Since it is turning to a new month, I spent some time planning in “big picture” mode and also re-evaluating my systems.
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First of all, I brought out my old Sidetracked Home Executives cards. For those of you who don’t know, the SHEs were the ones who originally inspired Flylady. I read their book last year and actually found it a bit more manageable for my brain than the Flylady reminders and lists. The idea is that you get colored index cards and put the daily, weekly, monthly and seasonal jobs coded by color…. I had yellow for daily, blue for weekly, green for monthly and pink for seasonal. There is even a color for the kind of things you do to restore your balance, or sharpen the saw as Steven Covey says.
I realize now after learning more about Visual Spatial learners WHY colored index cards work better for me than lists. I had dividers for every day of the month and for each month of the year in my little card box. I had a great system, even down to a card that reminded me to re-arrange the cards in preparation for the next week.
I guess I stopped using them, well, honestly, because I got bored. This ALWAYS happens to me and just recently I’ve learned to just work WITH it rather than trying to shame myself into sticking with the old system. I realize I am actually more effective if I let myself have some freedom to change my systems, and I am pretty consistent in the general principles.
So today I made a list using the cards in sort of a Motivated Mom format, because that linear checklist style format has been working for me recently. It is basically a slight revision of my management systems posted here.
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Then I also sat down with a calendar and figured out how much time was left in this year before June. I am planning to give Sean a notebook where we write down his daily academic goals. I am getting the message from him that he wants more ownership of this process and it is completely age-appropriate since he is entering high school now and needs a better sense of the “big picture”. The other kids all got some sort of daily or weekly planbook at about this age. It helps them to see a beginning and end and how to meet the objectives. For math and subjects that he is not as fond of, he will probably appreciate knowing when he is “done for the year”.
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There were a few more things I did but this post is long enough already.
Yesterday, I also updated my other blog and spent some time playing setting things up at Google where there is a place for spreadsheets and documents. WOW. I like the idea of having things online just because they can be accessed from anyplace. Plus, they can be opened to other people so the kids could access them too. I hope to get all our homeschool stuff set up in there — booklists and so on — just in the remote eventuality that I am someday trying to manage things long-distance as I used to have to do regularly when Aidan was spending long periods of time in the hospital in various distant cities.
