Coping With The Busyness

It is the time of year where it can be difficult to find a spare slot in your calendar and your to do list is continually growing. I spoke recently at a MOPS group on this topic, you can see the presentation and links here – Time Management for Busy Families.

The presentation is comprehensive and starts very much with some bigger picture strategies. This type of planning has served me incredibly well, allowing me to work from home, be with the kids, my husband and have time for my activities even when times are busy.

But there are times when I tweak these strategies to help me through the extra busy periods. Here are some of the things that I do:

  • Recycle a monthly menu plan. When the next monthly menu plan is due, I know things will be busy, so I am going to just recycle a previous one and print out the shopping lists again.
  • Back up meals. Even though I will have a menu plan, I know that in reality, things will come up over the next month, which mean I may not get to cook all the meals. I need a plan for having something quick and easy to get the kids to eat for those nights. My kids love pasta and by steaming up some frozen veg to go along with it, I feel like we have done okay for that meal. I will make sure we have frozen peas and corn stashed in the freezer.
  • A movie afternoon. Mr I has taken back to playing cricket every second Sunday. Most Sunday afternoons I would write my posts for the week, this will be tricky without him being around. For the next couple of Sundays when he is out, after lunch I am going to let the kids have movie afternoon. They will be responsible for choosing movies and coming to agreement together and making their afternoon movie snack. And I will work with the movie as a timer, to get as many posts as I can written!
  • Renewed the library books. This week there is just no time to get the kids back to the library for new books, so with the click of a button online, they are renewed and we will refresh them next time around.
  • Stop. Stop and ask myself the question do I need to be doing this, going here, making that?

Coping with busyness
{Inspired by this fab post from Bernadette Jiwa of The Story of Telling.}

Now I would love your help! I am sure you have lots of tricks and tips that you use to get you through busy times, please share below, then next week, I will collate as many as I can and share them in a post on the blog.

Looking forward to reading your tips!