Living Life Ten Minutes at a Time

I get very frustrated when I hear time management “experts” talk about how to plan out projects using long-term schedules. The reason for my frustration is that my life doesn’t unfold long-term…I literally am making decisions about what to get accomplished all day in chunks of time.

Kids, phone calls, family, business….all of these factors present me and most work at home moms with an unending supply of interruptions. So rather than try to fit myself into a schedule, I let the schedule create itself around me.

Here’s an example: This morning my son woke up at 6:25am which is nearly an hour earlier than normal. A few minutes of working with him to get back to sleep revealed that he was indeed up for the day. Now, two hours later, he’s already showing signs of being tired and cranky. I know that I literally have a window of 10 minutes to write this post because that’s how long his attention span is at his age and I need to grab these moments when I can. So I wrote in my notebook (I use a spiral bound notebook to keep track of to-do lists, resources and notes) the following:

8:27-8:37 am : Write a post for AutomaticMoms.com or finish a draft post.

What comes after that on my schedule? Nothing! Rather than worry about what I might be able to do later today, my agenda consists of just what I can get done in the next ten minutes. It sharpens my focus and narrows my thoughts down to only what I need to think of to get these ten minutes completed.

Of course I have other lists of things that need to be accomplished eventually, but as far as scheduling, ten minutes is as far out as I go. It reduces stress because I’m never “behind” more than ten minutes. I don’t have a list of things lined up ready for me to stress about.

Ten minutes…..that’s all it takes to get a project done sometimes, and sometimes that’s all you should focus on anyway!

p.s. At exactly 8:37am, my post was done and ready to be proofread….ten minutes down today, ten HOURS to go!