Latest / A Heart That Beats for Home / 9. Streamline Your Life Series / Week 1: Reclaim Your Calendar: Does Our Family Calendar Reflect Our Values?

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9. Streamline Your Life Series / Week 1: Reclaim Your Calendar: Does Our Family Calendar Reflect Our Values? · A Heart That Beats for Home

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: Hey friends, I'm Nikki Smith, your host here at A Heart that Beats For Home, the podcast where we're ditching filters and diving headfirst into the raw beauty of all things home.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Now, I am no expert when it comes to this whole parenting and marriage dance.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: I'm simply a gal who's been riding the mom roller coaster for 22 years and a wife still untangling the mystery of it all 25 years after saying I do.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: My goal is to bring you unapologetically messy and boldly genuine conversations about cultivating strong families.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: We're going to laugh, possibly cry, and straight talk about the joy and chaos that comes within the four walls that we call home.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: No judgment and certainly no perfection, just real talk from my heart, a heart that beats for home.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: Let's dive in.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Hello there, everyone, welcome to March.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: We are going to be starting a new series this month called Streamline your Life.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: Coming into March, it is spring.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: This is a time when everybody is excited to purge and organize and kind of simplify as we are coming into new birth and plants are starting to pop up out of the ground, flowers are coming, days are getting longer, the site of summer is on the horizon and it just kind of inspires in us a desire to kind of get organized and get things in order.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: We're going to take this month to talk about streamlining your life.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: I looked up the definition of streamline and it says to design or provide with a form that presents very little resistance to a flow.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: It increases speed and the ease of movement.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: I don't know about you, but that is what I want in my life.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: We're going to talk about it specifically in four different categories.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: This week we're going to jump into talking about how to streamline your calendar and your home operations.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: Then we'll be moving on to how to streamline your photos and memorabilia.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: Have a super fun guest on to talk about that, to share some of my own experience the last couple of years of really getting that under control and finding some resources that helped me completely master that.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: I'm so excited to share that with you guys next week.
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: Then we'll be talking about streamlining your home and then, lastly, streamlining your health and beauty.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: We have some fun things coming up this month in this series and I'm excited to be kicking it off today with streamlining your calendar First and foremost, one of the ways that I think that we streamline.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: When we look at that definition of what does streamline me, it's presenting very little resistance to a flow, increasing speed and ease of movement.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: I think one place that we have to look at is our calendar, because our calendar is often where we do get resistance and we don't have great flow and we don't increase speed and we have a lot of opposition with movement as opposed to ease of movement because we're juggling so many different things.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: Just taken some time to look at some practical parts about streamlining our calendar, but also just some good questions to ask ourselves some ways that we can just streamline our actual calendars, but then also some ways that we can take a little deeper dig down in to ask ourselves some questions about some of the things that we find on our calendar.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: Let's first and foremost talk about creating margin.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: When you think about the words on a paper, if you've ever been editing a paper and you go from maybe, single space to double space and all of a sudden, how much easier it is for your eyes to read everything.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: Or maybe you have everything down to half a space.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: The words are just jammed right up against each other.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: It's super hard to read.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: It causes you to have a headache.
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: The white part of the paper is as important as the words on the paper, because without the white, without the margin, without the space between words, we really can't make sense of any of the black ink that is there.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: We can't read the words, because margin is what actually allows us to be able to read and read.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Well, when we think about this in our lives, there's a lot of ways that we can apply creating margin in some of these areas that we're going to talk about over the next four weeks, and how that creates calm and peace and this really great ability to streamline so many of the things that we run into day to day.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: I love the quote by Zig Ziglar that says people complain about lack of time when lack of direction is the real problem.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: That's kind of a truth bomb right there.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: But again, people complain about lack of time when lack of direction is the real problem when we're looking at our calendars.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: These are some questions that I found online that I think are great to start to ask yourself, so that you can then start to create, maybe a checklist of things that we need to look at our actual schedule with our ideal schedule, and then start to see what do we need to do to streamline so that my goals in life match my calendar.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: So here's some questions for you.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: If you want to create margin and you say I want margin in my morning so that I can fill in the blank have a morning routine, enjoy my coffee, do my devotions, go to work on time, why would you want margin in the morning in your time?
