How To Reduce Your To Do’s: Dump, Delegate, Do, Delay

There are thousands of time management courses I bet.  Probably a few hundred written for Mums.

This is as simple as it gets for you, with a couple of extra twists I’ve added in to spice it up and make it more effective.

It can be so difficult to work out what needs doing when there are potentially months worth of things that you ‘could’ be doing.  Just making the time to sit down and work out what the To Do list is takes time ironically!

You Don’t Have To Do Everything

and

Five Minutes Is Important

Just remember it’s not a race, you don’t ‘HAVE’ to do everything and 5 minutes can be a valuable slot of time.  So it is perfectly polite to say to someone that you can’t do something or that you don’t have ‘five minutes’ (which means at least 15mins) to help them out.

If you want to be sure that you finish the week without panic about what still needs doing and at least enough things for you to feel some satisfaction and contentment with how the week went, then you will need to make a list.  I doubt that there are more than a couple of tired Mums out there with the ability to hold it all in their heads.  The rest of us will otherwise fiddle around, fire fight, suddenly realise we did things in the wrong order and have last minute panics to get things done, which inevitably means shouting at the kids.

In my book I go into this in much more detail.  It’s the step that makes one of the biggest differences in my life, but also seems to be the one that I have to continue to keep my eye on and adjust as the kids grow and life changes.  So I thought I’d do a quick summary for you:

1) First you need to work out your 3 Life Priorities.

2) From here you can work out your Top To Do’s that are non-negotiable

3) The stuff that is lowest down the priority pile gets dumped

4) Then work out what can be delegated

5) Then work out what else you are going to attempt to do

6) And what you are going to delay

My Top 3 To Do’s are pretty simple and apart from (2) don’t take any time, but I remind myself each morning.  Sometimes I still forget, as I did when I wrote this post and realised that I hadn’t adjusted to the changes in my family’s life caused by the big hairy ones redundancy:

1) Cuddle the kids, do the evening book read every other night, make something creative each week (then I’m a happy mummy)

2) Write, write, write, but write in a way that will help my books become the must have ‘pick me up’ books for mums and that I enjoy

3) Drink water, eat healthily, walk the dog, play with the kids, watch my thoughts, count my blessings each night

The best bit is you can treat yourself to a cup of tea and at least one biscuit while you are doing it!

If you would like some help with working out your Life Priorities and your top priority to do’s then either pop over to my Facebook page and ask a question, or come and join in the fun on Pinterest in my board all about Life Priorities.

Feel free to commit to your top 3 to do’s and pop them in a comment below; I’d love to know, I’m sure everyone is very different.