I created a tentative schedule in July.  School has been in since mid-August, and as I discussed in Best Laid Plans, the first month did not go as I planned.  Scott has been in his new school now for three weeks and I’ve had a couple of weeks to see how writing full time three days a week is going to go for me.  I finally feel like the family is in a rhythm.

I adjusted my weekly chore and laundry schedule, and just shifted chores around to make the days I write (M-W-F) do-able in a 45-minute time frame.

Here is my new daily schedule:

I have tweeked and adjusted this thing until it’s as tight as I can get it.

Every morning, I do a 4-mile walk.  It takes one hour.  I’ve tried to incorporate it during the day and it just doesn’t work out for me, so I’ve started getting up at 5AM so that I can do it.  The only day I don’t walk is Sunday.  By the time I get up and get dressed and ready to go, it’s 5:15.  At 6:15, I get home and start on making breakfast and packing lunches.  Kaylee is usually up by then.  At 6:30, I wake Scott and Jeb, get them dressed and downstairs, and have breakfast served by 6:45.  We have to leave the house at 7:15, and, three days a week, I drive all three of the kids to school.

It’s usually 8:00 by the time I get home.  I do chores for 45 minutes.  At 8:45, I check email, do some quick updates on social media, and at 9:00 I start writing.  I will stop for lunch, to give my hands and mind a break.  But, I’ll get right back at it until I have to leave to begin the round of picking kids up at 2:15.

Tuesdays and Thursdays, Jeb is home with me, so it’s a little less absolute.  I will ideally work on blog posts for three hours (but I seem to be behind in the rest of my life and have just let the blog slide for the last several weeks), then do chores for the rest of the time until I have to get Scott.  If I get ahead of chores during that time, I’ll go ahead and do the next day’s — which will afford me some more writing/social media time.

The blank spaces you see in the schedule is my down time.  I play with kids, hang out with Kaylee, run to the store – whatever I need/want to do.

I turn my computer off when I leave to pick children up.  I do not want to spend any time after school working since I have so much “no kids” time to do that during the school day.  I do, however, during the course of my writing day, schedule several Facebook and Twitter posts using Hootsuite, so that I can maintain a presence even when I’m not online.

Now that I have a good rhythm going, I foresee sticking to the blog post schedule I established and just never really stuck to.  I thought I’d start October 1st, but it’s the 8th, so I’m continuing to give myself a break and understand that this is all new to me, this writing full time, and there are growing pains in anything new.

Hallee

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