In this episode of the Grounded in Simplicity podcast, we're giving you tips for peaceful productivity. From getting rid of negative thoughts to setting boundaries, we're covering everything you need to stay productive and focused.
If you're looking to increase your productivity, then this episode is for you! We've got tips to help you stay focused and productive all day, every day. Whether you're a work at home mom or a homesteader with a dream, these tips will help you achieve your goals. Thanks for listening!
Links mentioned in this episode:
Living Well Planner: https://www.notsomodern.com/livingwellplanner/
Cube Timers: https://amzn.to/3VCs1Oh
Forest App Pomodoro Timer: https://www.forestapp.cc/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/groundedinsimplicity
In this episode of the Grounded in Simplicity podcast, we're giving you tips for peaceful productivity. From getting rid of negative thoughts to setting boundaries, we're covering everything you need to stay productive and focused.
If you're looking to increase your productivity, then this episode is for you! We've got tips to help you stay focused and productive all day, every day. Whether you're a work at home mom or a homesteader with a dream, these tips will help you achieve your goals. Thanks for listening!
Links mentioned in this episode:
Living Well Planner: https://www.notsomodern.com/livingwellplanner/
Cube Timers: https://amzn.to/3VCs1Oh
Forest App Pomodoro Timer: https://www.forestapp.cc/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/groundedinsimplicity
Hello and welcome back to the Ground and Simplicity podcast. This is Bonnie and I'm joined by my good friend Danielle. We are here to help moms find joy in being less busy. And we are not in separate rooms. For the first time ever, all six children are in the same house and the house is not burned down yet, so we're making progress. Without the dog, well, the dogs are a different story. The dog well, okay, yes, one dog is being super sweet. The other dog is an Australian shepherd, and they're just naturally neurotic.
Danielle:I was worried about the other one because he's usually the neurotic one.
Bonnie:She's shy and timid anyway, he's not reactive like the Aussie. Anyway, that's not what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about productivity and planning your week and just kind of being more intentional with our time. I think that's a big struggle for all of us and certainly something that I hear from a lot of other moms talking about not being able to figure out how to have time for it all because you can't. So, yeah, I think that's probably going to be a big part of what we talk about, really, is just kind of figuring out what are your priorities, not what everyone else tells you need to be doing and then how to get those things done, how to plan for them and, still feed your children and make it a doctor's appointments.
Danielle:Most of the time.
Bonnie:Most of the time. Alright, so do we want to just jump right into it? All right, so plan a time to hang on. Maybe you should start talking now.
Danielle:I never talk.
Bonnie:You always talk. This is not supposed to be the Bonnie show.
Danielle:It's the Bonnie show with the subco.
Bonnie:It's never supposed to be the plan. Okay, someone called me bossy.
Danielle:You should pick a time to plan your week ahead. Bonnie says she likes to plan her weeks on Fridays.
Bonnie:Yeah, I actually used to be part of a planning group, and we would actually have Zoom calls, and we would do our planning together on the zoom calls. There'd be like, whoever was leading the call is kind of walking you through it and coaching everybody, and then everybody else is planning what their week looks like ahead. Those calls were always on Friday, so that's probably a big reason why I kind of got into that groove. The reason that they set it that way and I really liked the way they set it up was the idea was if you planned on Friday, then you had the weekend to not have to worry about what was coming up the next week. You already had it all planned out, and plus you're not having to worry about taking time out of your weekend and remembering to sit down to your planning.
Danielle:Did you plan, like your Saturday through?
Bonnie:No, normally we would actually start the week on Monday.
Danielle:Okay.
Bonnie:So, like, Saturday and Sunday was already planned from the week prior. Okay. You were looking at the week ahead. It depended on if you wanted to set your schedule up so that it started on Sunday or started on Monday. The planner were all using as part of the group started on Mondays. That ended up kind of becoming the default.
Danielle:And I think that's another thing. Like, some people your week starts on Sunday, and some people you start your week on Monday. I think that makes a difference for when you want to plan. A lot of people plan on Sundays, which is what I originally put up there.
Bonnie:I pointed out that I don't like planning on Sundays. Right. Well, I see Saturday Sunday as kind of a group. So, like, if we're planning family activities or anything like that, we're usually planning it over a weekend. By lumping them together in the planning instead of having them split between weeks, that kind of made the most sense to me.
Danielle:Whatever day you want to plan, you can plan your day or your week on Wednesday if you want to.
Bonnie:Yeah, just actually sit down and plan it ahead of time. Don't wait till Monday morning to try to plan your week, because Mondays are just too chaotic.
Danielle:I don't like Mondays. I don't like Mondays. Okay. Next we have setting your goals for the week.
Bonnie:Yeah, you can look at it as goals. You can look at it as intentions, but it's really just by the end of the week, what do you want to accomplish or what do you need to accomplish to be able to achieve your goals for the month? If your goal is just to get through the week without killing anyone, then that should make planning a lot easier.
Danielle:Do you think that your weekly goal? You need a plan by the month as well?
