The 25-Hour Day

Spring is busy, isn’t it?

Busy for nature, busy in our careers, busy if you have children… Trees and flowers aren’t the only things sprouting new growth this time of year, and it can be a wonderful and taxing time to be alive.

For us, the months of March and April kicked life into overdrive. We have so much going on–tee-ball season for our four year old with the added bonus of Gage and I both coaching, increasingly frequent appointments for the third trimester of pregnancy for me, field trips and big decisions for school for both boys, some minor but impactful job changes for Gage, adding four new baby chicks to our menagerie, and about a thousand home improvement projects going at once–I feel like I should be approaching a burnout at any minute! But, thankfully, I’ve got a new antidote to the stress that I honestly cannot believe is working.

Several weeks ago, I was complaining (as I do) to Gage about drowning in responsibilities. Mainly, my complaints centered on having no time to myself and really no idea what even sounds like “fun” anymore, because I spend every waking hour busy with some task or another and never seem to get done. He is quick to express thanks for the work I do in our home and with our children, and to say that I complete ten tasks on my way to do the one I started with, but I could feel a little frustration creeping into the conversation each time I brought it up. He was irritated that I so often felt irritated, with a job that I enthusiastically chose for myself.

Let me pause here for a second to say that I am VERY proud of my work ethic. My neighbor came over to return our trash can from the road last week, and complimented the pressure-washing I was doing. He said, “I saw you dragging off that tree that came down a couple of weeks ago, plus splitting firewood all winter, plus working here and working there outside, and now running a pressure washer… girl, that baby is going to come out looking for work!” I can’t imagine a finer compliment than that, although he was both right and wrong. I do hope all my children develop a love for working fast and hard, but the truth of it is, I want this baby to come out into a world where she and I can absolutely relax, BECAUSE I got all this stuff done before she came. I take a perhaps unhealthy amount of pride in getting things done, and it’s always with the attitude that I will have time to relax and enjoy the fruits of labor later.

The problem was, in the talk with Gage, that I never had time left after the work was done. I felt like I was going and going all day long with hardly a break to sit down for lunch, and still falling behind on daily tasks. No way I had time to do anything extra or to put this wonderful nesting urge to good use with the list of projects I had in mind. Plus, I was tired and cranky without my feel-good fuel of task completion. I was griping a lot, and the man who makes possible this life about which I was so saltily whining was probably getting fed up. I could tell that the question no stay-at-home-mom wants to hear was close in coming–“What do you do all day?”–and I was trying to wheedle it away and draw out a little sympathy when…

He said it.

He said it in the nicest, most empathetic way he probably could’ve, but he asked The Dreaded Question all the same. Being the exceptional critical thinker that he is, the question was asked in the context of whether there was something I could do, some new pattern I could adopt, to get back my “me time” and still handle everything I needed to to keep the house running smoothly. In his defense, it was more, “What tasks do you do every day, and are they organized the best way possible to free up your time?” than it was, “What do you DO all day, you lazy bum??!”, but I was still pretty incensed. He went so far as to suggest that all the things I do in a day could be compressed into short bursts of work, that would ultimately result in my having WAY more time to do whatever I wanted instead of fretting about falling behind on chores. I (naturally) skipped the good intentions behind the suggestion and took it personally, like most homemakers would, jumping immediately to the defense of my work. I went so far as to make a list, starting the very next morning, of all the things I did each day. I stopped by 11 AM because I was already at a full page, but I shared a photo of the list on Facebook and asked other mom friends how they handled their workloads. I shared Gage’s suggestion about compressing the work time along with my list, and his idea was predictably ridiculed.

I was pretty happy to be vindicated in my exhaustion, but not happy enough to dismiss his idea altogether.

The next week, I implemented a version of his plan, which was to set a timer immediately after finishing breakfast, for one hour. In that hour, I worked as hard and fast as I possibly could, stopping for nothing short of potty emergencies or child injury. I turn on a TV show for the kids (No, we don’t love TV as a babysitter. But, they watch quality programming and the trade-off is well worth it to give me a focused hour in which I am not constantly disturbed.), and I know that since they are freshly breakfasted, they won’t need anything from me while I go to town on my to-do list. The morning hour consists of ONLY the basic jobs that must be done in order to keep the house running along without anything piling up, and in our home, it looks like this:

• Clean up kitchen from breakfast (put away food, rinse dishes, wipe counters/table)
• Empty dishwasher and reload/start if ready
• Combine/empty trash cans as needed and take out compostables to bin
• Tidy living areas (boys help)
• Feed/let out dogs, give Zig medicine
• Feed chickens, clean out brooder, wash and refill water jugs (boys help)
• Move clothes washer–>dryer, start new load washing
• Make beds
• Wipe down bathroom sinks/toilets/counters
• Sweep kitchen
• Start diffusers running
• Put away anything out of place–shoes, clothes to laundry, etc.

