My friend, neighbour and super supportive “encouragement buddy” has just sent me back to my abnormally peaceful home, with strict instructions to write without distraction for 90 minutes. Or until I finish this post and hit “Publish”. Whichever comes first!

Opportunities like this don’t come along very often, so you won’t find me arguing with her for even a minute of this precious writing time.

It’s been too long since I published my last post. Because a published post means I’ve actually been writing. And as you can probably see, I haven’t.

It’s not because I’ve allowed procrastination to get the better of me though.

I don’t have time to procrastinate. I’m far too busy for that!

When I wrote my first post, a few readers commented that procrastination is not always the problem. Often it’s simply that there are too many things we’re trying to do –  and it really is physically impossible to do them all.

Well I have to confess that lately I’ve been trying to do it all. The business accounts. The customer orders and banking. Creating a website. This blog. My online bookshop. The housework. School appointments. School runs. Cooking. Laundry. Caring for the family. It’s a list that could go on for a while, but you get the general idea.

Which probably explains why last weekend – after a week of 6.30am starts and working late into the night every night – I ended up in bed for 2 days fighting off a nasty cold.

The upside of being sick in bed for 2 days was being able to watch a couple of DVDs and get some guilt-free reading done. But as you can imagine, there were many more downsides than upsides. Like the fact that everything I’d planned to do over the weekend was still there waiting to be done on Monday… along with all those things already scheduled for Monday and the rest of the week.

And so began another week of trying to do far too much!

In trying to do it all though, I haven’t been doing any of it particularly well.

I’ve been finding it so much harder to get into a routine this year than I expected to.

In recent years, since my discovery of Flylady’s great home organization website, I’ve really come to value the idea of having some daily routines. My ‘Morning Routine’ in particular has made such a difference in the past few years to how much I’m able to accomplish in a day.

But this year everything’s changed. Our new school routine has even disrupted my daily habit of doing Morning Pages, so that I’ve only been writing two or three days a week. Which gives you some idea just how bad things are!

Without a routine that works for me, I’m just spinning my wheels, going nowhere.

Without a routine, I’m more easily distracted and find myself too often doing “research” on the internet, 10 tabs open at once. For business purposes. Honestly.

Without a routine, the housework is a constant battle, I feel guilty taking time for myself, and nobody’s particularly happy – least of all me.

Without a routine, and without a plan, I make poor time management choices. It’s easy to spend time doing work that really isn’t important right now. Work that takes me away from the things I need to to in order to achieve my dreams.

Sure, there are times when I do procrastinate. Don’t we all? But this is not about procrastination.

It’s about choosing to spend the time that I do have in ways that support me in reaching my goals.

It’s about setting priorities and having a plan – and following through with that plan.

It’s about needing to have “a place for everything – and everything in it’s place”. Not just when it comes to physical clutter, but also for all of those things that we hope to achieve throughout the course of a day.

Maybe you share some of these same struggles.

• Are you trying to do the impossible, expecting to do too many things in a day?
• Do you find yourself  disappointed at the end of the day by how little you’ve actually managed to get done?
• Do you have dreams that you long to accomplish, but can’t imagine how you might find the time for them?
• Are you going from day to day without having routines that really work for you?

Here are a couple of ideas that I’m working on this week , that you might find helpful too:

Choose one or two activities on your schedule/to-do list that would make the most difference to you if they were done every day.

Although Flylady and Leo Babauta at Zen Habits would both recommend working on only one habit at once, and I know that’s a really good idea, I’m a bit impatient at the moment so I’m aiming for two this week!

The two things I most want to be doing every day are:

• My Morning Pages (2 full pages each day) – because the rest of my life seems to fall more easily into place when I get these done.
• Getting the dinner dishes done immediately after dinner each night (that way I won’t spend several hours making half-hearted attempts to finish cleaning the kitchen. There’s plenty of things I’d rather be doing.)

What about you? What one or two activities are you not getting done at the moment, that would have the greatest impact on the rest of your day if you were to do them?

When is the best time each day for you to get these activities done?

I used to be able to write my Morning Pages from 6.30 to 7.30 each morning, giving me an hour to then get kids ready for school. Now, with one heading off to high school early each morning,  I would need to be up and writing no later than 6.15am if I want to write 2 pages.

As for the dishes, I’d love to have them done by 7.30, or at the very latest 8pm, leaving the rest of the night free. This I’d need to do straight after we’ve finished dinner.

When is the best time of day for you to get your activity/ies done? In the morning, before anyone else is awake? After you get home from work? After dinner?

Commit to doing these two activities every day – no distractions!

For me, that means I don’t turn the computer on at all until after my two pages have been written. Which so far (for 2 days now) seems to be working.

It also means that when I’m halfway through writing a sentence and my mind starts to wander – or I suddenly feel overwhelmed with all I have to do, as I did this morning, and wonder if I should just stop writing and start the rest of my day already – I stay committed. No distractions, no excuses. Committed!

What about you? What do you need to do to stay committed yourself?

If you ‘fail’ or don’t manage to get them done, keep trying!

Don’t expect to succeed right away. (They say it takes 21 days to form a new habit.) But do be prepared to perservere. And if you do keep trying but can’t seem to make it work, think about what you may need to do differently in order to succeed at making your activity a daily habit.

You may need to lower your expectations of yourself (in my case, that might mean committing at first to writing just one page each morning rather than two). Or you might need to re-evaluate when is the best time to be working on an activity.

Keep at it though. If it’s important enough to you, you’ll get there. Hopefully it won’t be long at all before you’re enjoying your new habits, and are ready to add a couple more.

Support your new habits by creating a routine – and make sure to follow it!

String a few habits and regular tasks together and do them at roughly the same time, and in the same order, everyday. By doing this, you’ll be creating a routine that can make getting through your To-Do List each day a whole lot easier.

I have a great Morning Routine for getting the housework done when I get back from the school run (I’ll tell you more about that some other time). My morning routine makes my day run so much more smoothly – when I make time to do it!

So no excuses. No distractions. Keep at it until you make it work. I know I will be!

Brigid




What routines are you working on establishing at the moment? What are your challenges and triumphs when it comes to habits and routines? You can share your thoughts by clicking on “comments” at the top of this post.