Bonnie:I do. I'll try to set aside a week before the month is over. I'm looking at the next month, and this is more like in terms of business. Even if you're not running a business, you can be looking at it as what do you want to accomplish for your home school? What do you want to accomplish? Fitness, personal development. Are there so many books you want to read?
Danielle:Right?
Bonnie:Yeah.
Danielle:Or your garden stuff. I don't know about Florida, but here every month is like something different. Until you get to the winter and then you don't really have to.
Bonnie:Do for a couple of months. Yeah, we definitely go on a monthly plan with gardening in Florida. We'll even go so far as to break it down by the week because, for instance, October, the beginning of October is very warm. About like, midway through October, all of a sudden, not the daytime temperatures are still warm, but our nighttime temperatures are starting to drop. That's when we're starting to look at planting our cold weather crops. So, yeah, we may plan out October and say these are all the things we're going to plant in October, but we're going to focus on these things the beginning of October and the end of October. Right.
Danielle:Like we plant our garlic in October.
Bonnie:Right.
Danielle:But it varies based on the weather.
Bonnie:Yeah. For us, if you order garlic, a lot of times you can't receive it until sometime in October because you have to wait for the farmers to actually harvest it and everything. Normally to get a good garlic harvest in Florida, we need to cold stratify for 30 days. You're looking at November, December before you're even able to put it in the ground. That's also kind of we do the soft neck varieties and the creoles because they can mature faster and don't need quite as many chill hours to write.
Danielle:Right. And then setting your weekly routine. This is more instead of like goals, things that you want to accomplish for the week or the month or whatever it may be, it would be more things like laundry. You have to do laundry every week. Theoretically, probably more than once a week.
Bonnie:I am seriously I'm about ready to say, okay, whatever is not washed by Saturday, I am taking it to the laundry mat and just doing it all at once so that way I can start fresh the next week.
Danielle:Well, yeah, laundry math.
Bonnie:Well, it is, and maybe that'll be my motivation for not having to go to laundry at but the constant cycle of starting the week feeling behind on laundry and then by the end of the week, I'm even further. He's always crying. I mean, he looks is he still crying right now? No. Okay, then he's fine. No one's dying. So we're good. Well, and for us too, we've got our home school coop on Thursday, so we have to plan for right now. Soccer season is started, so we have our practices and our games on Saturdays. Yeah, those are all things that really need to go on the schedule first that we know are going to happen consistently this day, this time, all of that. Right.
Danielle:So, like laundry things like Bonnie mentioned, like if you have coops or some kind of extracurricular activities that you or your kids are doing, book clubs or whatever, bible studies, things like that. Meal planning and prepping and all right things, include them into your weekly routine. You could pick like a day that you always do laundry or you could just like a lot of people I know start like a load every morning. Yeah, they might finish it next week.
Bonnie:I try not to be that bad. I mean, it amazes me. The number of clothes my children can go through. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I have to do at least a load a day and a lot of times two loads a day just to try to stay on top of it. Yeah. If that doesn't happen and that's when things spiral and I get behind.
Danielle:I did four loads yesterday before we die here. I still have laundry in the basket.
Bonnie:Yeah, whatever. I know. I'm jealous that my mom actually has two washers and two dryers. I'm like, how much I could get done. That's why I want to go to laundry mat, because I can just throw everything in all the washing machines at one time.
Danielle:I don't know, that might beneficial. Yeah, but then you have to go town.
Bonnie:Well, I don't know. Town is not that far. It's more the lugging, the laundry basket.
Danielle:The closest laundry map from here is far.
Bonnie:What do you consider far? Because Florida far and Indiana far, I'm finding are two very different things.
Danielle:I think it's like 20 ish miles.
Bonnie:Yeah. Okay. I'm probably like 15 miles from town, but it takes me 20 minutes to get there. So it's kind of the same thing. That's literally like that's where our grocery store is.
Danielle:That's where the closest grocery store and all that stuff is. We have an all our general over there.
Bonnie:Yeah, that doesn't feel far to me.
Danielle:Should we tell everybody you got lost?
Bonnie:I did not get lost. I put your address in Google and Google took me to the middle of a cornfield.
Danielle:I really did think that maybe you were just down there and it had just thought that you were.
Bonnie:No, because then it even said I needed to go off the road into the middle of the cornfield. I wasn't even on the right road. I drive down, I turn into another road, I put the directions back or put the address back in, thinking, okay, now that we're closer, maybe it'll better at finding the address. It took me back to the same cornfield. This is the one time that Apple actually got it right. No, I did not get lost.
Danielle:Okay.
Bonnie:I was exactly where Google told me to be.
Danielle:Well, Google didn't know what it was talking about.
Bonnie:No, obviously.
Danielle:Okay, so this one is all you. Because I hate this analogy.
Bonnie:Why do you hate this analogy? Just cause everybody I feel like it's cliche or something.
Danielle:Everybody uses this analogy.
