Make Over Your Mornings – Day 8 Blog Along

Image from makeoveryourmornings.com

Good morning! If you’ve been with us from Day 1, welcome back! I’m so proud of you for continuing on! If you haven’t snagged a copy yet, it’s not too late to get yours and join us! Head on over to Make Over Your Mornings to get yours now. The workbook that comes with it is invaluable – not to mention the personal videos you get to watch each day featuring Money Saving Mom‘s very own Crystal Paine. You can find Day 1’s Blog Along post here to catch up. And if you’re looking for a testimony to how wonderful this program works, you can find mine here.

Have your copy and ready to start changing your life? LET’S GO!

How many times have you started out your day with such high hopes and great intentions and a to-do list with 50 items listed? You get going on your day with plenty of momentum, checking things off as you go, only to realize before the day’s over, you’ll still have over half of your list waiting for you. Momentum slows, disappointment sets in, and you feel the sting of failure.

I have been guilty of this very thing my entire life. I set very ambitious lists – just like I did with my goals – and wasn’t realistic about how much I could actually accomplish (or how much more of my list I couldn’t) in just a day. It’s very hard to get up and go at your day when so many of them are piled high with carry-over lists from incomplete tasks from days before.

Narrowing down my goals and learning to take things one step at a time like we’ve been taught in this course has helped tremendously to keep my day planning focused and manageable. I also find that by writing out my feasible to-do list, I am so much more intentional about my day. You see, when I have a list of a million things I need to get done running through my head, I wind up spinning around in circles all day long and not really having a lot to show for it at the end of the day. Writing it out keeps your mind focused on the task at hand. Likewise, setting a general time frame for each task means you’ll be focused on that specific task until it’s complete, and you’re on to the next. When you’re not giving something your full focus and instead are thinking about all of the other things you have to get done, you tend to not work as efficiently and thus are unable to complete tasks in the time allotted.

Although we’d all like to hammer through our lists and cross off those goals in whirlwind time frames, the reality is that there will be seasons of our lives where it’s just not possible to get much more done than making sure our families and homes are taken care of. Or, your time frame for working on goals may look something more like after the kids are in bed each night, and that may be all you have to give to that. Whatever season you’re in, concentrate on making those to-do lists manageable.

I plan each day the night before so that once I’m up, I don’t have to devote any time in the mornings to planning. It’s already done, and I’m ready to roll. I also make sure to not fill up every single block of time in my planner. Things happen. Life happens. You’ll run out of milk and have to make an emergency run to the store. You’ll end up getting distracted by a toddler whose stuffed toys in the toilet and now it’s flooding the bathroom. Or, you’ll just plain underestimate the time a task will take. Accounting for those times in your day that you can’t predict will also help you be a successful day planner. Besides, if you end up ahead of schedule, that means you have more room for doing something you love or even working on another part of your goal list!

Below is an example of how I planned my day for Monday this week. Keep in mind that you also need to plan your day with our non-negotiables intact.

MUSTS: Laundry, Dishes

NON-NEGOTIABLES: Blogging, Daily Devotional, Sewing Orders/Advertising

BITE-SIZED GOAL PIECES: Weekly Planning for Blog, Work on Sewing Class Booklet, Pattern Anthology Sew Along

• 6-630am – Wake, shower/dress/hair, daily devotional
• 630-7am – Blog (Blessings Basket)
• 7am-8am – Get kids ready for school, pack lunches, get kids on bus
• 8am-815am – Weekly planning for blog
• 815-9am – Wake toddler, Breakfast with the toddler, clean up kitchen from breakfast, dress toddler
• 9-915am – Start laundry, advertise onesies
• 915-930am – Trash Day – take out trash
• 930-10am – BUFFER TIME
• 10am-1230pm – Work on sewing class booklet, active time with toddler, BUFFER TIME
• 1230-1pm – Lunch, put toddler down for nap, dishes
• 1pm-430pm – Pattern Anthology sew along, BUFFER TIME, get kids off bus
• 430-545pm – Cook dinner
• 545-10pm – Nightly routine (you can find that here)

I made sure my day was comprised of the MUSTS and NON-NEGOTIABLES, and then added in my bite-sized pieces from my goals list.

There were times in the morning I needed the buffer time, and there were times in the afternoon that I ran ahead of schedule. All-in-all, I was able to accomplish everything on my to-do list as well as knock a couple other items off of my bite-sized pieces.

I mentioned on Day 6 the Tools4Wisdom Planner that I absolutely love for planning my days and keeping track of my long-term and short term goals and their bite-sized pieces. Whatever tool you use – be it a planner, an app, or a good old piece of paper in a notebook – make the most out of it by keeping it open each day. That way, your day is always visible and doesn’t just get shoved to the side. If you’re interested in getting a Tools4Wisdom Planner for yourself, I’ll be posting my review of it in just a matter of days and highly recommend it!

I’ll also be back here tomorrow with my experiences and thoughts from Day Nine! And don’t forget, if you still haven’t gotten your hands on a copy of the Make Over Your Mornings e-course, you can do that here.

Are there areas of your to-do list that are strangling you and your success in each day? How do you plan to combat those issues?