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: The second one is I want margin in the evening so that I can fill in the blank read a book, take a bath, tidy up the house, do other fun activities with my family why would you want margin in the evening?
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: Or what about in your day to day?
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: I want margin between each scheduled activities so that I can fill in the blank not be late, fix the snack, not have to run through a drive-thru, get over to the appointment on time, run over from one appointment if it happens that I'm not late for the next one.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: Let's look at weekends.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: I want margin in the weekend so that I can fill in the blank Take a walk, be spontaneous, take a nap, spend time with my family.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: And then, lastly, I want margin over the holidays so that I can fill in the blank Is it to finish preparations without being stressed, to be able to sit and talk to relatives, to be able to savor in the meal that I actually spent three days creating, to be able to have the extra time for fun decorating of cookies with the kids.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: What is it so, when we look at the things that often get stolen away from us when there's not margin, it's things like having a routine enjoying a cup of coffee, doing a devotion, reading a book, taking a bath, not being late, fixing a snack, all of these things that are the things that start to not happen or to become super stressful when we don't have any margin.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: Now we're going to talk about different seasons of life and how there's times where this is, you know, a little bit more achievable than others.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: There are just crazy seasons.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: But just, we're going to walk through some practical things on organizing our calendars.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: So the first one is how are you getting organized?
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: I have to tell you that I am, to my core, a paper calendar person and I have prided myself on this for so long.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: But this last year I had to bite the bullet and I had to make the decision that I needed to get a digital calendar, and it pained me, but we were starting to have all of these points where it was not moving with ease, it was not streamlined.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: I have a husband who travels a ton for work.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: I have a crazy schedule.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: We have multiple kids with busy schedules and, specifically in the connection with me and my husband, not syncing calendars for his travel started to become a point of contention, where he was maybe going to be gone on a trip and I didn't know about it and so I had planned something for the family and then a week before the trip, you know, it was just like, ah, this isn't working, and so we had to create an online calendar that absolutely does not have everything on it for the shared calendar.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: The only thing that we share on this digital calendar is when he's going to be out of town or an activity that he needs to be aware of.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: So kids basketball schedules, activity at the school, maybe it's a father son something or a play or a performance those are things that are on the shared calendar.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: Pretty much anything on his day that happens before 6pm I don't need to know about, but it's the nighttime that I need to know, kind of what's happening.
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: In the same way that he needs to know if I'm traveling for work, if I'm out of town, if there's things that I need his assistance on, then those are going to go on the digital calendar.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: But this has helped me so much.
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: It was painful to move away from the paper calendar but it really has been freeing.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: So for those of you that are maybe still in the era of paper, there might be some benedicts and benefits to looking at digital.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: We are using just Google Calendar.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: I downloaded like four different things, did trials on a bunch of them.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: By far I found that Google Calendar just worked the best.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: It's what we're using.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: Also allows us to color coordinate.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: So now again there's only a few things on the shared calendar.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: But now on my massive home calendar that has all of the kids things, all of my things, all of my work things, all of the things that pertain to the house the hair appointments, the dog grooming appointments, all of the things.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: Right, the mom calendar is kind of like the master calendar, being able to assign colors to every category.
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: So every person has a color, and then there also are some categories that have color.