Bonnie:If you haven't heard or I guess, most people are probably listening this and not seeing the banners. One thing that I do with my planning is planning for the big rocks. The analogy is that if you have a container and you try to fill it with the sand first and then the medium rocks, by the time you get the big rocks, there's no more room for the big rocks. If you put the big rocks into the container first and then the medium rocks and then you fill the sand over top, everything gets done. It's kind of the same thing with your planning. We have the weekly routine stuff and if it's just like unloading and reloading the dishwasher and doing the laundry and those little things, you don't necessarily need to write those all down in your planner because you can do this between tasks. If you just write now, obviously if you have to like leave to go to soccer practice, leave to go to a doctor's appointment, something that's going to take a larger chunk of time. Yes, write that down. Anyway, so let's play for the big rocks. Everything else just kind of falls into place in between. That way we're still in this case, the big rock is our priorities. Those things that we've set the intention for said we want to accomplish this week. Maybe it's not like the whole big project, but we've broken the project down to pieces and we've said, this is how much I want to get done today. We plan for those things and then we're still reaching our goals, meeting our priorities.
Danielle:We're not so worried about menial tasks like unloading the dishwasher, right? Because if you do all those menial tasks and to focus on all those little itty bitty things and you don't have time for the big things right, really make a difference in the day.
Bonnie:Well, and the thing too is like we find ourselves, we end up spending all of this time on these little things that really aren't our priorities. Some of this stuff, like doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, even doing the laundry, we can delegate that to our kids or our spouses. If you have the means, hire somebody, delegate it to someone from outside of the home. When we focus on those little things that aren't priorities, then that ends up eating up all of our time. We don't accomplish our goals because all of a sudden we don't have time for any of it.
Danielle:All right, are we ready for that?
Bonnie:I think so.
Danielle:The next one is don't over connect. It kind of goes along the same lines of not focusing on the wrong things. There is such thing as saying no. So if you don't have time or.
Bonnie:Right and it will have a tendency to I really enjoy volunteering for things. I like feeling useful, I like helping people. I will end up volunteering for so many things that I no longer have time for the stuff that I need to get done right. Even if you're just talking about not even just volunteer things, but the things that you're trying to do in a day, like planning for the big rocks. Planning for the big rocks is great, but if you're trying to plan six big rocks a day, you're not going to get it all done. Right. I mean, really, like you think about it, especially if you are feeling overwhelmed. Only plan one big thing a day. I mean, a lot of people will say three, but sometimes three is just not realistic for most people.
Danielle:We have podcasts about that.
Bonnie:We may have. We probably did, yeah.
Danielle:We were talking about I don't remember exactly what, but I know we talked about having no more than three goals.
Bonnie:Right? Yeah. Because were just talking about goal.
Danielle:Setting, I think were. Yeah, but the same premise.
Bonnie:Yeah, same premise. If three is too much for you, then you just focus one thing you're getting done each day, and then you do enough to where you feel comfortable and you feel accomplished with what you got done and everything else will take care of itself. You either delegate the rest or it really wasn't that important and didn't need to be done in the first place. Right.
Danielle:Which comes back to knowing what your priorities are and making sure that you're setting the right priorities and that those priorities are your big rocks and not as a sand. Exactly. Okay. I don't know that we talked about using time blocking before.
Bonnie:I'm not sure. Not very in depth. I don't think we could probably do.
Danielle:A whole episode on time blocking.
Bonnie:I'm sure we could. So I do use a paper planner. Paper planning is not for everybody, but I know some people, even if they have like, hourly marks in their planner, they'll just kind of write sideways across multiple and they'll just say, this is, like, vaguely where I plan on getting this done.
Danielle:Right.
Bonnie:I will not say that I am great about sticking to my schedule, but I will I'll use my pins and I'll block out a set amount of time that I'm planning on just focusing on this thing.
Danielle:What is it? Where can I think the timer thing?
Bonnie:Oh, pomodoro.
Danielle:Yes, I do.
Bonnie:I have the app on my phone. I haven't really been using it. We got these cubes, and they look like dice, and they have different numbers on each side, and the number is a timer. We have one cube that's short time and one cube that's like up to 90 minutes. You just turn the cube, whatever number is up, it instantly starts the timer for that amount of time. We'll use those, especially if the kids are working on cleaning up toys or something like that. I'll tell them, Clean up all of your toys. Well, that feels too big, right? I'm like, all right, clean up toys for 15 minutes. I just turn the timer to 15 and it goes off after 15 minutes. That feels much more doable to them. Even if we end up like we do 15. I'm like, hey, do you guys feel like you can keep going? We set it for another 15. Right. That way it feels much less overwhelming for them. Right. I find that if I get on my phone to use my Pomodoro timer I end up getting distracted before I actually get this Pomodoro timer. The less I pick up my phone, the more likely I am to get the things done. Now I know someone else was talking about the timer. It may have been Alexander that you have to leave the app open and it grows a tree while you're leaving the app open and it's a Pomodoro timer. If you close the app to go do something else on your phone, the tree stops growing. Hey, can you give me a second? I think that they will actually plant a tree for you from using the app. Oh yeah, the trees that you grow in the app turn into real trees in real life.
