Week 2: Life happens

By: Melanie

My daughter is sick. I suppose I shouldn't have expected her to stay completely healthy for the next 52 weeks out of respect for this challenge, but I sort of did. In any case, it's a good reminder that life happens, and being organized will just make everything run more smoothly and easily when it does. Getting organized however, is just more difficult when you can't put the world around you on pause. But that's why we're calling it a challenge, after all.

In a way it's the perfect time for this week's task of organizing my schedule. I need to learn how to use my time more effectively. There isn't a lot of extra time in my day, but on days like this when I find my daughter entangled in my arms for hours at a time, drifting in and out of a seriously unhappy consciousness, I realize that when all is well I really have much more time available to me than I realize. It's just that so much of that time is eaten up in meaningless ways. A very common scenario is finding myself with a few extra minutes, but I'm not sure how many minutes because I don't know how long a) Elle will sleep, or b) Elle will play by herself, or c) my husband will be out with Elle...you get the idea.

Life revolves around my 19 month old - as it should - but if I haven't organized my schedule and figured out what needs to get done and how long I need for each task ahead of time, I find myself spinning in circles trying to decide what to do and what I have time for and I end up getting nothing accomplished.

I have the organizer, I'm making the to-do list, and by the end of this week I'll have it all down on paper. And as daunting as that seems, I have a feeling that it's only the beginning.