organization: the to do list

Sometimes, I have a love/hate relationship with my "to do" list.

As you know, we've undergone some big changes and transitions in our lives recently. We sold our house, moved 6 hours away, and Justin, recent Seminary graduate, officially started his career in the United Methodist Church. Change is hard, even good change, no matter how you try to prepare yourself for it. But we are settling in and creating new routines and new "normals." With all of the changes I thought it might be a good time to look at my own time management and how I have been structuring my "to do" list!

Back in January I shared with you my home management binder. While I have used it, I'm probably not getting as much use of out it as I could be. I shared with you that I had decided to create a section labeled "To Do." In this section I included 3 things:

• Weekly to do lists (Organized Home)
• Monthly Goals lists (Home Life Simplified)
• Master To Do list (Organized Home)

I'm a planner, but I had felt convicted that I wasn't always using my time well and when I came home from work my motivation was simply not there. I have always been a list maker, but I decided to become more organized and intentional about it- setting myself goals and deadlines to reach, so to speak.

What I found was that I struggled between thinking "I can't survive without a list"  and "oh my goodness I am so overwhelmed by my to do list." Anyone else feel this way? I simply could never accomplish all of it and I felt like I was lazy or failing each day/week/month when I kept moving tasks I should have already completed over to a new day/week/month. And tasks that have multiple parts or where maybe I had started on it but not finished yet? Those drove drive me crazy! I wanted to check it off but I couldn't yet because it wasn't totally complete!

I ended up doing away with my organized, more formal to do list for a while. I've been jotting a few things down on paper without a time limit attached to it and I eventually complete [most] of the items.

My devotional the other day happen to be talking about this same subject and how we often measure our value by accomplishments and productivity. But if we believe this lie we are missing out on how God sees our worth, or as the author of my devotional said, "When I rely on the ruler of productivity to establish my worth, time becomes a slave master rather than a gift."

Ah, a gift. Time certainly a gift that I don't want to waste, but I also don't want to be a slave to time either. So where am I going from here with my time management? For one thing, it is summer. My schedule and routine (or lack of) are completely different than from the school year. But I am trying to take some of the things I have learned about myself and time management and start putting them into practice now. I want to avoid feeling overwhelmed but still hold myself accountable for accomplishing things in a timely manner. At the same time though I don't want to feel like I have failed or that my worth is diminished simply because I didn't accomplish everything on my to do list. My worth is found Jesus, not a list of tasks.

Things I want to change: 

• Breaking down larger or multi-part tasks into specific smaller, more manageable tasks. (Example: Instead of writing "clean entire house" I would list out the different cleaning tasks and check those off as I do them)
• Creating a completely separate to do list for school.
• Accepting time limits- be more realistic about what I can accomplish in a day/week/month and mindful of unexpected things that come up. In other words, spreading the tasks out based on importance over the span of the week. (My Monday's always had a list a mile long, which was completely unrealistic, and I would spend the rest of the week trying to catch up. By Thursday I didn't want to do anything!)
• Schedule [more] time to rest or do something that I simply enjoy! It's okay to have a day or evening that has nothing scheduled on it!
• Not sure I'm going to keep the Monthly Goals list .. I haven't used it in several months. 

Things I want to keep:

•  My Daily to do list. I haven't used it in some time, but I think I am ready to go back to doing it. In fact, I might just upgrade it to the Daily Checklist from Organized Home and add in the weekly chore list as well.
• Mapping out my week on Sunday night. 
• Prioritize tasks. (although, I could obviously do this better!)
• Taking a breather. I allow myself some time when I first get home from work to just simply sit down and breathe. In addition, I try to take breaks periodically while working on completing tasks.

A healthy balance, that's what I want. So how do you feel about time management?  Are you a list maker? A procrastinator?

Check out these other great articles and resources on time management:
Top 10 Ideas for Time Management
Creating a Time Budget
3 Tips for Getting Stuff Done
10 Tips for Getting More Done

Linking up at at a bowl full of lemons!