Sunday, June 17, 2018

Finding Balance - a New Take


You would think with all my rhapsodizing about summer I would be contentedly swinging in my hammock with a cool drink in a mosquito free back yard. Wrong! Any mother can tell you that summers are even harder to stay on top of things. When the kids are toddlers and young elementary school aged, usually the before and after program morphed into summer camp. Yay! But then sleep away camps and summer sports teams and other things happen.

I was over at a dear friends Friday, celebrating the last day of school with other high school mommas, and taped to her kitchen cabinet were the next two weeks schedule covering summer baseball, summer jobs, and a couple other activities. "Summers are harder," she replied calmly (because she is fantastically well organized, and one child has his driver's license :-)).

How do you do it? How do you stay sane balancing it all while still taking care of your self? How do you find balance? Everyone has an idea. There is a new book (of course) out that I read about in a Wall Street Journal article, called Pick Three. The author, Randi Zuckerberg (yes, sister of Mark) says that we should strive to be "well lopsided" rather than "well balanced." "As she sees it. there are five major areas of life - family, friends, fitness, work and sleep - and each day she has to choose just three to focus on."

This is kind of in line with a concept I learned from Mel Robbins, when she was speaking at a conference (heard on a long ago pod cast I can't find the link for). She recommended keeping a notebook where at the beginning of the day you write down everything that you need to get done - a complete brain dump. Then go back with a highlighter and highlight the things that have to get done that day, and only focus on those things first.

Both concepts advocate for choosing some, rather than trying to do all. Like right now, I am choosing to write a blog post, and ignoring the mess on the rest of my desk. And then I choose sleep to focus on for the rest of today :-)

Have a great week everyone!

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