Danielle:What if you use Pomodoro timers all day? Then that'd be a lot of trees.
Bonnie:I don't even know. It may be a paid app, I'm not sure, I have to look it up. You keep talking.
Danielle:Well, we're talking about time blocking and then we start talking about timers.
Bonnie:Oh yeah. So, well, you're the one who originally got me the pond. Well, the pulmonary hybrids, but also on time blocking.
Danielle:Yeah.
Bonnie:You can talk about it for a bit. Do you actually use the time blocking?
Danielle:I used to.
Bonnie:Or you just told me I should use time blocking.
Danielle:No, I used to, but it seems like every time we try to, like I don't know, I guess because some people think that time blocking should be, like, a certain set hours, but it really doesn't have to be. It's just, like, allowing enough time and a block of time in order to get whatever the task is done.
Bonnie:Like Flora Green focus to do list. Habit tracker.
Danielle:Flora Green focus. Yup.
Bonnie:Grow a tree alright, easily stay off your phone theoretically and yes, you look 50,000 plus real trees planted by two plus million proud users. So they plant real trees if you.
Danielle:Use the app and actually real trees.
Bonnie:There you go. Yeah, and this is one of my pitfalls of time blocking too is you set the time and then kids walk in the room and dogs start barking and the stove catches fire and the goats get out. Which I guess we kind of can go into that with the next one. I guess with that I would say give yourself flexibility, give yourself grace, understand that some days are going to be more productive than others say there's only really one big thing you want to accomplish today and it's going to take you 90 minutes to get it done. You could set a 45 minutes time block, take a 15 minutes break and then set another 45 minutes time block.
Danielle:Right.
Bonnie:If it's just the kids want something, you can say, hey, wait until I get to my break time.
Danielle:I think that emergency then training your kids when you have like a time block of, say, work time, if you're a work at home mom, then they can't distract you during that time frame. Unless the service is on fire.
Bonnie:It gets easier as they get older. We get to twelve and they don't even want to talk to us anymore.
Danielle:Sure.
Bonnie:They just want to stand by the kitchen table and stare at us.
Danielle:The older two are the only ones outside. You can go play with the older two.
Bonnie:Okay. Henry is still out there. He's creepy.
Danielle:Is that what it is? Henry creepy? I don't think you're going to offend Bonnie if you call.
Bonnie:He drives me nuts on a daily basis.
Danielle: I think that we need to stress the fact that time blocking doesn't mean that it has to be like from 09:00 A.m. To 12:00 P.m. You're doing right. Wire seat. It could be like this is the block of time. We need a three hour block of time, and we're doing Commodore timers for that entire block time. We're taking breaks and we're moving around.
Bonnie:Yeah. I cannot set a time block for myself for more than 90 minutes to 2 hours. Right. That's one the extent that I could stand sitting in a chair. Also, yeah, for me, that's kind of pushing my attention span remark. Right.
Danielle:Well, I think that's the nice thing about Pomodoro timers and things like that is because you're working for this short span of time in the grand scheme of things, and then you're getting up and you're taking a break and walking around and getting a drink.
Bonnie:Right.
Danielle:Some people have trouble with them because they have trouble sitting back down and refocusing.
Bonnie:True. Well, and for me, and it doesn't even have to be a Pomodoro timer, but I'm in this group that does coworking sessions. We all log into Zoom and we're not talking on the Zoom call. We all have it silenced, but we're working. At the 1 hour mark, we check in and we let everybody know what our progress was.
Danielle:Right.
Bonnie:That's really good for me because you're less likely to let yourself get distracted because it's like, no, everybody else is working. I need to be working because at that 1 hour mark, I need to be able to tell them that I accomplished something. Right. It kind of goes back to the whole like you will fill whatever time block you give yourself. If you say, I'm going to give myself 3 hours to get this done, you will find a way to make it take you 3 hours, even if you could have had it done in 45 minutes.
Danielle:Right.
Bonnie:If you have less time than you set a smaller time block. Now, maybe you don't get it all done, but you'd actually be amazed at how much you can get done when you just sit down and go, no, I'm only going to do this one.
Danielle:Thing for this amount of time, right, and getting rid of distractions.
Bonnie:Lock the phone in the other room. I use my do not disturb on my phone. This episode of The Grand and Simplicity podcast is brought to you by The Living Well Planner. Are you ready to make your goals and dreams a priority? The Living Well Planner is the only planner designed to help you organize your schedule, take control of your finances, plan your meals, and crush your goals all in the same place. Whether you're a working professional, a busy stayathome mom, a motivated college student, or even a small business owner, the Living Well Planner is designed to help you easily manage all the pieces of your busy life. Simply visit notsomodern@gmail.com LivingWell Planner to start living your life with more intention by ordering the Living Well Planner today.