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: So if it's a full family activity, it's green.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: So if we know the whole family is doing this thing, it's green.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: If it has to do with my marriage, then it's gray and then we all have our own colors.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: So what this has done that has been really eye-opening for me is it allows me to see someone or something that is very over-scheduled and someone or something that is very under-scheduled.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: And I think sometimes, when we just write things in our paper calendar, we don't see this contrast of whoa, there is a ton of red and red is associated to this person, or there is very little gray and gray is intentional dating or whatever.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: In my marriage, it kind of brings that to the surface so you can go wow, I need to do some evaluating here.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: So when we have that in front of us, then it's also learning the power of a no, and this is something that I've gotten much better in the last couple of years.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: I am a yes girl to a fault.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: I love to help, I love to fill in, I like to believe that I have a capacity for a lot and I do.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: But I'm also learning that every single time that I say yes to someone or something else, I am saying no to my family getting the best of me.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: Now, that doesn't mean that I never help and I don't go do things for others, but in my older age I am learning that when I say yes to doing all of these other things, that things in my home that my family depends on me for are not getting done.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: So when I say too many yeses, we're not going to have as many good home cooked meals, the laundry is going to probably be behind, the house isn't going to be in the order that I like it for us to operate at our prime in and again in seasons.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: That is okay, but it makes you have to really think about the things that you say yes to.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: A quote that I heard I think it was maybe in Lisa Turker's book, your best yes was a quote that went something along the lines of when you're asked to do something, number one always take 24 hours to think about it.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: I think we get really bad at somebody calls and says, hey, will you be the room mom for the class, and you say sure and you hang up and you're like darn it, I didn't want to do that, but I did.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: It's really wise to say you know what?
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: Give me 24 hours to think about that.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: Let me talk to my husband, let me look at my calendar.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: Sometimes you might look at those things and have those conversations and go yes.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: This totally aligns with where I'm at in life, the things that I want to be putting time into.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: This is a good yes for me to say, but a lot of times there is reason to say no.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: And instead of feeling guilty about it and saying yes begrudgingly and then not doing a great job or always being a point of contention while you are doing it, here is a saying that Lisa said something.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: I'm sure I've doctored it and changed it a little bit, but when you go back to something that you've had a 24 hour rule to kind of process and the answer ultimately is no, a way that you can say that is thank you so much for asking me.
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: I'm very honored that you would ask me to be the room mom.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: Everything in my heart wants to say yes to that right now, but my calendars and my priorities in this season of life are telling me that I have to say no.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: Maybe next time I can help you out, right, and so it's not saying no, I don't care about it.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: It's saying my heart wants to, but my calendars and my priorities are saying that that would not be a wise choice right now and instead of living in this stage of over glorification, of busy, which I think we all can get into, I have learned that there is so much beauty in margin and that I operate better, my family operates better.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: There's way more peace, there's way less conflict when we have more margin in our schedule.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: And so the other thing and I know we talked about this last week on the podcast, if you listen to it at all about allowing room to live an interrupted life, and sometimes when it's just we are so, appointment to appointment, activity to activity, there is absolutely no time to have the interruption in life that sometimes is the most beautiful times in our day, those little interruptions when we get to stand and connect with somebody for 20 minutes that we run into in a parking lot because we haven't seen them and we have beautiful conversation.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: Or the girlfriend that calls and says, hey, I'm in your area, is there any chance you can meet me for a cup of coffee?
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: And because you haven't scheduled yourself, so to the brim, you can stop and have coffee.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: Or you can do the impromptu thing with your kid.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: If they say, hey, can we go to Starbucks and whatever.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: Everything is revolving around coffee in these examples, but it just allows time for laughter and joy.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: It allows you to be able to serve others when you see a need, it allows you to connect with people and so just creating enough margin that you actually have room in your life to be interrupted for beautiful, spontaneous things, to connect and to serve and to laugh and to find joy, and so I think that is really important.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: Now let me ask you a couple of questions when you look at your calendar.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: So if you're in this process of simplifying and streamlining your calendar and let's say you already are digital or you're going to get digital, maybe you're going to just stick with traditional pen to paper and that's fine.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: Maybe you need to at least start highlighting, if you don't do that, so that you can see kind of these categories and how they group.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: But here are some some questions that you can ask yourself when you look at your calendar.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Number one what holds your time?
