week a declare it “cleaning day.” I wouldn’t try to talk someone out of this, but personally I have never found it to work. Too often, things come up and the task for a given day doesn’t get done, and then you have to choose between trying to get two things done the next day or letting the given task slide until the next week. The same for a cleaning day. If you set aside 4 hours every Saturday morning to clean your entire house, and then one Saturday you go out to brunch instead, where are you going to make up that time? Do you really have another 4 hour block in your week that you can devote solely to cleaning? Like I said, some people swear by it, but I’ve never found it practical.
Whether you decide to set a cleaning schedule or complete chores as you notice they need to be done, you need to organize your cleaning process. Go around your house and gather all of your cleaning supplies. How many rooms did you have to go to in order to do that? Did you know where everything was? Did you have duplicates of anything? Now that you have your inventory, it’s time to put it all away. If you have the space, put supplies specific to a room (toilet bowl cleaner, dishwasher detergent, etc.) in that room. This way you will know where they are and you will not have to traipse from one room to another to grab stuff while you are mid-cleaning. Purchase or parcel out any duplicates you have per room as well (one shower cleaner in each bathroom, etc.) If you need sponges, paper towels, or some kind of special equipment to clean a given room, put that in the room as well (I have a roll of paper towels in each bathroom as well as the kitchen.) Everything else should go together in one place. Window cleaner, dust rags, anything else you will need to carry from room to room. If you have a number of small bottles or supplies, you may want to invest in a caddy or box to keep them all in, making transport easier and storage more orderly. This not only lets you know where everything is, but lets you know what you have. Nothing is more annoying than being halfway through cleaning a room and realizing that you don’t have something you need to finish. And put it all back where it belongs when you are done.

3 – recurring errands
Whether daily, weekly, or monthly, there are some places that you will need to go over and over again. The most time-effective way to tackle your errands is geographically. If you have to go to the dry cleaner, the bank, your mom’s house, and the post office, consider where they are all located. Is there a dry cleaner in the same strip mall as your bank? Is your mom near either of those? Before you head out the door, mentally plan your route for minimal backtracking. Another consideration is combining errands. Use the pharmacy in the grocery store and get your prescriptions filled while you shop. Buy stamps from the ATM at the bank while making a deposit. If you can go to one less place and still get the same amount of stuff done, you can save both time and money. Finally, plan your errands. Know when you will go. You can set aside an evening or afternoon each week for “running around” or you can set aside a time each day. With this method, you can base your errand for the day around where you already have to be – run to the bank a block away from your office on your lunch hour, go to the store you’ll drive past anyway on your way to pick the kids up from school, etc.

By keeping your recurring tasks more efficient, you will free up much needed time for the individual non-recurring tasks on your daily to-do list.

This is part 3 of a 5 part series on home and personal time management. You can read part 1 here and part two here. Tips 4-5 are coming soon!