Danielle:Okay, scheduling buffer time. This is yours.
Bonnie: This is mine. Our family needs a lot of buffer time. I have learned that if I know that we need to leave the house at 09:00, we need to start getting in the car. Well, there's that, but we need to start getting in the car at 830 because I don't know how, but it will take 30 minutes for us to get in the car, get buckled, and get out the driveway, right? There's that kind of buffer time, but there's also just there have been studies that show it takes our brains, like, about 15 minutes to go from one task to another. You can't just sit there and go, okay, I'm going to have this task is going to go until 08:00, and then I'm going to do this task till 09:00. You have to build in at least a half hour in there just to go to the bathroom, get a drink, refocus, right.
Danielle:Move on to the time blocking and making sure that you're leaving space between each of those blocks. If you're doing home school in the morning, then you want to transition into work or even making lunch or any of those tasks after you get done with school session, then you need to leave yourself a block of time that you're just right.
Bonnie:That was my biggest pitfall when I first started time blocking is I was trying to schedule out like, every hour of the day, and then I'm like, oh, well, time blocking just doesn't work because I can't get all these things done. It wasn't the time blocking didn't work. I was just over scheduling myself, right? I started, like, really only scheduling something every other hour. I was getting a lot more accomplished because really those feelings of failure can be such a pitfall to us and really be what keeps us from moving forward. Because we've just decided, well, there must be something wrong with me. This works for all these other people.
Danielle:I can't do it right, I'm broken.
Bonnie:And it's usually just because we've over.
Danielle:Committed and tried to.
Bonnie:Exactly.
Danielle:You can only cram so much stuff into a day. I know for us, even with school, and we can do like a whole episode on how we do our school days and try to structure them. Whether or not they work out, it's a whole other story. Like, only planning like this long for math and if we don't get it done, we either stop and come back to it later or they have to do it later on their own or whatever it may be. Because I think the kids, even more so than adults, just get overwhelmed with.
Bonnie:The whole and we've been running into that a lot because we're visiting my parents and we're home schooling and is like, at their house and they only know traditional schooling. The kids are having a hard time with a lesson. They're having meltdowns. I'm like, alright, let's try something else for right? I get criticized because well no, they're just learning that if they have meltdowns, they don't have to do it. I was like, I'm not saying they don't have to do it right. We're just going to focus on something else and get their mind off it for until we can come back at it with fresh eyes and less overwhelm, less anxiety. And now she leaves the room.
Danielle:Yeah, I find out to do that with all three of them. I would say my youngest sometimes is the worst, but honestly, it's usually my oldest.
Bonnie:My oldest is getting a lot better. She's getting better.
Danielle:Anya, a lot of times I can just change what we're doing. She'll say she wants to do something, I can usually get her really motivated to actually start and then she just gets in the smooth and she's like, I don't want to do it because the book says I have to do it. So we'll move on to something different. We're doing Greek Mythology.
Bonnie:Oh, I like Greek mythology.
Danielle:We'll stop what we're doing and I'll just, I got this really cool book and we'll read a story out of it or I'll find a story online or a video or something and let them. That's another thing, whether you're talking about something that you are doing or something you're doing with your kids, sometimes it's changing the medium. It can make a big difference and whether or not you can stay focused long enough to finish the task.
Bonnie:Yeah, we do another whole episode on homeschooling, but I think that's one thing that my parents have a hard time understanding about my mom specifically, is that not all homeschool. Going to be in the curriculum reading the book, right? She only sees what's done in the book as the actual school work. It's like, what, let's go read a story, or let's go find a YouTube video about this, or let's go research this on Google or.
Danielle:Find a science experiment or the million or whatever.
Bonnie:Honestly, they're learning just as much, if not more, from, like, more hands on stuff, but especially if you've got kids that are more, like audio or visual learners. We didn't finish that lesson in the book, so we didn't make any progress.
Danielle:Not really the way it works. It's hard because, I mean, I was traditionally schooled, so it's even hard for me sometimes to think, to separate myself from the fact the curriculum says we're supposed to do it this way, right, and then we end up doing it a different way. I know they still grasp the concept and learn the things they were supposed to learn, but what.
Bonnie:I mean, if you're like, type A Nd, I'm, like, not. I was always that kid that pushed back and was always like, well, what if this isn't the best way to do this? Why do we do it this way? Why can't we find another way to do this? I was always didn't like homework, was really bad at doing my homework, was a great test taker, hated sitting through lectures.
Danielle:College was awful, right?
Bonnie:I was always just like, I was also coming up when ADHD really became a big thing and everybody was getting diagnosed with it, but no one understood it, right? I was always like, there's nothing wrong with their ability to learn, right? Like, we're just more hands on, and we just don't fit in that box and just listen to the teacher all day long.
Danielle:It became this big thing because went from a school with completely different dynamic than, like.
Bonnie:I don't see, like, there's nothing wrong with the student, something's wrong with the box, right? And we need to change the box. No, we can't change the box because the box is we understand the box in the box. We can control the box. Yes.