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: Number two what do you need to eliminate to create margin in your day?
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: Number three what are you doing that is not bringing you joy but is taking a lot of your time?
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: Number four is one person over scheduled and if so, do we need to examine that and look a little bit deeper.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: Number five is there any downtime scheduled in our day?
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: Number six have I scheduled myself and my needs into the calendar?
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: For me sometimes that looks like taking a day for working on a digital scrapbook that I want to get done, or to go to the spa for a morning, or to just take a nap, or to have a chunk of time that I'm just home.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: The next one is have I scheduled my marriage into our calendar?
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: And then the last one, and the most important one, is does our schedule reflect our core values?
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: And this can be one that kind of can get you because you can say well, my core values are my marriage needs to be growing and I need to have connection with my kids and we prioritize family dinner and going to church.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: And if you look at your calendar and you're like Johnny has a tournament every single weekend, we won't go to church this month, there's not one thing on the calendar for my marriage to protect that.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we're not having family dinner at all this week because everybody's going a different direction.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: There's no rest at all.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: You might have to say how do we need to change our schedule, change our commitments, so that our calendar can reflect our values, conversations, and it's hard to say no to things, because a lot of things that we have ultimately, in our household, decided to say no to are not bad things.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: They're actually really really good things.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: But a couple of things that we have to filter through in our home is not only is this a good or a bad thing, but how does this affect the other members of the family?
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: If we say yes to this for Johnny I'm making up a fake kid if we say yes to this for Johnny, how does it impact Susie and Mary?
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: And if Susie and Mary are going to get a lot of negative from the yes for somebody else, then we might have to look at it or might have to at least have a conversation about it.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Maybe we need to say this year it's not right, but here's how our life is going to look different next year.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: We just had this conversation in our family when we were looking at a couple of options of opportunities for our son and looking at what does it look like if we do it this year and what does it look like if we do it next year, and which one feels better.
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: And it was our son that said, I totally want to wait for next year.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: I totally I don't want to do it this year, when you showed me all those things that it would impact in my life and my commitments and my ability to do some other things that I really like and value.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: I don't want to add that to my plate and I think so often we go let's just do it.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: Or we buy into the lie that if our kids are not in everything, if they aren't in a sport year round, if they are not doing every single activity, if they're, you know, not in every club, then somehow they're going to be missing out.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: Those are lies.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: I was not in any club sports.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: I was not on any teams.
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: I did not participate in anything outside of my siblings as my, my team at home and my youth group.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: I don't feel like I missed out on my childhood.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: I don't feel like I got sold short.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: Now I can't compare the times of my childhood to now.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: I recognize that.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: But I think we can very easily fall into.
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: If they have this interest, I have to sign them up in every single thing that's going to help them grow in that, and then I not only need to help them get into that, then I need to get them private coaching and all of these additional things so that they can be the best at their game.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: And it starts to get exhausting.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: And if you multiply this by two, three, four, five kids, I don't know how people do it.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: It is so crazy and the time just gets out of control.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: Where there's just, it's total chaos.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: All of the time.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: There's going to be seasons of this when it's just it is what it is a lot of littles.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: But I do think that there are some things that we can do to specifically help monitor that.
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about ways outside of asking yourself those questions.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: How are ways that you, as a mom, can work on streamlining your calendar a little bit, because there are a lot of things that we carry, that we hold on to, that we're responsible for that, when they just are part of our, our life and we don't really think about how we're managing them.
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: Things like going grocery shopping, meal prepping, any of those things, paying the bills, working on the taxes.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: They just kind of become like a little bit of a game of whack-a-mole where you're maybe in between activities and you have a half an hour.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: So you're like I'm going to really quick run into the store and get the 10 things that I can think of off the top of my head that I need, but ultimately it's not the whole grocery list because I haven't sat down and done that, or you know, it's all of this just constantly running, running, running.
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: Have you ever considered time blocking and time blocking?
