What do you do when you have so many commitments and priorities that you simply can’t take care of them all—at least not right now?
You have to make tough choices.
Several of the tools in my FREEDOM toolbox that we’ve been discussing in recent podcasts are especially helpful here:
You need to REFLECT to figure out your priorities . . . and to identify which of the competing priorities are the most important.
You need to FOCUS on those most important priorities.
You need to ELIMINATE other uses of your time so that you can focus on those highest priorities.
You need to DISCIPLINE yourself to take action on those top priorities.
The past few weeks have been even busier than usual for me in all 3 major planning areas: personal, family, and business. In the personal category, I’m dealing with some health issues, including a shoulder problem that requires time-consuming therapy. In the business category, I’m trying to catch up on multiple editing projects after traveling to speak at several homeschool conventions. And in the family category, we’re wrapping up our 18th year of homeschooling, celebrating my third son’s high school graduation (after homeschooling him for kindergarten through 12th grade!), and filling out a college application.
Something has to give.
This week, I made the hard decision to eliminate this week’s podcast. The “Flourish At Home” show is an important commitment for me because you, my listeners, have told me that it’s helpful to you. I intentionally keep each episode short (usually 15–30 minutes) by eliminating verbal clutter (chit-chat) and making all the content as relevant and useful as I can. But even a 15-minute podcast takes me about 4-5 hours to create, including time to plan, jot down some notes, record, tag, upload, write a blog post, create graphics, share on social media, and so on. As I reflected on all my current commitments, it was clear that this was the most appropriate thing to eliminate this week.
I originally planned to post just a couple of sentences about no new show this week, but then it occurred to me that this is a good example of how to implement the very time management principles that I’ve been teaching, so I thought it would be helpful to share how I reached that decision.
I’ll be back on Tuesday, May 19, to continue our FREEDOM series with a look at how to organize, and then on June 2 we’ll finish the series with a discussion of multitasking. See then!
Remember, you’ll find helpful strategies, along with encouragement and inspiration, in my book, Flourish: Balance for Homeschool Moms. It’s available on my blog at www.FlourishAtHome.com.
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