3 simple hacks to get back on track when you are overwhelmed and don’t know where to start.
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Resources mentioned:
- Podcast #50 – How to Put Your Homeschool on Autopilot
- Podcast #184 – Living in the Sandwich Generation
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TRANSCRIPT
After any major life event, it can be very hard to get back into our normal routine. And this can be anything from a holiday to having a baby, to finishing up the school year to starting the school year. There’s all kinds of things that kind of mess with our schedule and then get us off track and we struggle to get back on track. I am always off track, it feels like, but there are a few things that I do that always put me back on track very quickly. And that’s what I’m going to share with you today.
Hello friends. Welcome to the Raising Arrows podcast. I’m Amy Roberts from raisingarrows.net and this is episode number 188, Getting Things Done When You Don’t Feel Like It.
When it comes to events or projects or circumstances that get you off track, a lot of times getting back on track is one of those things you, you want to do, but you don’t feel like you can do it. And sometimes it even just feels like it’s one more thing to do. Trying to get back on track is just one more thing, and I don’t want to do it. And if that’s the case, I want to encourage you today to take into account the three things I’m going to share with you that get me back on track very quickly and see if any of those resonate with you as something you can do to get yourself back on track. And even when you don’t feel like being on track, or you don’t feel like getting back on track, or you don’t feel like really doing anything, you just like to curl up in a ball and forget that you have things to do. This will help you. No matter what it is that you’re not wanting to get done, whether it’s homeschooling, housework, blog work, whatever it is, these are three things that will really help you get back on track, even when you don’t want to.
The first thing is to make a three things list. The three things list has been something that has helped me tremendously over the years. I’ve heard lots of other bloggers and podcasters talk about this, and so I know it’s not just me that this works for. It works for a lot of people.
Basically, you’re going to take a piece of paper. It could be an index card, it could be a post it note, it could be a list that you have on your reminders or your notepad on your phone phone. And you’re going to make a list at the beginning of the day of three things you’d like to accomplish that day.
Now, don’t make these things huge either, because that was my mistake. When it came to, like, blog work, I would say that I was going to finish this big project or I was going to write this post and publish it. That’s too much. Those of you who know the blogging world know that to write a post, edit it, get the pictures in and do the graphics and everything that goes into publishing a post, it’s not a doable thing for a short amount of time.
These three things need to not take forever. If you have a huge project, say you want to declutter an entire room. You probably shouldn’t put declutter the living room or declutter so and so’s bedroom on your list. You need to take it in bite sized pieces. Unless that’s the only thing on your list that the three things are that room. And even then, that might be a bit much. Take it in bite sized pieces. Break down those bigger projects into smaller pieces.
So for instance, let’s say I need to plan for homeschooling. Well, rather than being really vague about it – I need to plan for next week’s homeschooling – I need to say on my three things list – going to plan for history for one week next week. That’s it, I’m going to sit down and I’m going to do that. And for me, that’s probably going to take about an hour. So that’s a pretty chunky project. And I need to consider that fact that if I’m doing a big project, like planning something or taking care of a blog post or recording a podcast, I can’t have a bunch of other huge projects that same day. So my three things list can have a big project, but it can’t have three big projects. It’s got to have maybe one big project and two smaller projects.
And the point of this is that it gives you a direction to head. It gives you the ability to see on paper three tasks that will make you feel pretty good about your day. If you manage to get through even one and a half of them, you will feel pretty good about your day because you actually had a direction to your day.
And that is what is often lacking when we feel like we can’t get back on track and we can’t get things done is because we’re all over the place. We’re a little popcorn about things. We’re over here doing this. And then it’s like if you give a mouse a cookie, you know, it leads to this and then it’s to this thing and pretty soon you are all over the place. And you look back at your day, and it’s 9 o’ clock at night and you go, what did I do? Well, certainly you put out a lot of fires and you took care of a lot of things. And I will be the first to, tell you that there are often times I go and put things on my list after I’ve done them just so I can cross them off. I know I’m not the only one, but the point to this is that you need to have a direction to go in the first place. And so if you sit down in the morning with your coffee or while you’re just standing at the counter cooking breakfast and write down on a piece of paper three, three things that you would like to accomplish that day.
And it can be as simple as – I managed to read a book with one of the kids – I taught school. That is a huge project for a day. That is a big chunk of your day. So don’t forget that those are things too that can go on that list, especially if you’re struggling to get the homeschooling in and do it. Well, for me, I’ve been homeschooling now for 20 some odd years and I just kind of do it automatically. School starts at 10 and there’s a very automatic rhythm.