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: This is who time blocking is really good for.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: It's good for people who are always trying to multitask.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: It's great for people who need help focusing on a task and reducing distraction.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: Great for people who want to be intentional about time and their energy.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: Great for somebody who needs a clearer sense of where your time is going each day.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: And great for somebody who struggles with overworking, who maybe gives too much time to a task.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: And I know for me, sometimes I will do time blocking just here in my home where I will look at the things that I need to do to make the house run.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: You know things like laundry and dishes and cleaning.
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: Then there's things like preparing for the podcast and some social media tasks that I need to do, and then there's working my job that I work from home Like where do I fit that in and sometimes I will just look at my schedule.
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: If I'm home for five hours and I will literally write down one hour power clean, you know, two hours of working, an hour of podcast and there's my day.
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: Right and literally it's setting timers.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: Now sometimes people can do this where they time block and they use the same block for their whole week, monday through Friday.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: This is exactly what I do.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: I know people who do that and do it very, very effectively.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: For me, I have too much ebb and flow in my days of the week.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: They don't all look the same.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: Two days I'm homeschooling my son at home.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: One day he's half day at school.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: Two days he's full day.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: I have some commitments on one of the off days, so my schedule doesn't look the same Monday through Friday.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: That works great for somebody who has a very consistent Friday or a very consistent week where you can just lay out the whole week and time block it.
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: For me, I will look at blocks of time that I find myself at home often overwhelmed with.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: How do I designate my time to be able to really work effectively?
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: To the point that I will say, okay, an hour of cleaning starts now and I will put my phone away, I'll dock it on a docking station.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: I'll throw an air pod in and either put a podcast in or I'll blare some praise music in the house, set an alarm for an hour and get to work when that timer is done.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: It does not matter if the house is not clean.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: It doesn't matter if you're halfway through a load of laundry, you just walk away.
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: You did your hour of time blocking for the cleaning.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: Now you're going to go sit at your desk for two hours and you're going to work on your work.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: You're not going to be doing other things, you're not going to be scrolling the internet.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: You are literally going to set a timer for two hours for this intense work session where you're not going to worry about anything else.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: When the timer goes off and that two hours is done, you close your computer and you move on to the next thing.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: This works really really well at getting things done.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you the other thing that I have really gotten good at that I didn't use to be good at.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: I would look at my calendar as an open slate for fitting things in wherever there was free time.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: What I would find is that every day I would have one or two appointments.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: What I would find is that I would have one or two appointments outside of the home every day.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: I would have one at 10 and something at three.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: That totally destroys a flow in a calendar.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: If I get up and I get things going, I get the kids off to school or we start in the school work here, and mid-morning I need to go to an appointment that lasts for an hour.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: Then from 10 to 11, I'm gone.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: I'm back at 11.30.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: I'm just getting back into the flow of things.
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: I need to go somewhere at three.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: What I have learned is if I just block off two or three chunks of time in a week so maybe it's Monday from eight until noon, and it's Wednesday from noon to three and it's Friday from 10 to 12.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: Those are the times that I will book myself outside of my home what happens is I start to have much bigger blocks of time at home where I'm getting stuff done, where there's focused time.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: I think sometimes all of this little sporadic scheduling gets so overwhelming.
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: What will start to happen is, let's say, on a Monday morning where I have that block of time, that I'm going to schedule appointments from eight to 12.
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: If I schedule an eight o'clock appointment for coffee with somebody and then I schedule another one with somebody at 10, when I look at that schedule I go, I'm out of my house, I'm going to have that eight o'clock coffee appointment.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: I don't have anything.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: At nine I'm going to be prepared, I'm gonna run across the street from the coffee shop and do my grocery shopping so that that's done, and then I'm gonna have my 11 o'clock and then I'm gonna come home.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: So now I've gotten a couple of things that were done outside of the home done at the same time.
