Ever wake up in the morning feeling a little frazzled and chaotic? Maybe you had a long night, the night before, because the baby wouldn’t sleep or one of your kids had a nightmare. Perhaps, you have too much laundry to do, groceries to pick up, and the kids have practice. Don’t forget that you still have to decide what to make for dinner, oh and lunch…but you should probably take care of breakfast first, right?!
If you ever wake up feeling overwhelmed by the thought of what you have to do for the day, you need to make sure that you are planning. Not just pretty planning, although that makes it fun, but actually planning your activities.
There’s a lot of talk about this topic of planing today, but it really isn’t anything new. Someone has just put a spin on it.
When I was a little girl, I remember seeing my mother with this big black book. It may not have been that big because looking back, I realize the my perception as a child was a bit skewed. Almost everything looked big to me.
Anyway, my mother had a black leather binder that she kept with her all the time. She wrote phone numbers in it. I saw her taking notes and keeping track of her bills. What I didn’t know until recently was that it was a Franklin Covey classic binder.
That might not be a big deal to you, or it might, but that’s big in planner society.
There I was, a little girl, witnessing, first hand, what it meant to take charge of my day and my life. I didn’t know what an impact that would have on me, until many years later.
Fast forward to today, I have my own Franklin Covey planner. Let me correct that. I have multiple planners in multiple sizes and they all have helped me get the job done.
My mother was a single mom and she got the job done. She had to do her job at work and then come home and get the job done at our house too. I never wondered how she did it as a child, but when I became a mother, I wondered. I realized a few years ago that she remained focused by using that system of writing down her thoughts and plans to stay focused on her goals.
See, we all wake up in the morning a little frazzled. We have to take the time to gather ourselves and focus on what’s important. We should not wake up on 100. We have to pace ourselves, or else we can get drained before the end of the day.
You have to put things in place to assist you with leveling up. Like my mother, you need the things that you are going to keep with you, so that you can focus and feel less overwhelmed.
5 Tools You Will Need
Here are the five things that you need to plan your day. I’ll go more in detail in a future post, so make sure to subscribe to get notified when it publishes. The list is below.
- The right mindset. You have to decide that you are going to have order and focus in your life. If you don’t take charge of somethings, disorder and chaos will wreak havoc in your life.
- A prayerful heart and your bible. You must have your bible, or bible app, to help you frame your thought patterns for the day. This coupled with a prayerful heart will help you make a well thought out and executable plan of action.
- Commitment to move forward and progress. There is no point in planning your day, if you aren’t going to be committed to the tasks. Everything might not always go according to plan, that’s life, but you have to be committed to moving forward and progressing.
- A notebook and a beautiful pen. These could technically be two different tools, but you can’t use one without the other. The beautiful pen doesn’t have to be beautiful to anyone else except you. If you like the way that it writes and glides across the paper, it will work. These two items will help you to focus your thoughts before you actually start planning. They will also help you not to lose focus while you plan. Let’s be honest. Things come up. People have requests and we can get side tracked, if not careful.
- A planner to write down your plan, track your progress, and review for hindsight. There are so many different types of planners out there to choose from. However, I suggest that you get something that is aesthetically pleasing. You will be using it daily. It also needs to be functional and durable. Don’t get anything that might fall apart on you in a month or six months, at that.
Again, we are going to go into more detail about these five things, in a later post, so make sure to subscribe, but for now, start thinking about what I’ve shared with you today. If you don’t already have a planner, begin looking around to see what’s available. Don’t purchase anything just yet, because we are going to discuss your options…and there are a lot of them out there.
If you have any specific questions that you’d like me to address in the future, regarding planning, post a comment below or send me an email at makeda@beingmrsmom.com