Danielle:Since you can't control the child and put the child in the box, there is a problem.
Bonnie:It's not the box, though.
Danielle:It's not the body of the child. I think we can apply that even to, like, gardening tasks, for instance, or even, like, laundry. Like, we all hate to fold laundry, but you can always start folding laundry and then go to something else and then come back to finishing folding it or putting it away or whatever it may be like gardening. Like, if you're planting something, I can't, like, be down on my knees all that time, what I mean? You get up and you go pull weeds or you do something else where you're up moving and doing a different task. So it's not so monotonous.
Bonnie:Right. Well, and two, I actually enjoy weeding.
Danielle:Because I'm weird, but you should have came up here.
Bonnie:I'm just going to plan the whole vacation just to come to Danielle's house. She'll feed me and I'll pull her weed.
Danielle:There you go.
Bonnie: My children will do whatever the heck my children are doing. For me and I guess this is kind of more like just one of the benefits of scheduling things out in general is I want to go out to my garden, but I feel guilty about going out to my garden because I have all these things inside the house that needs to be done. If I have it on my schedule that I'm going to do those things at this time, like, maybe hey, because this would be logical. If I go out early when it's cooler out, and then when it's the heat of the day, I come back inside the air conditioning and I do these things, because that would be logical, right? Instead, I get anxious about these things being done in the morning when it's cool out, and I find myself in the garden at 02:00 in the afternoon.
Bonnie:What did she do? Kind of having that scheduled out, kind of take some of that stress off because it's like I can sit down. Especially in this one thing with planning the stuff out ahead of time is you can look at it with a more logical brain.
Danielle:Right.
Bonnie:And you're not just kind of, like.
Danielle:Reacting to the anxiety.
Bonnie:Okay.
Danielle:Plenty of time for fun because listening to the dog not to go over is fine.
Bonnie:And I'm really guilty of this. Like, even just the book that I got from the library that you've read, like, three pages. I haven't read any of it. Are you serious? Bookmark is just in there so I.
Danielle:Don'T lose the bookmark.
Bonnie:Planning time for fun does not mean, like, spending money or even planning stuff for the whole family. It can literally just be, what do you enjoy? What do you need to recharge and setting time aside for that and actually doing it. Right? Sometimes that means, like, setting a boundary with your family. Like, I am off limits for this amount of time. I am locking myself in that room and I'm just going to do something I enjoy. Right.
Danielle:It can be anything, like you said, it doesn't have to be going somewhere and spending money. It can just be picking up a book or it doesn't even have to be every day.
Bonnie:It can just be like, I'm going to set aside time to read my book on Tuesday nights. I'm going to have a date night with my husband on Friday nights. You know, whatever. Right? Yeah, just setting that time aside to make sure that stuff is actually getting done because that is so important to actually taking care of you and not just like constantly exhausting all of your energy on.
Danielle:It shouldn't always be work. You should have the time to do something that you enjoy. Of course I think that we should schedule time to just have fun with our family. This is not specifically for that, just in general. I think we can't like my husband's only home on the weekends, so our fun ends up getting ruined because.
Bonnie:Going to lows and buying flooring. Right. You're not going to use we're going to use it.
Danielle:But we've been going hunting.
Bonnie:Yeah, but.
Danielle:Even if it's just going outside and kicking the ball or it doesn't have to be going anywhere doing anything, scheduling some amount of time. We like to play card games.
Bonnie:Well, yeah, I mean, for us, it's like we'll take the boat out to the river and it doesn't cost us anything except fuel for the boat, which is obscene. Well, I mean, we're not going that far up and down the river either, but it's just a fun thing. It will go out there, just float for a while. And.
Danielle:We didn't do like sometimes we go camping, we'll schedule hiking and all that stuff, but we just kind of went and we played cards and just sat.
Bonnie:Yeah, I can't remember who it was. I saw on Facebook the leaves were changing and so they're like, I just want to spend this weekend and just jump in the camper and go somewhere up in the mountains where the leaves are changing and I can see the leaves. Right. You just relax for the weekend and you go back home. Right.
Danielle:You don't have to worry about you kind of just let all that schedule and priority stuff just go for a few days and so you can recharge and then you can start fresh next week. It doesn't have to be and it doesn't have to be every weekend or every day or anything like that, but it's something you have to make time for yourself and for fun. Your schedule shouldn't just be about work and accomplishing tasks.
Bonnie:Right, I totally understand. It's hard to get away, especially when you have livestock. If you're working a job during the week, like your whole weekend is doing all of the things around the house or around the yard, whatever, that you couldn't get to during the week. Yeah, if you spend every weekend just cutting up branches or burning branches, cutting up trees, fixing the chicken poo firewood right? Yeah. You spend every weekend doing that, you get burned out really fast.
Danielle:Right.
Bonnie:You feel like you don't have a weekend because you worked all week and now here you are working all day.