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: Instead of going, I have a coffee appointment at 8 and now I'm gonna come home and then I'm gonna get a couple things done and then I'm gonna go to that 11 o'clock appointment or that 10 o'clock appointment and then tomorrow I'm gonna be like, ah, shoot, I need groceries.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna go back out to do groceries.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: Anytime you leave your home.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: You know it's going to take longer than you thought.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: You know you are giving up that morning, you are giving up that afternoon.
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: There's gonna be distractions.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: You're gonna go to the other stores, you're gonna get off track and when you can try to keep that into certain segments of certain days.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: That has been so beneficial to me.
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: Okay, so there's just some basic things about streamlining your calendar, looking at your calendar, asking some questions.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: Being okay for a season, maybe you need to sit down with your spouse, or if you're a single parent, you need to look at this calendar and you need to say what are things that are really overwhelming us, that are maybe sucking joy out of our life, that are not allowing us to have margin, not allowing us to streamline our calendar and our days, that maybe for a season, we need to see what happens if we take that out.
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: If it's not a do or die thing, if it's not a job, if it's not going to school, the sports are all optional, the clubs are all optional, the social activities are all optional.
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: What would happen if things are not working well and there is a lot of anxiety and very little joy because of an overwhelmed calendar?
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: What would happen if, for one season, you took that out to see if it helped the joy in your home, if it helped the rest, if people behaved better, if there was more joy?
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: If those are the things that come from removing something that feels somewhat important, I'm telling you it is worth it, even if just for a season, to kind of get that break and to get that reset.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: Now I wanted to tell you about a couple of just quick tips that have helped me that I want to pass on to you because I want you always to leave with a few things that you can take away and apply right to your life.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: This is one that I just learned.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: You guys, this is not like anything super fancy, but to me it was like this is amazing and this is really going to help me, and I was really surprised that I didn't know that this was an option that I had in my email that you all have too.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: If you have good old Gmail, there's a good chance that you have it If you have another email server as well.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: I just don't know how to do it, but did you know that you have an option to schedule emails inside of your email?
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: Again, you might say why in the world would I need to schedule emails?
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: Well, let me tell you about some things that this has helped me with directly relating to my calendar, household management, running our home.
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: Think about all of the different things that you do where you're like I need to remember so and so, but it's not for six months or it's, you know, next year when that warranty runs out.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: What you can do is, let's say that, for instance, you buy a pair of shoes that has a certain warranty on it for a year.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: If the souls wear out on your kids shoes, that you have the ability to replace them.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: This is the case with a brand of socks that I use.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: If the socks, if they wear out within a year, they will replace them.
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: But whoever remembers when they bought socks or where they put the receipt?
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: So when I order my socks, I can very easily take that email.
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: That's the confirmation, because I most often buy them on their website.
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: So when I get my receipt email from my socks, I can take that and I can forward it to myself and schedule it for 11 months from today, so that in 11 months from today, I am going to get an email with the receipt and a message to myself that says check all your socks for warranty.
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: There is no chance that a pair of socks will ever be replaced in my home if I don't do that exact process, if I don't do that for any warranty that we have for any.
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: You know things that need to happen a long time out, things I need to cancel.
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: Maybe you tried a 30 or a 60 or a 90 day subscription to something.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: Or you bought a one year subscription to something, knowing I need to use it this year but I will not need it on year two because it's just something we need for a time.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: How many of you will not remember that you didn't need it until the $199 or whatever it might be shows up in your checking account, right?
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: And then you're like, oh my gosh, I cannot believe I forgot to cancel that.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: Well, of course you did.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: It was a year out and nobody's going to remember that.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: So instead, send yourself an email that, hey, I need to cancel that car warranty or the computer geek thing that I signed up for for that year when we had all those computers that needed quick tune up.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: So use it for those things.
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: Use it for friendly reminders, for your honey-do list.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: Maybe you know that.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: You know we're leaving on vacation on June 14th and it would be really great to have the car serviced mid-May.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: And so I'm going to schedule an email right now why I'm thinking about it, why I'm looking at the trip itinerary for our vacation on May 14th to my husband that says hey, babe, we're leaving in a month for Florida.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: Because we're driving there, I really feel like we should get the car into Tony's for a quick maintenance.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: Would you mind setting that up?