I like this list because if we have to leave to run errands, or I hit a wall and have no energy left in the afternoon, or something comes up that prevents me from doing a single other thing all day, the house doesn’t look bad and there are no piles of dirty dishes or laundry to catch up later. This is the bare minimum, and keeps things ticking. I repeat parts of this list after lunch, like restarting laundry as needed, doing more dishes, moving chickens around, sweeping, and generally keeping the house tidy, but this is it for the morning.

I was first pleased to see that my entire list of basic chores COULD, in fact, be completed in just one hour after breakfast. That felt good, and sets a tone for the rest of the day.

Very quickly, within that first week, I found that the morning work hour did not grant me more time in the day. I didn’t suddenly have 25 hours to play with. But, it did something magical in that it framed my thoughts about chores in a new way, and opened up time in the day that I just wasn’t using before. The morning hour was a buoy that kept me from feeling like I was drowning in unfinished chores. I had a list in mind of things I wanted to get done before this baby comes in June, but they seemed so impossibly far away in the sea of regular daily tasks going undone. Reframing the day’s structure around one or two periods of focused, not-messing-around, uninterrupted effort on those monotonous daily jobs freed up a couple of open windows of time, in which I could choose an out-of-the-ordinary project to work on.

To refine my longer-term to do list, I used a system perfected by US Army SF in Vietnam: the CARVER Matrix. CARVER is an acronym that stands for Criticality, Accessibility, Recuperability, Vulnerability, Effect, and Recognizability. Essentially, you make a large list of goals (let’s say you have ten), and plug them into a matrix in which you rank each goal from 1-10 against the others in the acronym categories. The questions to ask in helping assign each goal its rank are things like, how long will it take? do I have a clear plan for how to attack this goal? how expensive will it be? how hard will the work be to finish it? do I have all I need to start it right now? how much impact is completing this task going to make on my overall happiness? In the end, you have a nice, neat list that shows which goals are so easy you should start today, and which ones might need to be modified or scrapped altogether because they’re harder than you imagined.

I further split the list into two categories: Short (can be completed in about thirty minutes or less) and Long (takes longer than 1 hour to complete).

The longer I stayed consistent with the morning hour, the more I found I didn’t need an hour to get it done. I could handle the morning chores, and then choose something off my Short list to do with the rest of the hour. Then, I could tackle or at least start a project from the Long list in the afternoon. I’ve been able to keep the house very clean all week without stress (enough so that Gage even noticed there were no more evening crash-course tidying sessions or panicked cleaning when guests threatened to come over, and that everything stayed smelling good, lol), AND have the pleasure of doing things that seemed impossible a few weeks before.

So, while I’m not so free as to lie in the hammock with a stack of magazines for three hours each afternoon, I am able to enjoy myself more because I’m not worn out from getting just a few things done. The boys are more interested than ever in having special “big boy jobs” like feeding animals and helping with dishes and laundry, and they seem to like the challenge of competing against the timer. The momentum even seemed to rub off onto Gage–I asked for some new shutters on our house, and he not only got those done in record time, but expanded the project to include new wooden columns on our front porch, flower planters, and a porch railing to match. The system works so well, I’ve had a new peace about having our third baby as a mom who parents and manages the household mostly alone… With Gage gone for work many nights and all day for at least five days a week, it seemed daunting to do what I already do AND care for a newborn plus two more under five. Knowing what I know about a breastfed newborn’s schedule (a.k.a., Mom has less than two hours between each feeding to shower, eat, tend to the other kids, and do whatever needs to be done besides), this plan is great! I know that I can keep a lid on things here at home in an hour a day, which I can carve out after a morning feeding even on the worst, clingiest, busiest days.

It’s not a 25-hour day, miracle cure. I’m still tired, and I won’t be picking up any new hobbies to fill all my free time (except hopefully blogging a little more frequently), but it’s SO much better. Taking on this challenge showed me a lot, and helped me toss out the stale attitude of overwhelmed mom. I feel more rested, more at peace in my home, and like I have more time to focus attention on my family.

This post is dedicated to you, Gage–I’m sorry I doubted your best intentions, and I’m so glad I tried what you suggested. Keep on helping me be better, and I’ll keep on making you proud. ❤