polka dot suitcase

Moms juggle a lot of things — that’s a given. Some moms handle it better than others. Me? I’m scatterbrained…always thinking about a hundred things at once, dreaming about things, plotting and planning future events, cloud gazing. So I need a little help keeping things organized and on schedule.

Back when the kids were little, I came up with my alliteration week. I divided the household chores up by day, and assigned each an easy-to-remember day. This not only got the kiddos involved (“It’s Muffin Monday!”) but helped me remember what the heck I was supposed to do each day. So, Tuesday was “Trash and Toilets” day, Friday was “Floors” day, and so on.

But it wasn’t until a couple weeks ago that I realized I could apply the same method to my writing work. There are different categories of work that freelance writers do — magazine articles, social media/networking, book proposals, marketing, and so on. What I’ve been doing for years is scheduling pretty much everything, every day. Which left me frantic and with an incomplete to-do list by the time all was said and to-done.

Then, as I was doing the laundry on Wash Wednesday, I thought, “Hey. This schedule stuck and it’s always worked for me.” Ta da. My work week was revolutionized. Now I’ve got Marketing Monday, Fiction Friday, Twitter Tuesday, and the like. (“Twitter” for my purposes will encompass all networking activities. There is no “N” day.) It’s only the second week, but I’m feeling optimistic.

But I didn’t stop there. I decided to bring revolution to our homeschool schedule, too. That was the same way — an ambitious daily “to accomplish” list that left us frenzied with little time to really dive into things that interested the kids. And that’s one of the bennies of homeschooling — letting the kids follow the rabbit trails of learning that pique their interests.

So, now we’ve got Math Monday, Word Wednesday…you get the picture. Sometimes you have to wiggle to get your weekday names to fit your needs (um…”Thankful It’s Science Thursday”), but it’s a start. Lest you education sticklers think I’m doing the kids a disservice by only doing “one” day of something like math, whoa. Fortunately, I’m a tricky thinker and I’ve found ways to integrate cross-curriculum into the “off” days. Shhh…kids haven’t caught on yet.

Anyhoo. In a rut? Got the schedule blues? Try an alliteration week…might mean magic!