Finding time to write/Writing to find time

Once she grows up and goes to school, I will get back to…

Most mothers would have their own choice of words to complete the sentence. What of the mothers whose kids have ‘gone to school’? They probably mean that once they are done with ensuring homework is done, and the uniforms are ready, and the lunch is packed and the kid is back from the three other classes, and the birthday party, they will complete their sentence.

My kid has gone to college and I still hadn’t started acting on my ‘dream list’. Just attempting to write a short post every day started leading to continuous headaches from lack of sleep. And the frustration of not being able to anything well enough. So, I got into soul searching/serious project planning mode.

Step 1: Excel sheet of all the tasks I ‘need to do’ and ‘want to do’ in a day.

Step 2: Assign estimated time for each task except sleep (added numbers for the worst-case scenario too-so driving time varied from 40 mins to 2 hours)

Step 3: Subtract Sum of all task timings from 24:00:00

Sleep time came to 3.5 hours

Step 4: Freeze timings for all non-negotiable tasks and steal minutes from everything else. Sleep 5.5 hours.

Step 5: Shift some tasks for weekend only (can’t afford to read every day), knock-out some tasks, try multi-tasking (driving and eating breakfast) and hope and pray but the Excel sheet still shows 6.5 hours of sleep.

As all good project managers do, I didn’t even factor in things beyond my control (illness, maid’s illness, unforeseen tasks, etc).

And finally, as all good project managers also do, I decided to ignore the Math and believe that something will work out. I will exercise and read and write and still do justice to the office and household, one day. 

For now, let me be glad that I managed to complete this post today.