Too often, we don’t write down the basics of our schedule on a sheet of paper for the week.
We forget what the face of busy is because we don’t look at it on paper.
This is one of those weeks, the last in the series of eight, where I’m having to really look at what the week, seven simple days, look like.
Here is how my week is unfolding – what about yours?
May 3rd – a gift of a Sunday at the farm; it did mean that we got in at 10 pm and hadn’t shopped for food the week ahead;
May 4th – leave home by 6:15 am to make a breakfast at a WEN partnership event for the Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) kick off; drive from south Houston to north Houston at nine for work; meetings all day; leave early for the first day of swim team at 4 pm where kids melt down and two threaten to quit; kids taken home and I run to get teacher gifts for appreciation week and basic groceries; home by 6 pm to cook dinner; kids in bed at 8:30 so I can bake a blackberry cobbler and blog;
May 5th – meetings start at 8 am; one more early day this week to pick up little man at engineering while the other two go to swim team practice; make dinner and assemble teacher gifts; pack for weekend away since leaving town Thursday;
May 6th – ninth wedding anniversary – hoorah; meetings downtown, including project for work and board meeting; boys go to swim team and I pick up little bit at ballet; mom comes to babysit so Bray and I can go out to dinner to celebrate; finish packing for my trip and for family weekend trip;
May 7th – wake before 5 am to catch 7 am flight to Minneapolis; arrive, delightedly, to see girlfriends living in Minnesota before giving keynote speech for Minnesota Women Lawyers annual conference; dinner with friends and then off to bed for early flight;
May 8th – vacation day – hoorah again, but yawn; wake before 4 am to catch 5:30 am flight out of Minneapolis so I can get back to Houston before 8:30 am, arrive home to load car and family and drive to Horseshoe Bay for wonderful state bar awards meeting and getaway for family;
May 9th – dare we sleep? Horseshoe Bay filled with jet skis and canoes and swim outings if the rain doesn’t drive us indoors;
May 10th – Mother’s Day – hoorah, still yawning though what with 48 hours of non-stop triplet energy on the water; brunch and then meet family in Austin for a boat outing; arrive in Houston in evening to see own mom and hopefully run to grocery…
Is that what you see ahead? Is that what you saw last week? How do we do it?
Well, we fit in breaks. We pray for supernatural energy. We carve downtime out wherever we can create the opportunity. For example, next week is all in town and bedtime will be much closer to 9 pm than 11 pm as it was the week preceding. You play catch up. You make sure that you have downtime interspersed with the crazy uptime periods.
After eight weeks of madness, I have two weeks with no travel and a mere four weeks from a full week-long family vacation in a national park with no connectivity to the outside world! That’s the solution. Building in breaks and delivering the best performance of your life during the big delivery season.
And in the meantime, try to go to bed!
Leave a Reply