When it’s an afternoon!
Okay, so it’s a lousy riddle but it’s been a real dilemma for me.
At the moment, I’m trapped in what parents around here refer to as kindergarten hell. Kids in kindergarten here go to school in the morning (8:45-12) for two weeks and then switch to afternoons (1-3) for two weeks. So my schedule is a little frustrating.*
I can add almost anything to my day, as long as I can do it at almost the same time each day. I also work best when I have a couple of hours at time – choppy schedules cause me great stress.
Are you starting to see the shape of my problem here?
My favourite work days are the ones when I can bring both kids to school for 8:45, come home, have breakfast, tidy up a little, catch up with some friends online using my laptop at the kitchen table, drink some tea and then head to my home office to work at 9:30. I work until 11:30, get lunch started and then pick up The Little Guy from school.
That works really well when he’s in mornings.
But when he’s in afternoons, I bring The Boy to school for 8:45, come home have breakfast, hang out with The Little Guy, do some housework, try to squeeze in a little work between requests from TLG, talk to him endlessly about the fact that this is not actually a day off and that he is going to school this afternoon and no, they won’t have playtime or snacktime because school in short. Then The Man comes home to lunch, the three of us eat together and then I bring TLG to school, rush back home, try to work from 1:10 to 2:40, and then head back to school to pick them both up and start the snack/homework/play/make supper part of the day.
So yeah, when he’s in afternoons I don’t get a lot of work done because everything’s so choppy.
I tried to solve that by having my friend K babysit a couple of afternoons each week. When TLG is in mornings, she babysits from 1-5 (and picks TB up from school). When TLG is in afternoons she picks them both up from school and babysits from 3-5.
That backfired on me because I found it hard to settle and focus in the afternoons. If I had been working all morning, my brain seemed to think we were done for the day, and if I had been hanging out with TLG all morning my brain was scrambled from five-year-old conversation.
This has been plaguing me for a while (in fact the afternoon problem even predates the kindergarten problem) and I haven’t been able to find a workable solution.
But then last week, I had a great chat with Liz from Dream Garden Coaching and she got me thinking about what made mornings work for me. Then I enlisted The Man and my friend J to help me brainstorm how to make my afternoons more like my mornings.
And, as usual, a friend could solve my problem when I couldn’t. J quickly identified the fact that my morning work sessions started with putting my house and my brain in order, and spending a little time by myself NOT working before I started trying to work.
Then we brainstormed ways for me to get that downtime in the afternoons, especially when K is babysitting and she and the kid (or kids) are downstairs and I can’t be alone there.
So, my new afternoon work plan looks like this:
If someone is home:
Have lunch
Take laptop and tea to my bedroom for 15-20m and hang out with online friends
Head to my office to work
If no one is home:
Come back from school run
Have tea and hang out time at kitchen table
Head to my office to work
And THAT’S how I’m going to make my afternoon more like a morning.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
How about you? Does your best work time match your schedule? If not, can you make your scheduled work time feel more like your best work time?
*And that’s before you add in professional development days, one day off per month so the teachers can host the Kinderstart program, parent-teacher meeting days, AND the fact that my older kid goes to school from 8:45-3 each day so I have to go back and forth to the school at least 3 times per day.
