For the first time in many, many, MANY years, I am being asked to work a “normal” schedule at work. Up until now, my schedule has been pretty much Monday-Thursday and Saturday, and broken up over the course of 24 hours. Since the program I manage is an evening program, and we sometimes have activities on Saturdays, I imagine I might still have occasional strangeness in my schedule…but the idea of working within the hours of 8ish and 6ish Monday-Friday is vaguely comforting to me right now. Novel ordinariness in my life.

This change is causing me to re-evaluate my task management system that I’ve been using, where I just randomly choose areas to work on during periods that I’m not working. It seems the kids and I will now be able to work within a much more predictable framework. So I’m planning to spend some time reorganizing our daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms so they are less like unsyncopated jazz and more like, well, it will probably be more like straight-ahead three-chord punk rock – because I don’t think our lives will ever not be chaotic at the very least.

Right now, my planning system involves 7 focus areas:

Work

Kids

Community

Art & Education (I might consider splitting these up)

Friends

Fitness

Household or Housework

I try to spend at least an hour on each of these areas every day, but it doesn’t always work out – especially since work takes up a huge chunk of my day. What I might try to do is block out time on the weekend for larger household, kid, and art projects, and just sustain the rest of the week. Off the top of my head, my schedule might look something like this:

Monday

Work (8)

Kids (2)

Community (2)

Fitness (1)

Household (1)

Art/Education (1)

Tuesday

Work (8)

Kids (2)

Fitness (1)

Community (1)

Friends (2)

Wednesday

Work (8)

Kids (2)

Fitness (1)

Community (2)

Household (1)

Thursday

Work (8)

Kids (1)

Fitness (1)

Friends (2)

Art/Education (1)

Community (1)

Household (1)

Friday

Work (8)

Kids (2)

Fitness (1)

Friends (2)

Art/Education (1)

Household (1)

Saturday

Kids (3)

Household (3)

Community (4)

Friends (4)

Fitness (1)

Art/Education (1)

Sunday

Kids (4)

Household (4)

Friends (4)

Art/Education (2)

Fitness (1)

Of course, if I economize, and make the kids or my friends do housework and/or exercise and/or art/educational projects with me…that will leave me more time to lock myself in my room and be all by myself. 🙂

I’ll probably break this down even further and be more specific in the coming weeks. Because I’m nerdy that way.