Danielle:I think that's like the catch with weekend homesteaders. Like people that consider themselves just weekend homesteads because they work all week. A lot of times they even have a separate property where they all the weekends. I think you still have to like, you might enjoy those tasks. I think you still have to find a way to step away from it at least once in a while. It doesn't have to be every weekend that you're stepping away from, obviously, since you're only doing it on the weekends, but even if it's only a couple of times a year where you don't spend the weekend doing all the home study stuff, like we all have to have a break from.
Bonnie:Right? Well, and when we first got started, it was really tough for us because we both had jobs in the city. It was an hour commute each way. We would leave home before the sun came up. We would come home after the sun has gone down. We're feeding with flashlights on our head, those lamps. Literally the only time we can get anything done, because the only time we could see anything was on the weekend.
Danielle:Right.
Bonnie:And yeah, that was exhausting. And we only had chickens.
Danielle:We had a couple of goats, but.
Bonnie:It was nothing like we have now.
Danielle:Right.
Bonnie:The horses, but honestly, because we did have more horses at the time, were spending a lot of our weekends trail riding because we're right. Next state forest. And that was our fun time. Right. Were making time for that, so weren't working all weekend. That's the thing with the weekend homesteaders. I know a lot of times they'll feel like they're not real home setters because they're still working, but honestly, you're working twice as hard as anybody else, really. Yes.
Danielle:I'm here. We have other things that we have to do during the week, and there are some things that I just cannot do on my own. We're stuck doing all of these things on the weekend, but like the last several weekends, we've gone hunting and we get time. I mean, all we're doing is sitting quietly in a tree, but it's time away.
Bonnie:Yeah. I mean, honestly, I was like, even the drive up here, people were like, I can't believe you're driving that far to go see her. I'm like but one I actually enjoy driving. I don't enjoy traffic. The fact that it was pretty much all back roads to come up here, that was cathartic for me.
Danielle:Right.
Bonnie:That really was recharge for me. Plus being down in the Columbus area and seeing all of the development and all of the stuff going on down there, and then being able to drive through Amish country and go, oh, there are still farms in Ohio, thank goodness. So, yeah, that was nice. Explaining combines to my children because we don't harvest grains in Florida.
Danielle:Oh, my.
Bonnie:Don't worry, folks. No one's being murdered. They're just late. They're playing.
Danielle:Look over the schedule. I don't remember what you were doing with this one, to be quite honest.
Bonnie:Well, it's all right, so after you've gone through all put all these pieces in, kind of looking over and one rechecking everything. If you put too much stuff down, is there anything you missed? Just kind of being able to plan out and know what to expect for the week ahead. Also look over it like the night before each thing or the morning of. Like when you wake up, you're having a cup of coffee. Look at what your schedule is for the day you should really like, especially when you're first getting into doing, planning, checking back with that schedule as often as possible to kind of keep on track because you're not going. To remember everything that you put down.
Danielle:Make sure anything that you have dentist appointments or doctor appointments or whatever that you don't normally have and making sure that you have them all written into your weeks.
Bonnie:Because I'll put them in my phone and then forget to copy them over to my planner and not get the notification for the dentist appointment for like an hour before we need to leave for the dentist appointment. That's always fun. Yeah. Scrambling, like glancing over and making sure.
Danielle:Like you said, you haven't overdone things that you haven't, like, filled in every waking hour of every day because then you just get burnt out and you don't get as much accomplished if you try to cram your schedule full.
Bonnie: Right. You have to think realistically, when is your peak energy for the day? Because if it's 09:00 A.m., you're kind of out of luck. I mean, if you're wiped out after 07:00 P.m. Every night or 05:00.
Danielle:P.m. Or whatever, you have three kids, right?
Bonnie:You're trying to, like, do things that require mental energy after that point in time, like make food sometimes.
Danielle:That'S.
Bonnie:Why God made frozen pizza. Then, you might want to readjust things and put that at a different time or push it off to the next day or something, right? Okay.
Danielle:The last one is planner options and alternatives. I like a paper planner. I think Bonnie uses a paper.
Bonnie:I like a paper planner. I need to be able to put my brain on paper, right. It does help me to remember things if I write it down. Me too. It helps me to have a visual. Again, if everything is in my phone and I'm going to my phone to check my calendar or whatever, then it's more easy for me to get distracted and open other apps and do other things and not get my planning stuff done. Now, I will usually kind of back things up to my Google Calendar because not that my husband ever actually remembers to check it. I have shared my calendar with my husband, so if he tells me. I didn't tell him something. I'm like, did you check the calendar? I have no more excuses, or he has no more excuses. My assistants can see my calendar, so that way they can see it. Plus, sometimes I do need to be able to drag and drop different appointments, and that makes it easy with the digital options. That is one benefit to using a digital option, is if you're still trying to kind of get your groove of what your routine is going to look like and what you're going to do day to day, being able to just drag blocks around where they fit is really handy.
Danielle:You can always use pencil.
Bonnie:Where's the fun in that? I want different colored gel pens, and I want to color coordinate all of my time blocks based off of theme.
