One day at a time / #KISS Week 29
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Today I'm joining this week's Blogging Ideas by sharing my take on how to manage our schedules to our advantage.
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In a fast-paced world, being a woman is a big challenge. Today we women have taken on several responsibilities that keep our schedules busy. It is not only about the role of the mother. To this, we must add the different intra-family functions we fulfill. We are wives, daughters, aunts, sisters, and friends. Each of these roles demands more from us every day. There are many women managers whose responsibilities are so great that there is no fixed time to end the workday.
Today's world is very competitive, so continuous professionalization is a constant in our lives. This competitiveness has even reached our children's classrooms. Today it is not enough to take the children to school, educational institutions demand the constant presence of parents at school to promote and support "extracurricular" activities. Failure to do so is sometimes frowned upon because it is interpreted as meaning that the children do not matter. All this is a pressure cooker. How do you go about accomplishing all this?
There are so many activities scheduled for a single day that there seems to be no tomorrow. Many times I found myself in the sad reality of placing more than two activities on the same schedule. The most paradoxical thing is that each activity had to be done from one end of the city to the other. A real madness! Many times, I was often wrong with one of these activities or even worse with both of them. At the end of the day, I felt exhausted and depressed. I felt that I was not able to fulfill my responsibilities. Did I say responsibilities? Eureka, here was the solution! It was right under my nose.
I started to think about how to make my day have more than 24 hours, but this is still not possible 😂 so what I had to do was to change the concept of "responsibilities" for "priorities" and as if by magic everything started to flow very well to the point that today my days are long and I can say that I enjoy free time to do whatever I want. Do you want to know how I did it? I'm going to share with you how it all started.
"Responsibility" sometimes brings with it the concept of "obligation". Without realizing it, we accept activities that we don't want to do, but there is a burden of obligation that makes it heavy.
The first thing I did was to separate responsibilities from priorities, understanding that priorities are the things that have a direct impact on our well-being such as family, sources of income, and recreation. I left out of the agenda everything that did not bring me something good. The second thing I put into practice is to say "no", this saved me from committing myself to activities and saturating my day.
I plan my days with only one priority activity. For example, if I have a doctor's appointment on Monday, I do not schedule any other family, school, or work activity for that day. In case there are two activities I try to do one of them in the morning and the other in the afternoon, trying to have enough distance between them. What happens if I have time to spare between one activity and the other? Very simple, I take my time and have a good coffee. I can also go shopping and buy some things I had planned. If there is enough time, I go to the hairdresser's to pamper myself a little. The truth is that at the end of the day I feel pleased with everything I did. If you notice, I only had a couple of things planned, and I ended up doing more. That's a win-win!
It seems contradictory but sometimes trying to squeeze the most out of your time turns against you by squeezing yourself. Today with these simple changes, I am more efficient at work, I share more quality time with my family, and I can take time for myself and enjoy my hobbies, exercise and nature walk.
I think so! It all depends on what you expect from your life and how you want to feel.
Thanks for reading. See you in next post!
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