I am a creature of habit. No, seriously…I love routines. I love organization. People have often accused me of being pragmatic, inflexible, and anal-retentive. I’m a planner. I like things to be a certain way, and I get really frustrated when things don’t work smoothly or the way I expect them to proceed. When I find a routine that works for me, I find it hard to change, and once that pattern gets disrupted long enough, I find it hard to get back into the routine that I miss.
I’ve been trying to get my routine ironed out for a while now. As a stay-at-home mom for almost 20 years, my routines were dictated by the needs of my family: up at the crack of dawn, feed the kids, get them off to school, come home, clean house, pick the kids up in the afternoon, get them through their homework, make dinner, wash dishes, put the kids to bed, and then, finally, I could put my feet up and enjoy some TV while I crocheted or did some other handy craft. I was busy. I was exhausted. But I miss those days. The routine was so simple, it was hard to mess up.
I’ve been struggling with my routine for several years now. It seems like everything has become so complicated, and even when I do settle into some kind of routine, it doesn’t stick for long…something always comes along to mess it up, and then I can never get it back on track again. Take my sleep routine, for instance. It doesn’t matter what I do, or how hard I try, I can never get my body to settle into a decent sleep pattern.
When I was younger, and I had a job outside the home, I was usually in bed by 10:00 PM. I had to be up by 6:00 AM in order to be showered, dressed, and get to work by 8:00. During that time, I also had to feed the kids and drop them off at school and/or daycare. My husband, Mark, who is an audio engineer, often bemoaned the fact that I was already in bed and asleep by the time he got home. He often worked late. When he wasn’t recording bands in the studio, he was often teaching night classes to future engineers at the local community college. We were like two ships that passed in the night.
Eventually, everything changed for both of us. Mark took a job that put him in the studio during normal business hours, and with the kids grown and out of the house, I started working as a travel agent, working from home, making my own hours, which were usually late, since most of my clients contact me in the afternoon or evening. I suddenly had the leisure of being able to sleep in once in a while, and that eventually became all the time. Without the necessity of an early wake-up, my sleep pattern slowly drifted to a later and later bedtime, until [gasp!] I found myself unable to fall asleep before 4:00 AM! Now I am the one up all night, and Mark is the one in bed and fast asleep as soon as the sun goes down.
Let me tell you, it’s not good. While it feels good to stay up and have this lovely quiet time to myself to get lots of things done, it is not very healthy. Do the math. If you stay up until 4:00 AM, the only way you are going to get a healthy eight hours of sleep is if you stay in bed until noon. And even if that were possible all of the time (which it most certainly is not), you miss half of the workday! It can be a real challenge to get all your work done if you only have 4 or 5 hours in which to get it done. And what tends to happen is that family and other commitments start to encroach on that time so I wind up working later and later just to get everything done. It’s a never-ending, vicious cycle, and I feel like I can’t win.
For the last several years, I’ve struggled to get my biological clock back on track. I dream about being in bed by 10:00, 11:00, or even midnight, but nothing I’ve tried has worked. It was even one of my 8 goals in Cultivate What Matters. I thought I had it conquered after our Christmas cruise. While we were vacationing, we got up relatively early every morning to have breakfast together as a family and to get off the ship for excursions and such. And we were tired every night, exhausted from the day’s activities, ready for bed, out like a light. When we came home, we were still tired, so I got to bed early, and it felt so good. But then, I had some work pop up that had a deadline, and I had no choice but to stay up late and get it done. And that was all it took to ruin my early-to-bed sleep pattern.
This year, even though I am not using the Power Sheets system any more, I am still doing some serious goal-setting, but I decided to shift my focus away from getting 8 hours of sleep, and instead am looking at it more as a “big picture” kind of issue. It doesn’t do any good to fix the sleep pattern if I don’t fix all the things that disrupt my sleep pattern. And that involves setting up some pretty serious rituals and routines. My first step was to think really hard about what I wanted my day to look like, and to script it all out, planning it in great detail. My therapist, who has been trying to help me with this, looked at my daily agenda and said, “You can’t do all that in one day!” She’s probably right. She suggested that I take that plan and actually lay it out on a schedule…this is when I will do this, this is when I will do that, etc. So that is the next step in my goal-setting process for this year…to get real about what I can and can’t do by actually scheduling it, with a properly allotted time for completion.
I’m really looking forward to giving this system a try. I think by creating a careful and thorough plan for how I will spend my day, allowing time for interruptions and emergent issues, I can manage my work schedule, home life, down time, and sleep in a more productive and healthy manner. I’m anxious to give it a try, and I think that adding in the #mmcmakeyourbedchallenge to the mix is a great way to kick it off. I hope you’ll join us in it! I’m anxious to hear from everyone whether it actually made a difference or not!
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