Earlier, I promised to address the folks who don’t believe they have any extra time, because their days are already bursting at the seams with shit to do. I’m particularly sympathetic to this belief because I lived my life that way for thirty-plus years. “There aren’t enough hours in the day” (or week, or month) was a mantra of sorts, and it felt very true when I was saying it to explain why I was sleeping in instead of working out or ordering pizza instead of cooking dinner.
But it wasn’t totally true. What was true was that I prioritized sleeping over exercise, and convenience over some sort of Martha Stewart fantasy that I don’t actually care to attain. It’s not that I didn’t have the hours in the day; it’s that I didn’t want to use them for calisthenics and cooking, and I’ve learned to recognize and admit that. #NotSorry
Unlike me, however, you may be chipmunk with kids who require “vitamins” in their dinner. You may also be getting home too late at night to start any kind of meal (Martha-level or not) and have it on the table before those kids need to be off to bed. I’m not saying you’re not busy, and I’m not saying you necessarily have the freedom to dial up a large pepperoni every time you don’t feel like cooking.
What I am saying is that every single thing you have to do in any given day CAN be assigned a priority level, which will help you juggle it all. If you finally admit to yourself that you don’t give a fuck about some of it, even better. But the rest is “need to do” and “want to do,” which is what getting your shit together is all about.
Prioritizing takes you BEYOND the magic of not giving a fuck, into a land of ass-kicking and name-taking. Theodores will marvel at their newfound levels of productivity; Alvins will realize that life doesn’t have to be such a slog; Simons will hone their natural capacity for efficiency and feel even more superior to their brothers than they already did.
Hypothetically, let’s say you are a nine-to-fiver with two kids and a “not enough hours in the day” problem. Dinner is a big part of that, so maybe the solution is to have meals on hand that either don’t take much time to prepare, or are already prepared (by you, not Papa John). A few batches of freezable repasts concocted over the course of a weekend can be parceled out on a nightly basis. Chili. Burger patties. Lasagna. That kind of thing. A nice casserole never hurt anybody.
But let’s also say that your weekends are stuffed to the brim. The kids are home from school so they need tending, or ferrying back and forth from whatever kids do these days. Tee-ball? I don’t know; I spent my childhood reading in my bedroom, but that’s neither here nor there. Perhaps yardwork beckons. Then laundry. Then errands. You’re starting to feel like standing over a hot oven for six hours is not conducive to all the other shit you have to do in your forty-eight-hour reprieve from the workweek.
You know what that feeling is? Fuck Overload™. You. Need. To. Prioritize.
Pick a time frame—e.g., today, this week, or this weekend. What’s on your to-do list for that time frame? What things are the most urgent? And what absolutely has to happen today (or this week, or this weekend)?
Then, make your own version of the to-do and must-do lists from here–here, pertaining solely to your household tasks (not your job; that’s a different part of the book, different set of lists). If you can’t do it right now, take out that real or metaphorical phone, find yourself an hour to focus, and pencil it in. Otherwise you might never get to it and I will have written this entire book in vain, which is an extremely depressing thought.*
And don’t try to be sneaky, Alvin. You can’t double shit up together on one line (like “shop and cook”); you really have to assign each task its own entry in the must-do hierarchy. (“Grocery shopping” comes before “make lasagna” which comes before “do the dishes.”)
Making these lists is prioritizing in action.
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If feeding your family takes top priority, what’s next on your list? Grocery shopping, which you might be able to fit in while the kiddos are out swinging those plastic bats. Then carving out time to cook, which could be nightly (easy meals) or in batches (frozen delights). A slow cooker is your friend, friends. And let’s see… the young’uns have to sort their own clothes before they’re allowed to go out, laundry can be done while your lasagna’s in the oven, and you know what? The grass can probably wait another week to get cut. Next weekend, it goes higher on the priority list and you spring for a pizza.
And if you’re a new parent with a baby, there may be no tee-ball practice, but there’s a lot of other shit to deal with.* If you have a partner, you each get a list! If you don’t, you may be prioritizing “find a babysitter” or “see what Grandma’s up to this weekend.”
(If you’ll kindly put down your slappin’ hand and just give it a try, you really might find it helpful.)
I can’t account for every permutation of lifestyle and parenthood, but no matter what your situation is; how much help you do or don’t have; and whether your kids play sports or sit quietly in their rooms rapping with Laura Ingalls Wilder, my point is: Once you have a handle on your priorities, you can schedule them in.
And, guys? The more shit you have to do and the less time you think you have to do it, the more you NEED the must-do list in your life. It is in fact true that “there aren’t enough hours in the day” to do everything. But you don’t have to do everything.
You only have to do the things that you prioritized.