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: So in a month that email is going to come into your husband as if you sent it to him that day, but you've already done it.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: Maybe you need to send some of these reminders to your spouse even though you have a shared calendar, or maybe you don't.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: Maybe this is a great option for those of you that don't want to have a shared calendar.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: Maybe two weeks before the daddy daughter dance, you need to send an email reminder.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: Hey, babe, just a quick reminder.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: Two weeks out on Friday, don't forget that you and Sally have the father daughter dance.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you wanted to order flowers or book a limo or do anything special.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: Just wanted to give you a two weeks heads up that that's coming.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: Maybe you started tradition that you're sending something on birthdays or anniversary, or it's the same pictures or poem or something that has meaning to you that you schedule to send every birthday.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: You guys, today I'm preparing for this.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: I was trying to see how far out.
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: You could.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: You could schedule these.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: I was able to schedule an email out to myself.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: I tried 2070.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: I tried February 13th of 2070 and it let me schedule it Now.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: I'm assuming that Gmail will be so not even a thing that we're using anymore.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: But how funny that you can schedule something out 50 years from now in an email.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: So you clearly don't have to do it that far out.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: But let's even just say that you wanted to write something to your child.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: You were thinking about them, you were so proud of them and you thought this would be a great thing for them to receive on their birthday.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: Write the email, write the letter, schedule it and know that it's just going to happen and they're going to get it.
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: So how do you do this?
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: You simply go into your email and Gmail, go ahead and compose an email, like you always will, and then you know the oval blue that says send, right to the right of the send button.
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: I have never once noticed it is a down arrow.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: Click the down arrow and when you click on that it opens up and it says Schedule send.
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: Click on schedule send.
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: It pops up a calendar and says pick a date and time.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: You pick whatever date and time you want to send it to yourself.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: You hit submit and your email is filed, ready to send and scheduled.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: You can go check all of your scheduled emails.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: There's a place then off to the side where you can see scheduled emails.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: You can go in, make any changes you know, send immediately if you want something to go quicker than you had originally scheduled.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: I think that is an awesome thing.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: Now you guys might be laughing and say Nikki, I have known about this for years.
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: I have to believe there's a lot of you that don't know about this, because I feel like I'm pretty tech savvy and I had Not a clue.
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: So use this to help streamline as well.
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: Maybe you need to send things to coaches or to people that help you coordinate your kids, and you can sit down Now and schedule anything and not feel like, well, I don't need them to get that email six weeks before it's necessary because it will get lost in their email.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: Nope, you can do it today and schedule it to arrive into their inbox exactly when you want them to be getting it.
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: Then Something super simple.
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about paper filing.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: What do we do with all of these papers that are coming into our house mail, kids, backpacks, all these things.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: If we're gonna Streamline this process in our house, how are we going to do that?
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell you a couple of things that have made it super easy for me, especially when my kids were smaller.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: This is not as big of an issue now.
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: A lot less paper comes in.
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: Number one because of the age of my children.
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: Number two because of the Age of technology, but there still is a lot of paper that comes in with mail and bills.
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: I ordered the best acrylic file holder again, I'll link it in the show notes just from Amazon.
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: It's a clear acrylic.
• 33:11
  Speaker 1: I need things to look pretty and so I had that.
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: I put it right on the shelf in my pantry With file folders in it.
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: When the mail came, I learned to walk directly to the garbage can, where I have the garbage and the recyclables.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: I also have a shredder in my pantry.
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: That was something else that just kind of helped me streamline my process.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: I opened the mail flyers, magazines, brochures, junk mail immediately goes into recyclable.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: I open every single bill, throw away all the extra things that come in it always, and then I take just the bills and I put them in the file.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: I I personally, when I did this had one through 15 and 15 to 30.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: So depending upon when, when it was due in the month, I dropped it into the appropriate one so that when I went to grab that folder, knowing I needed to pay bills for the first half of the month, they were in there.