And that’s the next thing we’re going to talk about is creating a rhythm, a routine to your day where there are things that end up on autopilot. I have an entire podcast about putting your homeschool on autopilot that I will link in the description. But consider this, the more things that go in a routine, because that’s just the way you always do them, the simpler your day is going to be because you don’t have any decision fatigue. You don’t have to think about it.
I know at 10am, school starts every single day. That’s how it works. And so I don’t have to think about that. I don’t have to put it on my projects list or my three things list. I don’t have to do that because I’m already in that mode. I know at 10am we start and we usually go until 11:30 or 12 with morning time and the stuff that we put into our morning time. And so I’m done. And then it’s the rest of the day that I have to figure out. It’s the rest of the day that I have to make sure I don’t sit in the chair and binge watch whatever, and I actually get things accomplished. So on my three things list, I’m not going to include homeschooling. But if you are struggling to put homeschooling in its prioritized place, that might need to be something that goes on your three things list.
Another thing might be that you’re going to cook dinner. For years, I had to set a timer or an alarm on my phone at 4pm to remind me to get in there and cook dinner, stop whatever I was doing and cook dinner. And there have been seasons in my life where I just really didn’t feel like cooking.
Now we have a new plan in our household that I will be sharing with you in a future podcast about how we’re doing meals now. But it’s one of those things that if you are struggling with it, it maybe needs to be the thing that goes on your three things list. And then as you do it consistently, it will become part of your autopilot habit. You’ll be building these habits and routines that you don’t think about it anymore. It’s almost like an internal clock goes off at 4pm and you’re like, hey, I need to figure out what’s for dinner. And then you don’t struggle with it so much.
And you’ll start to see that evolve. You’ll see your three things list evolve as you start to build these habits. And then that begins to simplify your life tremendously because the three things list gets to be a little more productive, if you will. It doesn’t feel so mundane. It doesn’t feel so much like these are things that I should just do every day. How come I can’t get these things done? Because you will have built a habit.
Recently I started a habit of working out in the morning. And this is something that I used to do, but then I got away from it because it’s very easy to walk away from habits. And then it doesn’t take very long for you to get out of that habit. It’s been years now since I have worked out in the morning. However, I’ve been getting up with my husband and he leaves fairly early for work. And, during that time between when my husband leaves for work and when the kids get up and start their independent schoolwork, that’s a perfect time for me to not just waste it all by sitting around drinking coffee. Not that there’s anything wrong with sitting around and drinking coffee. I just need to use those times for a workout or for something a little more productive to start my day off, because that’s a goal of mine. And so that’s where I’ve placed that. And it’s become a habit now. I’ve been doing it for several weeks. I just get up, I do my stretches, I do my push up challenge that I’m doing. And then I do a workout, about a 25, 30 minute workout on my computer. When it gets to be a little bit warmer, I will probably, alternate with some walking outside during that time frame. And this is something I used to do. The last house we lived in, which by the way was seven years ago, I did that. I got up in the morning and before any of the hubbub started in our house, I took a two mile walk. It was part of my day every single day. But I got out of that habit. So now I have to build it back into a habit and get back into the rout.
And that needed to start out on my three things list. Workout was one of my three things. And it made me feel really good to check that off the list and realize that I had done it and now to realize it’s just a habit. Now I don’t even have to put it on the three things list. I just do it. So it is simplifying my day.
Another part of simplifying your day is to look at the places that seem really difficult for you. One place for me is meals. I really struggle with food and meals. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been feeding a small army for almost 30 years. I don’t know, I don’t know what it is. But I will say that I am a little fatigued when it comes to meals. And so I have had to do some things to make meal time simpler.
And one of those things is that breakfast is always on your own. When the kids get up and they straggle into the kitchen, that’s when they get their own breakfast. My children are at an age where most of them do not need help anymore to get their own meals. I try to have things on hand that even the smallest ones can take care of themselves. I keep some sausage links. when we make pancakes, we make extra. I always have bread. I always have, whipped cream cheese and various jams and jellies. We always have eggs, we always have bacon. We always have hash browns available. Sometimes I have a sweet bread or something like that that I’ve cooked up. And that will also be for breakfast. And so I try to have things available. Cereal. We do have cereal. Not very much, but we do have cereal and oatmeal and things like that. Sometimes we have granola that I’ve made on hand. But I try to make sure that I have things that they can get for breakfast on their own. And even the nine year old is able to get her own breakfast, because there’s things that she likes to eat and she can put them in the microwave. She knows how to make herself some hot chocolate and that’s often what she has is sausages and hot chocolate and that’s okay.
