Life is too unpredictable to live by a schedule...or is it?

When I was an attorney (hee hee hee…I love that I can say that in the past tense), I lived by my Outlook task manager. EVERYTHING went into it. Breakfast meetings, client meetings, networking meetings, trial preparations, trials, mediations, vacations, doctors appointments, birthdays…you name it, it was on my calendar. And, since I was either glued to my computer or glued to my phone…I was never more than a click away from knowing exactly what I should be doing at any given second.

I’m no longer glued to my computer, and I can rarely find my cell phone in the bottom of the diaper bag, and here is the big AND…I didn’t even know WHAT I was supposed to be doing with my time. It was freeing and terrifying. And the only person I have to report to drools a lot, and falls asleep in the middle of conversations (hmmm, that doesn’t sound too different from my former boss—just kidding, I worked for an amazing team, and none of them drooled).

In the 10 weeks that I went back to work after having Tati, our house really took a beating. We did a lot of running around from here to there, and making piles of this and that to be dealt with at some other time. I knew, within about 10 minutes of waking up on my first day as a SAHM, that I could not do my job the way I wanted, in a house that was as unorganized, and quite frankly, messy from neglect, as ours.

Enter the Motivated Moms Chore Planning System http://www.motivatedmoms.com. I got tipped off to this glorified chore chart from my mommy board friends. For the paltry sum of $8.00, I have a checklist for becoming June Cleaver. Each night before bed, I look at what I have to accomplish the next day, and each morning I get up and plan my day around my tasks. I get the same mini rush when I check off “cleaned top shelf of fridge” as I used to get when I crossed out “return call to opposing counsel”—only I don’t have any heartburn for the hour before I clean the shelf. Best of all, I don’t feel overwhelmed about all I need to do to get my house into shape. I have a plan, and I can already see the progress.

My favorite chore is, of course “pampering myself”. Hey, if the chore chart says I have to, I have to!!