Danielle:So you can procrastinate because you don't.
Bonnie:Have the right no, I trust me, I make multiples of all of the colors of my gel pens, but then I'm going to go through my giant box of stickers, and then I'm going to find just the right motivational stickers.
Danielle:We know why Bonnie likes the paper Planner.
Bonnie:I'm a there are about a Kajillion Paper Planners out there. You can literally pick your favorite. I'm not going to say there's anyone that's like the perfect planner. It really depends on what you need out of the planner and making sure.
Danielle:That it contains the things like that because you can add different things to it. They have a home school section that you can add to your planner, and they have a blogging thing that you can add to your planner and a different type of business.
Bonnie:Well, I know, yeah, a lot of people will use the Aaron Condemned because you can order the specific pages that you want in your planner and customize it to you, but they're a little pricey.
Danielle:Plumbing is kind of pricey.
Bonnie:I know a lot of people who use the Happy Planners, and Happy Planners have several different versions, and there's like, pages that you can add.
Danielle:The happy planners. Oh, yeah.
Bonnie:I actually really like the undated. Well, all of her undated.
Danielle:Ruth Duke up.
Bonnie:Oh, my goodness. Why did I just forget the name of the planner?
Danielle:I don't know. I know who you're talking about, but I don't know the name of her planner.
Bonnie:Of course I looked at my parents'house because that's a good place. That's a good place. I haven't used it all this week.
Danielle:There's all kinds of different digital things you can use. Some people just use like, a Google Calendar or, it's the Living Well Planner. That sounds right. Yeah.
Bonnie:It is living well. Planner but yeah, I've used that one for a few years now. I like that it's undated because I really like especially with the home schooling and everything, but I like planning my year from July to June and so that way I can just date it the way I want.
Danielle:I know the plum planner. You can get undated, but you can also pick what month you want it to start at, so you can order one any time of year, and you can tell them you want to start at this point. You can do twelve months or 18 months or 24 months, and you can add all those different things in there.
Bonnie:I kind of like it.
Danielle:Yeah, I need to order a new one.
Bonnie:That'll do it, too. All right. Also, there are the ones that they look like a paper planner, but they're on your tablet. It'll even be animated to look like it's flipping pages. You can just do everything on your tablet, and it saves it as a planner. It doesn't save it as and you.
Danielle:Can make the motions to highlight things or check things off. Because I know a lot of people that they like the satisfaction of being able to check off boxes, like physically check off boxes.
Bonnie:I like checking or scratching across.
Danielle:That's why a lot of people like paper planners. We've gotten to the point where we still have it.
Bonnie:Yeah, that would be great if my children would stop breaking my tablet.
Danielle:No, ours don't work.
Bonnie:Ours is just cracked. It's still under warranty, so when I get back home, I'm going to send it off to you. Thanks.
Danielle:All right. Are we done talking about planning your week?
Bonnie:I think we are. Okay, our children. Has everyone done interrupting us? Does anyone else want to interrupt us really quick before then? No. Wow.
Danielle:I think everybody interrupted us at some point.
Bonnie:You probably could travel.
Danielle:He was trying not to, though. He was, like, standing over there.
Bonnie:All right, well, yeah. What lesson or what do we want to final words?
Danielle:Any final words?
Bonnie:This talkie talk over here. Sorry, we had one more interruption.
Danielle:I think the point is that everybody should try to find a routine to plan out their week, because things go more smoothly and more productive if you have things planned out.
Bonnie:Right. And really, what's that saying? A goal without a plan is just a wish. We can set intentions, but unless we actually come up with a game plan.
Danielle:For how to actually and what is.
Bonnie:Accomplished, that what's the Bible verse?
Danielle:Without a plan, the people perish, or whatever it is.
Bonnie:I don't know that one.
Danielle:You're not helpful.
Bonnie:I'm sorry.
Danielle:Where there is no vision, that people perish property.
Bonnie:Oh, okay.
Danielle:Where there is no vision, the people perish. So you have a schedule. That's your vision for the week, and so you won't perish.
Bonnie:So there's your takeaway. If you don't want your children to perish, not be retired.
Danielle:We all have to have a plan and a goal, and it helps to have it all written out on paper or on your tablet or your Google calendar or whatever it may be.
Bonnie:Believe me, flying by your pants is not the way to get anything accomplished.
Danielle:That's all right.
Bonnie:How's that book coming?
Danielle:It's like 40,000 words.
Bonnie:Well, that's good. You scratched the last one you started.
Danielle:I still have it.
Bonnie:Okay, that's good. I started a different on the back burner.
Danielle:Yeah, I have a bag of chips, apparently. All right, everybody is in here talking.
Bonnie:You guys have a good one and we'll catch you next time. Thank you for listening to this episode of the grand and Simplicity podcast. You can help us reach more listeners. Please share this episode with a friend and also leave us a review on Apple podcasts. You can also help support the financial needs of the show by buying us a coffee over on Patreon.