Towards the end of last year, I felt very overwhelmed at one point. My son got sick and had to stay home for a week and it brought me to a hard stop work wise and workout wise. It took me to pause and prioritize what I really wanted to be focusing my energy on. My accident in November (I fell at a kids birthday party) had me pause all my workouts as I was recommended as much rest as possible to heal my knee MCL injury.
I have been collaborating with a longtime colleague, Selma Boggie who can be found on Instagram @selmaboggie and @harmonyandtidy, these past months and it’s been an awesome experience. She was my client for almost 10 years and most of my work milestones have been accomplished together with her and our extended team. One of her passions is organization and she was certified by Marie Kondo a few years back and has been applying this to time management and other work areas so she offered to guide me in my process.
In December, she sent me an excel sheet template with a weekly calendar broken down hour by hour including sleep time. Her philosophy is to have an organized lifestyle (considering both home and work) that helps to fulfill your dreams and goals in harmony. She also says to think of your 24 hrs when planning and not just your typical 8 hour work day. She divides the day in blocks of 8-8-8 meaning 8 hrs of sleep, 8 hours of ‘work’ and 8 hours of leisure time. Her homework for me was to jot down how I was currently spending each hour of the day. One of my challenges is that in one hour I jump from emptying a dishwasher to watering my plants to getting kids dressed for school to eating something so it was hard to fit that into the little excel boxes. I tried to just sum it up to ‘housework’ or ‘kids’. We then color coded my boxes, noticing which ones were dedicated to home, kids, work, or myself. The good news was that I was overall aware and happy with my current balance and it’s aligned with my priorities.
The next step was to develop an ideal week schedule based on my goals and habits such as daily movement and meditation. Throughout my therapy process, I’ve learned I often focus my day on things I have to do and responding to others needs versus what I want to do so when developing this schedule I worked hard on trying to shift this priority especially in the mornings when my children are at school. Of course, we color coded this one too.
As we were entering the holiday season, I knew I’d only be able to really test this as of January, which I have. I also went ahead, inspired by my colleague, and developed a presentation deck for 2023 starting with my priorities and even breaking down the habits I wanted to start including as well as financial goals. In terms of work, I decided to focus on 3 main projects this year, which I’ll soon be sharing more of.
Now that January has wrapped up, I looked back at my presentation and schedule and can share the following:
- Most if not all of my activities are aligned with my overall yearly priorities;
- I have worked on the 3 main projects and can check off the milestones I had for January;
- I didn’t reach my monthly financial goals yet although much of what I’m working on is ramping up for the returns;
- In terms of my weekly schedule, I have been sticking to it about 90% of the time. I need to improve on daily movement although running after 2 toddlers all afternoon can count for some movement but I mean conscious yoga or strength training. I have been overall diligent with my morning routine, house work, meditation, work hours and afternoon/night routines.
MyPPDStory 