Check out the other installments in this series: the intro, how we planned for it, prayer, health, and family life.
Dave and I were both raised to be hard workers. That man is a work horse both inside and outside the home, and I’m the product of two people who achieved success when all the odds were majorly against them. We don’t mind getting our hands dirty and getting the job done. Our major downfall in this area, however, is the lack of leisure we tend to allow ourselves to enjoy, especially during this season of life.
We constantly remind ourselves of something the professor of our Philosophy of the Human Person class stressed frequently: that a society without leisure is doomed. Our culture today leans toward the non-stop speed and it is so so so easy to get caught up in it. I am guilty of the over-busy-ness syndrome every single day of my existence. It is easy for me to buy into the line that productivity and efficiency are everything.
Thus, when we started our total life overhaul, Dave and I knew we wanted to establish a permanent spot for leisure in our lives, which necessarily meant streamlining the way we work in order to afford time for rest.
We are still in the midst of many of these changes/improvements. But from what we have accomplished so far, I have found that we are much more focused and productive during our work times, which gives us wiggle room for leisure every night. I wish I would have known what we were missing out on so we could have made these changes sooner. Taking time for rest makes us better workers – it’s a great paradox.
We are so very far from perfect and have a long way to go, but here are some little ways we mixed things up that have made a pretty big impact …
Work
Work-Life Balance
I’m pretty sure the perfect work-life balance is impossible to achieve. We will always be shifting priorities and expectations as the differing seasons of life pass and we will always be adjusting our schedules to ensure that neither our work nor our “real life” is neglected to a dangerous point. I touched on this in my post on family life, but I thought it was worth mentioning here again. We are really making efforts to safeguard our time as family, to focus solely on being a family during those times, and to make those times more prevalent.
Setting Work/Study Hours
One of the biggest ways we’ve done this is by setting work and study hours. During my day at home with George, I have very specific hours that I work, broken down into 15 to 30-minute tasks. Of course, these have to be super flexible because George is a wild man who has not inherited his mother’s reliance upon structure. But I do find that when I have a set work schedule, I am able to weather the unexpected interruptions from George (like a too short nap or a cranky day when he’s not crazy about playing by himself for a few minutes) and get back on track faster once I am able to work again. The same goes with Dave’s studying in the evening. We have specific times for family time, leisure (more below!), bedtime for George, and late night work and study. By setting aside these specific times for such tasks, we are able to be laser-focused and crank out more and better work in less time than before (another lesson I’m really learning from this book).
In the next post in this series on scheduling, we’ll chat more about how we determined our best work/study hours 😉
Eliminating Distractions
Ahhhh, distractions. They’re prevalent, right? …
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Sorry, just got back from checking Facebook real quick. 😉
Distractions are time and creativity suckers and when I’m heavily distracted, it takes me three times along to complete a task. It drives me bonkers, and yet I have to remind myself to reign it in all the time.
I knew that by funneling my focus during my work hours, I would be able to get more done, which would allow for more leisure and family time. This meant getting rid of distractions.
If you have an abundance of self-control, then you can just not open email or social media or blogs or Buzzfeed during the times you are meant to be working. But if you’re like me and can’t not check your email when you see a little notification, you may need some extra help. Here’s what’s working for me:
- Do not check email or social media first thing in the morning. I wish I could chuck my phone into the bushes in the morning. When I start my day with email or social media, I immediately start off sluggish and scattered. When I start my day with prayer, snuggle time with George, and planning the rest of the day, I am so much more at peace and better able to dive into the work ahead.
- Eat the frog. This book is on my birthday list; but one of the author’s suggestions is to make the first task of your day the most difficult one or the one you dread the most. That way, it’s out of the way and you can mark it off the list, making the rest of your smaller tasks appear less overwhelming.
- When working, close out email. Because it’s a rabbit hole.
- Use social media blocking apps. There are many apps and other websites that allow you to set certain times when you will be “blocked” from your social media outlets. The most popular seem to be Cold Turkey (for Windows), SelfControll, StayFocusD, and LeechBlock. You could also set timers or alarms on your phone with messages like, “Focus, silly goose!”. But that may just be me.
Dreaming
One of the most influential things Dave and I have done is create our dream board. Essentially, a dream board is what it sounds like. You determine your goals and dreams, write them down, and hang them up so you see them every day and are reminded of your mission. I’ll be writing more on this in an upcoming project that will be (hopefully!) coming to you before the end of the year!
Leisure
Joint Hobbies
The nice thing about being married to your best friend is that you like to spend time doing fun things with them. Dave and I have a lot of hobbies we share, but many of them involve extended time and being outside the house like hiking, taking long drives, and going to the theater. In this season of survival, however, those activities are few and far between. So we’ve had to find other ways to relax and enjoy one another without lots of time or energy. One simple thing we love to do together is watch a show once George goes to bed. And pillow talk never gets old.
Family Fun Night
Going along with the previous point, I’ve been trying to implement a “family fun time” (how corny am I?) once every week. This may be something as basic as an evening walk downtown, a visit to our favorite shop, or a game night. Again, this is my simple attempt to promote leisure as a whole family.
Time for Reading
Dave and I both love to read, and we haven’t been able to read as much as we would like in recent months. So we decided to schedule in reading time at the end of the day before bed. This has to be insanely flexible and it doesn’t happen as much as we would like, but it’s something we are aiming for. You can see the books on my Christmas list here. One of my goals for next year is to read more fiction, so I’m open to suggestions for that 😉
Time for Relationships
Finally, I wanted to spend more time fostering relationships with those who are important in my life. For me, part of this meant purging my social world of unnecessary drama. I needed to leave certain Facebook groups that were toxic and negative because I would spend my time getting sucked into the silly drama. It wasn’t doing me any good. Now, I’m aiming to have at least one good phone chat a week with a friend. This is so difficult with le bebe, but it’s important, so I’m striving. I’m also trying to spend more time with my grandparents. Have you seen these books? I’d really like to use them to record my grandparents’ memories and to pass down to future generations.
Ok, enough from me for now! Only one more post to go before the finale!
How do you balance work and leisure? Do you naturally lean toward one or the other? Let me know below!
A) Fiction: I’ve been feeling a pull this Christmas Break towards some young adult fiction that I read from my library when I was a young adult. They were half historical and half romance and always involved two love interests, whose plot-sequence was typically determined by a wartime disaster. Naturally, my library pulled them because they were paper-back and written in the 80s … so I just ordered them off Amazon … these particular ones were from series called Sunfire, but … there are a lot of (G-rated) jewels like that in places.
B) Leisure: Several years ago I decided that it was super important to me to have the kind of, at least mental leisure, leisure that teens in my area had when I was the same age as ‘Part A,’ the kind of leisure to pick the pills from a sweater and get mending done, which, also delves into the more simple wardrobe, since, to quote Mark Twain, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” The less one has, the more one can identify with it.
C) Scheduled Leisure: It can take a while to feel like leisure … which can be frustrating … but it’s all about progress, like everything, and I love finding out how much of myself is from God (all, but in this case specifically) as the process goes.
~ Clara
We’ve usually had a good balance of family/work life…but I think I want to change up our leisure time. For one, I’d really like a screen-free night so we can play games, read books, chat, whatever. Just no screens. They are so distracting!