Conquering the Chaos Part II – Organizing Your Life into Buckets

Now that you have gone through Part I of our Conquering the Chaos segment and have a time inventory of a typical week, it’s time to begin to understand what all that means by sorting the activities and tasks that occupy your days into buckets, so you can more easily understand where you spend your time, where you want to spend more time, and things in your life that are just right.

Begin this exercise by printing off the life bucket printable and begin sorting all the tasks and activities from your family life inventory into one of the appropriate buckets:  School, Extra-Curricular, Household Cleaning, Laundry, Household Maintenance & Repairs, Lawn Work, Volunteer Commitments, Faith Commitments, Administrative, Meal Planning, Household Finances, Fun Stuff, Personal, Auto/Transportation, Family Commitments, and Other.

For example, let’s say you look at your family life inventory for Sunday and found you did the following things (click picture to enlarge):

You would then go through this list and sort each of these items into the appropriate bucket making sure to include the time as well so that your bucket list looks something like this (click picture to enlarge):

Go through your family life inventory day by day and add each activity to the bucket list.  For tasks you do every day, for example making dinner, enter it once in the Meal Planning and Prep bucket with an average time from the week it took you to plan and make dinner. 

Once you have gone through your family life inventory and added everything to your bucket list, then go through and add anything you didn’t do the week you took your family life inventory but know you need to do.  For example, you may have done a family life inventory during a week in which you didn’t need to mow the lawn, but you know it is something that is typically done, so go ahead and add it to your bucket list along with a time estimate.  You want to have as complete a list as possible.

Understanding What It All Means

Now that you have your life divided into buckets, it is time to understand and analyze what it all means.  To do this, go through your bucket list and ask yourself these questions:

What buckets or activities are taking the most time?

On what buckets or activities should we be spending more of our time?

What buckets or activities are causing the most stress?

What buckets or activities are the most enjoyable?

What buckets or activities are the least enjoyable?

Starting With the End in Mind

Now that you have a good picture of what your current family life looks like, it is time to spend some time on what you WANT your family life to look.  This is a mental image or written expression of what you want your family life to look like most of the time.  The point of this exercise is to articulate how you want your family life to be by asking yourself these questions:

What things do I want to spend less time doing?

What things do I want to spend more time doing?

I want our family life to be less………?

I want our family life to be more…….?

I personally want to be more…..?

Here is an example to help better understand:

I want to stop rushing and having to yell at my kids to hurry up.  I want to have time to exercise a few days a week and to sit down in the evening and spend time reading to my kids, playing games with my kids, and enjoying my family rather than running around getting things done.

I want a clean house, but minimize the amount of time I spend cleaning.  I want to have all the clutter, toys, and stuff picked up every night before bed so that I don’t have to look at it in the morning.

I want to know in advance what I am making for dinner and I want the dinner to be healthy.  I want to spend a maximum of 90 minutes each day making and cleaning up after dinner.

I want to find more time on the weekends just spending time with my family rather than running to soccer games and sports events.  I want to find time to do the things we say we want to do, but never seem to find the time.

I want to stop paying bills late and want to spend a maximum of 60 minutes each week doing bills and financial work.

I want the kids to be in bed by 9 PM every night.

I want to be in bed by 10 PM every night and get up an hour before the kids every morning

I want to find more time for date nights with my husband and nights out with friends

I personally want to be less stressed, less worried, and more fulfilled.

Remember no family or family life is perfect.  We all have good days, bad days, and points in our lives where no amount of planning analyzing, or preparation can make better.  The point of this exercise is to articulate a vision and goal not make yourself perfect.  Sometimes things are out of our control but that shouldn’t be a reason to not try at all.

Once you get through this exercise save all your notes along with the notes from Conquering the Chaos - Part I for next month’s segment - Conquering the Chaos Part III - Creating a Family Schedule that Works. 

Good luck!