Have you felt half-crazy? Like life is pulling you in this direction and then this one and then again to a hard left? I won’t lie, that’s been happening to me more than I’d like to admit to. It’s been a challenge to get anything done, whether that’s cleaning, cooking, or blogging. Then, of course, there are the mom things I need to do like “summer school” with my kids and snuggling.
Important stuff that keeps getting thrown out the window.
So, I’ve been working hard to regain control over my day and thus my life. And in case you’ve found yourself in a similar situation, I wanted to share with you what I’ve been doing.
1. Email
If you work whether outside the home or running your own business, chances are, email is time-consuming. I know that for me, checking email can seem like an all-day event! So here are some things that I’ve done to control my inbox:
- I took email notifications off my phone. Meaning, that I don’t even know when I get a new email and thus, I don’t ever even check my email on my phone anymore. So freeing!
- I no longer check my email throughout the day. This tip comes from the awesome book, The Charge by Brenden Burchard and it’s been life-changing good! Basically, I schedule to go into my inbox, AFTER I’ve completed the day’s tasks. Then, I go into my inbox and only check emails from those that I’m waiting for a response from. Then after that, I send any emails that I need to send. Then I close out of my inbox. Basically, as Brenden says, if you check your inbox all day long, you’re on someone else’s agenda. And I mean, that’s 100% true for me!
- I set up an automatic responder and passed the job of managing one of my inboxes (yes, I have more than one) to my assistant. It’s been super freeing and allows me to manage communication with my readers so much easier!
These tips have been so amazing at allowing me the freedom to work and get my tasks done! Now, maybe email isn’t a problem for you, I only started with email because it does tend to consume a lot of us during the day and distracts us from more important things.
2. Schedule
I’m no stranger to this thought-process and I promise you, if you have kids, you need a schedule. Kids do so much better when they know what to expect! Just like you set up a work or school schedule, you should set one up for your home as well. I highly recommend, Crystal Paine’s FREE webinar on saying goodbye to survival mode – super, super helpful!
Just the basics of getting started are simple – start with waking up/going to bedtimes and eating times. Since those are things that all of us have to do every day, it’s easier to start with those. Then once you have those times figured out, fill in the rest of your “hour” blocks with the other tasks that need to be done – cleaning, schoolwork, work-from-home stuff, reading, quality time together, etc.
It’ll probably take a few tries before you figure out a system that works really well for your family, but once you get it figured out you’ll feel so much more at peace!
3. Meal Planning
Yep, meal planning if you don’t already do it, will save your sanity! I swear by it! But here’s the thing, you don’t need a complicated system! If you haven’t started a “family favorites” binder, head to this post here to read how I set up ours (super easy and simple!).
But, if you haven’t tried freezer cooking yet, I highly encourage you to give it a go! Don’t worry, if you’ve never done it before, sign up for this free workshop. Erin’s the one that helped me understand how to actually do freezer cooking (because for real I had no idea where to start).
If you need something that just simply does all the meal planning for you, I recommend eMeals. We used eMeals for over 2 years and LOVED them! In fact, many of the recipes from our Family Favorites Binder are from meal eMeals planned for us. They have several different plans to chose from, so you can pick whatever fits your diet! We had the clean eating one and it’s was amazing! Oh and they currently have a free trial going on, you can get two weeks of meal planning for free – click here to sign up.
4. Simplify Your Finances
I don’t know about you, but the moment life gets crazy, it always seems to affect our finances. Like, I go from having this amazing budget and everything is following so well, and then BAM! Things happen and then I totally forget about adjusting the budget, and fixing any errors and making sure things are moving right.
Maybe this is just me, but in case you find yourself in this situation, here’s what I do. Keep it simple. I do my best to keep our finances as simple to manage as possible because life does happen and things get crazy. I love using my budget binder because it keeps all of our bills and everything right there. I can put the certified mail stubs for our estimated tax payments there and basically just keep everything organized.
But my husband and I also like keeping track of our network via Personal Capital because it shows us everything – our savings accounts, mortgage, investment accounts, etc. So we get to see what our net worth looks like and track how it moves up. It’s a great motivator during tough times.
I also, keep Sundays as my day to go over the budget. I make sure I record any transactions from the week and if we’ve gone over budget, I adjust the budget to keep everything running smoothly. Basically, if I didn’t do this every Sunday, our budget would be all over the place and we’d be broke. And truth is, when I fail to keep up with this habit, we do end up WAY over budget and stressing.
Related Post: How to Keep From Going Over Budget
5. Have Fun
Okay, so this one probably sounds silly, but it is true if you have fun you have more life in your veins. I don’t necessarily mean that you have to plan a trip to Greece or spend an insane amount of money to have fun. I simply mean, we need to enjoy the every day.
Most of us get so bogged down by the day-to-day that we forget to just break free and have fun. I want to encourage you that if it has been a moment since you had fun, that you schedule it today! That may mean, deciding that instead of spending all weekend running around from here to there that you instead, stay home and watch a movie with the family while sharing a giant bowl of popcorn.
Or maybe you need a date night with your spouse or you just need some time to yourself. Whatever your version of fun looks like, do it and do it soon. I’ll keep the crazy from feeling so crazy I promise.
Okay, so you tell me, what do you do in order to keep the crazy at bay?
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Hi Jessi. Could you please explain how you work with an assistant on emails and such. If you could also give some kind of reference to the costs associated with this I would really appreciate it.
Basically, I set up a list of typical email responses to the common emails that come through – so like, someone wanting to write a guest post for my blog, my assistant just inserts the correct canned response and the Guest Post Guidelines and emails the person back. If it’s a question from a reader that we commonly get, she has a list of my blog posts that are related to those topics to help point the reader to the answer. If she can’t answer it, then it gets forwarded to me. I hope this helps!
Thanks for sharing this great post. It was very useful.