How to get your life and your house in order

I’m a kind of sort of SAHM. I work only on the weekends (Saturday and Sunday), so I am the one home with our toddler a majority of the time. Although it does sometime seem that our family time is limited with this arrangement I am truly lucky to have been able to keep keep our daughter home with one of her parents (or one of her grandparents when my husbands and I’s schedules overlap on the rare occasion). However being home with my toddler by myself for a majority of the week, I found myself overstimulated, irritable and drowning in house work. I got tired of feeling that way so I decided to something about it.

I set an alarm any on my non working days to get up before my daughter wakes up. I set the tone for my day and I get a little bit of me time. How I use this time differs from day to day. Some days I read a book, some times its looking at emails or writing a blog post, some days its checking over school work (I just started grad school because I’m insane and thrive in chaos I guess), and sometimes it’s scrolling through social media.

Speaking of social media/phone use… It’s no surprise that doom scrolling is the killer of productivity. I couldn’t figure out why I was sooo busy but still felt like nothing around the house was getting done, until I started to look at my screentime. It was a wake up call, I was wasting so much time scrolling. Time that was being taking away from being productive and more importantly time being taken away from my child. I decided to limit app usage to a couple hours a day things have changed for the better! Once I reach my max that’s it for the day, the apps are frozen until the next day. I feel better, I’m not as overwhelmed or anxious, my mind is clearer, and my kid gets to see me without my phone constantly in my hand.

Now that I actually had time to get things done I needed to formulate a plan of attack for household task and chores. I ultimately landed on this method I continued to see float around the internet. Each day you tackle a room or a task. You have a small list of things that should be done daily, but your main area of focus varies each day. I haven’t been doing this step very long but I love it already. I feel productive because I have a checklist I can complete each day and I am able to stay on top of chores. Below is what I made and use for my household, but you could obviously make one that better caters to the needs of you and your household.

I told my husband since making these changes I really do feel like a new person, like I have gone through some kind of metamorphosis and have unlocked some new version of myself. So, I figured I’d share these tips in hopes of helping someone feel like they have control over their life again. ⊹ ࣪ ˖