Account for Adulting
In doing a time audit, you may have been surprised at how much time you spend on just maintaining your existence. Things like eating, sleeping, and bathing yourself and your family members (including pets) takes time, and then there’s everything needed to prepare for and execute those activities, like shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.
Most of this work associated with basic adulting can be expected. We can expect to do it every day, week, or month for pretty much our entire life. Yet for most of my adulthood, it was usually a shock when I had run out of coffee, or toilet paper, or dog poop bags. Managing these affairs was done on an ad hoc basis, meaning it was urgent and needed to be squeezed into or even take precedent over existing plans. This often led me feeling frazzled and stressed.
When I began to plan out what I wanted to do and put it on my calendar, I took to it like a fish to water. But because I had not thought to put things like grocery shopping and booking the dog’s lepto boosters on the list of my goals, those things came up and messed with my perfectly laid plans. Super frustrating yet totally preventable.
I’ve learned to include all my basic day to day adulting in my time planning process, and as a result they no longer hijack the time I want to be spending relaxing or rewarding activities.
An added benefit to adding your adulting into your planning and calendaring practice is that it can help identify where you might want to switch things up. For example, I used to spend ~3 hours of my weekend on washing, drying, and folding my clothes at the laundry mat around the corner. When I accounted for that on my weekend calendar and saw a big block of time of my precious weekend dedicated to something I despised doing, I knew it was time to change. Now I pay the laundry mat for the wash and fold service, and spend that time on building my business.
What ways would you want to change things up so your adulting can work better for you? If you want help identifying it, or you already have ideas, I’d love to hear from you! You can drop me a line here.