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: At the second half of the month they were in there when I walked to my computer to do it online.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: I had them kind of divided that way.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: Do whatever works for you.
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: I also had a file in there for child keepsakes that I need to file away, but I need to put in a safe place until I get to their end destination, if you don't have something right there where they belong.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: Again, this is something that we'll talk about in a couple other episodes on how we can do this, ways to file that, where to store it, how to digitize it, all those things.
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: But even now, when I digitize most things, they still go into a folder in that file folder cabinet, little you know Bin until they go where they need to go.
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: It keeps them safe, it keeps them categorized.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: And then there's just the random paperwork, like the title that came in the mail or piece of something that is important but it's not urgent.
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: One through 31 days.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: It needs to be filed and it's appropriate place.
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: I just have something there, and so by opening the mail every single day and immediately throwing away the things that are not necessary, the amount of paper piles that you will get rid of is Amazing.
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: Paper is clutter, paper is overwhelming, and so do not allow papers to pile up.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: Have the rule of file or pitch.
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: Those are the only two categories.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: I either file it or I pitch it, and if it doesn't fit in those, I don't know what it could possibly be, but you don't need it.
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: So file or pitch.
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: So those are just some really, really basic things to go over.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: You guys, how we spend our time matters.
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: Something as small as creating system around our calendars, paying our bills, maybe setting up a time to do taxes once a month instead of being super overwhelmed at the end of the year, seems really trivial, but when we look at how we spend our time, it is important.
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: I'm sure most of you have heard the analogy about the university professor that walked into his class with a vase, a Pile of rocks, a pile of pebbles and a jar of sand.
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: And when he started putting the rocks into the vase these two inch or so Rocks he filled them all the way to the top and he asked the class is the jar full?
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: Of course they all said yes, the jar was full of rocks.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: But then he grabbed the container of pebbles and poured the pebbles into that vase and All of those pebbles found their way into the nooks and crannies in the jar.
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: He then asked the students is the jar full?
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: To which again they said yes.
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: Well, then he took the sand and he poured the sand and all of the sand also was able to go into that vase.
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: He explained that the rocks are the main things in our life.
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: They're the big things there are family, there are friends, there are job, there are health.
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: The pebbles are the smaller things.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: They're things like the sports, the house cleaning, the entertainment, the hobbies, and then the sand is kind of the Trivial things.
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: It's the things we lose time on, things like scrolling on social media or being distracted or watching TV.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: He then took everything out and showed what happens when you put the sand in First, when you fill the vase with sand first, there is no way to get the rocks and the pebbles all to fit in.
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: This is a great analogy when we talk about our calendar and we talk about our time.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: So often the things that are getting the most space in the vase are the sand and the pebbles, and it's because we haven't organized our time in a way that prioritizes the rocks, which are the foundation the family, the friends, the job, our health and they get robbed out by other things like the sports, the entertainment, the hobbies, the scrolling on social media, the TV watching.
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: I love the quote that says time is free but it's priceless.
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: You can't own it, but you can use it.
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: You can't keep it, but you can spend it.
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: Once you've lost it, you never get it back.
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: How we spend our time matters.
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: It matters to our family, it matters to our peace, it actually matters to our health, to our mental and emotional stability, and it really is important.
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: And as mamas, we hold a lot of the calendar in our hands.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: So I'm excited for you to take a look at it to see where you need to make some adjustments.
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: Share with us what you're doing.
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: If you have any tips or tricks, we'd love to hear them.
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: Share them with us and you guys, if this has been something that's been helpful for you.
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: I would encourage you to share this episode with a friend Maybe who's working on the streamlining their own life will have more in this series to come in the next three weeks.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: So thanks so much for being here with us today.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: Use your time wisely this week, friends.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: We'll see you back here next week.
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: Until then, take care.