If you have kids you need to plan…
I know I have had more kids than is strictly normal, but my
most manic time was when I had just the first two as I had to look after more
than one person at a time and it confused me. It soon became clear that if I
was to get through the day/week/month/the rest of my life sane, then I would
have to adopt some mechanism of organisation.
Now, people that know me well can testify that ‘being
organised’ isn’t my strong suit [glad my husband isn’t likely to read this…]
but needs must I always say. And needs there certainly were.
Before I reveal the lengths I was driven to in order to keep
one nostril above the water, I will add a disclaimer;
Systems have to be
followed to have a chance of working and a] I didn’t always follow them and, b]
depending on my state of health and level of the kids’ cooperativeness, they
didn’t always work when I tried to follow them…
But hey, we all get sick days and kids on wild sprees and
days when everything goes WRONG, but hand on heart, I can truly say that having
some sort of framework is like a comforting scaffolding to hang your life on,
and to come back to as if to a raft on a choppy sea.
Because that's what systems are. They are scaffolding, designed to hold your life together
while you are working on it. Systems can be a scary concept, but think of it
like this: my way of writing down what I need to get done in a week, and
allocating time to it, and making sure I don’t forget anything the most
important stuff is my system. That’s all.
So, the more kids that came along the more I had to plan and
write down and it made me look organised when I wasn’t really, I was just
surviving.
My first attempts at planning were ripping pages out of
note books and making a list of everything I had to do THAT DAY, which was
fine in as far as it went, but days would suddenly pop up out of nowhere and I
would find it was someone’s birthday that I had forgotten. And I had forgotten
because I was concentrating on one day at a time and not looking ahead. At all. There are times when we must do this [just given birth, bereavement etc]
but in the main, a little bit of looking ahead saves time and upsetting your
mother-in-law.
I am now going to reveal to you something I devised together
with Moo when we were both eyebrow deep in kids. I truly believe we were the
pioneers of all the swanky business/life planners that all these cool
entrepreneurs are trying to sell us. I called mine ‘Memory’ and here it is:
Yes, it’s a scruffy old notebook, but it contained gold
dust. So, here’s how it worked:
1.
Open out a spiral-bound notebook so it lays
flat, and you have a double page spread looking up at you
2.
Get a ruler and pencil and draw columns. On the
first page draw a narrow, medium and wide column
3.
On the second [facing] page draw a narrow, wide,
and then medium column. Ish.
4.
So across the two pages we have six columns of
varying widths
5.
Then divide the first five columns into seven rows
by drawing six equally space lines horizontally, leaving the last column to run
undivided down the page.
6.
First column call DATE, Second column DATES TO
REMEMBER, third column JOBS & PLANS, fourth column MENU, fifth column LOCAL
SHOPPING and last column SUPERMARKET
Thus:
The planner worked in this way; each week you filled in the
day and date in the first column. In the second column Dates to Remember, you
would fill in any birthday, anniversaries, wedding or hospital/GP/optician/school
appointments. In the third column you planned your jobs for the week, like washing, making a birthday cake or hoovering the upstairs etc. As you
could see which days were heavy with appointments you could devise a work
schedule that left busy days free. In the fourth column you would plan a menu
for the whole week, making sure you kept simple or reheated meals for
complicated days, in the next column you would fill in the local shop. In the
days of yore when we all could get to a local Post Office this was great as you could make sure you bought the
birthday cards and stamps a few days before the birthday came up in the Dates
to Remember column. Or you could buy your fresh meat from the local butcher at
the beginning of the week as you looked at your menu. The last column was
Supermarket [or weekly] shop, which is not divided up horizontally. The idea of
this is, if you leave the planner open on the side, as soon as you run low of
something you write it down straight away in this column and it is
automatically part of your next weekly shop. The rest is added by looking down
at your menu for the week.
OK, so we don’t all have local shops anymore [this was from
1984 after all], and it may well be too labour intensive for busy working Mums
to draw up every week.
But you must admit, we were ahead of the planning game….
Saggy
Saggy
No comments:
Post a Comment