Planning, planning, planning. Always planning, that’s me. Greg asks if you can over plan and I just don’t think so. As working women with children (or not), there is so much to consider and plan. That is what the Sunday Basket® does for you! Do you need to plan this much and have everything planned? No. But it will increase your intentionality and output. I talked about the idea of a train (momentum of productivity) that you can get moving; one for home and one for work. The idea is we can have it all, we can win at home and work through planning. Listen to episodes 570 and 571 to get the full explanation.
How You Gain Time
In my active parenting years while growing Organize 365®, I was driving kids, helping with homework, did 100% of the house duties, had my direct sales business, my parents got divorced, my dad passed and I helped settle his estate, and I was just plain out of time. I wanted to share some ways I looked at my time and realized how to reclaim it. After about three years growing Organize 365®, I just came home and abruptly announced, “I am no longer cooking or going to the grocery store.” I gained time and we saved money. It didn’t take long before Greg assumed those duties.
About 3-6 years after that, I had learned CFO and COO skills and started to apply them at home. I became more efficient with my time and resources. I think my family assumed a magic fairy came in and cleaned the house. I’d clean while they were away and then I’d work at night, but then my family thought all I did was work. So I flipped the script. I worked during the day while they were at school/work and cleaned while they were home. But I realized I could get those cleaning hours to work on growing Organize 365®, so I hired out my cleaning. And sometimes you just delay a task and see how long you can go without doing it to understand a better cadence for completing those tasks. Maybe it doesn’t need to be done as often as you thought. We are not going for perfection; the goal is excellence. I use my time very purposefully through lots and lots of planning. I eventually abdicated all of my responsibilities at work and home and that freed me up to complete my very own book tour in 2021. Organize 365® ran smoothly and so did my home. My trains were fueled up and knew the directions to go.
Trimester Home Planning
The Sunday Basket® Home Planning Day is to help you plan, abdicate, and be intentional with your time to get your home train running smoothly. It’s trimester planning, which is what I realized we need to do for homes because quarterly planning never made sense to me. I have found that it is most natural to plan in January, Summer, and Fall for our homes. And that is due to all the school years where we start school at the end of summer, we have a winter break, and then a summer break. There is a certain energy that flows with those breaks and time of year. And I found I really like to sink my teeth into some sort of meaty project that could potentially take up the whole trimester. I broke down my planning and execution process of these meaty projects and the S.M.A.R.T.I.E.S. goal planning I use in episodes 596-599. I schedule our planning days due to that natural cadence I learned in my school years that continued into my teaching years. For Planning Days, we really take a look at your current phase of life. We are getting down to the details so when life tries to derail us, we have accounted for that and we just keep chugging along. Planning Day is the way to make goals realistic and possible. I strongly recommend Planning Day Prep. In Planning Day Prep, you will fill in holidays, birthdays, and other important dates in the planner. You will update your Sunday Basket® and update labels for your Sunday Basket®. You can move archive papers from your Sunday Basket® to your binders. Then on Planning Day, you aren’t distracted by trying to do those things while the webinar is in progress and you are all set up to execute the planning that comes from Planning Day.
8/24 Sunday Basket® Home Planning Day - 9 Steps (10-2pm EST live webinar)
1. Where are you in your current phase of life?
2. Time - 5 different ways you will look at it
3. Habits/Routines - AM, afternoon, and PM routines
4. Housework - Ideal cadence for laundry, cleaning, and meal planning
5. House Administration - Your Sunday Basket®
6. Plan - 3 years, 1 year, a project, 4 months
7. Detailed Week by Week Plan - To complete your meaty project
8. Detailed Weekly Agenda - Daily plan
9. Look at your time additional ways
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Organize 365 Podcast