And then lunch is also on your own. Lunch – I always make sure that I have sandwich fixings and nacho fixings available for the kids if we don’t have anything else. But a lot of times that’s when the leftovers are consumed is for lunch. So for instance, today there were a couple of hamburgers, a couple of bierocks, there was some ground beef and there were sandwich fixings. And then I also cooked up some soft pretzels and some cheese sauce that I made from scratch and put that on the stove. And that is what they’re going to munch on when they’re done with their schoolwork. They’ll just come in, they’ll have lunch whenever they are ready for it. So we don’t have like set breakfast, set lunch. That’s something that I needed to do to simplify my day.
As for my own meals, I almost always eat the same thing for breakfast. I always have eggs, bacon, hash brown with spinach and maybe some raspberries or some cottage cheese on the side. I always have a cup of coffee with a little bit of half & half in it. And that’s my morning, every single morning. Very rarely do I deviate from that.
For lunch, I typically have some sort of bowl. Today I had, one of those cups of goodles and I put broccoli in with it. So I cooked up the goodles in the microwave. I added some frozen broccoli on top that I’d cooked up. And then I air fried lightly breaded chicken. I cut that up, I put it on top. I added a little bit of primal kitchen buffalo sauce. It was amazing. Like I’m kind of thinking that might be one of my go to meals. It was so, so good. And, and I’m not usually a Mac and cheese person, so that was really yummy. That’s what I had for lunch today. I will often have a rice bowl or some sort of salad, something like that. That is just my go to. I have those things on hand and that’s what I eat day in and day out.
Dinner is another story. And like I said, there’s a podcast coming on what we’re doing for dinner, but suffice it to say, we are rotating children through as the chef for the night. And it is really helping simplify my life because my life has drastically changed in the last year and a half. My mom now lives with us and my husband is home from deployment. my right hand woman got married. So my daughter, who’s 21, she got married and left the house. My 25 year old moved back in, but she’s hardly ever here because she has a full time job. And so there’s a lot of crazy moving parts and pieces. I now have two grandchildren who come over fairly frequently and so there’s just a lot of moving parts and pieces that didn’t used to be there.
Somebody was talking about how, you know, things change as you get older and it actually gets busier. And one of the reasons for that is that when your children are all small, they’re contained under your control. The schedule is yours, the timing is yours, the, the meals are yours. Everything is yours. Your domain, you are in control of everything. And then they grow up and there’s adult children coming back, there’s grandchildren. Perhaps you are taking care of an older family member. I do have a podcast on living in the sandwich generation that if you are living that you might want to take a listen to that because I talk about some of the issues I found doing that and how we’re kind of trying to figure out and get our footing being a caregiver to my mother now. And so there’s so many different things that happen when you have older kids and it stops being your domain. They’ve got stuff over here and you’ve got people coming in here and pretty soon it can feel very out of control. Thus the reason I need to have a three things list and I need to have habits and I need to have routines, and then I need to simplify as much as I possibly can.
I don’t know what you’re dealing with and what your circumstances are, but I do know that by implementing these three things, you will end up getting back on track very easily. Even when you don’t feel like doing anything, you don’t feel like getting on track, and you don’t feel like doing anything but sitting in the chair, you can get back on track by putting three things on a list that you would like to accomplish, keeping those simple and doable, simplifying your life with a routine that you start making into habits by putting those habits on the three things list. And then as you begin to do those, naturally, they can come off of that list. And then by simplifying the parts and pieces within your life.
Whatever it is that feels too complicated, feels like too much. Start figuring out, how can I simplify those things. In that podcast that I talk about, living in the sandwich generation, one of the things that I have done to simplify that part of my life is that none of my mom’s appointments get to be in the morning, unless it’s a Friday, and then it’s late morning, because that’s our day that we clean. And I can get everybody started cleaning. I can get the house kind of tidied up, and then I can go to an appointment. But other than that, I need to be at home teaching school in the mornings. So therefore, I cannot put one of my mom’s appointments, her doctor appointments or whatever it is she’s going to, I can’t put those in the morning. And that’s okay. That’s something I needed to do in order to simplify. So all appointments, all extra things, unless it’s some sort of emergency, it goes in the afternoon hours. Because I want to be available to teach school. It’s a priority. I need to homeschool the five kids who are left to homeschool. And I need to do it well. So those mornings are, sacred. And that is something that I have done to simplify.
So I hope that you have found this super helpful. I hope that you can implement these things and find some peace and find some motivation to get some things done without making it over the top. All the things on your to do list, you have to break them down, you have to make them smaller, you have to simplify. And everything else needs to be a habit and a routine that you start to just do on autopilot without all the decision fatigue. Because your life is busy. My life is busy. Thank you so much for being here, friends on the Raising Arrows podcast. We will see you next time.
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