Bujo Babyyy [Life Organization for Squirrel Brained Aliens... I guess for people too.]

Today, Princess Leia and I are going to show you how to not suck at time management.

Earth and its inhabitants endlessly confuse and overwhelme me.

So, when things like this happens....

And I realize that Four is Five now and Three is Four and baby sister is turning 7 and 12 is going to be 13 in a couple of weeks and SHIT, Rose! Rose’s birthday is in two months… TWO MONTHS!?!?! My alien brain collapses and I begin I hyperventilate. I have to plan a party? I’ve never done that!!! I tried once but it was an epic failure, birthdays since have just been dinner and cake with a few family members and she was totally cool with it. Now she’s turning FIVE! She’ll remember this one for quite a while, she wants a real party this time with decorations and stuff because she’s watched twelve of her cousins have awesome birthday parties this year. (Okay not twelve, eight. Eight of her cousins.)

Kill. Me. Now.

Spare me the stress and panic please, oh please I beg you. I don’t know how to do this!!! Oh yeah, and I’m broke. Have I mentioned before that I don’t get paid? Because I don’t. Ski and BIL will help I’m sure but I’m weird about it. I only plan on getting her one present from myself, a functional mermaid tail and bathing suit set. The plan, because @Seer and I convinced her that is she eats enough mermaid soup (Pho) she’ll turn into a mermaid, is to take her out for Pho the night before her party and sneak the tail on her when she sleeps. Convincing my kid that she’s turned into a mermaid is totally worth that $60, don’t you think?

^source

Anyway… The party she wants? A mermaid pool party of course! So, put together a super awesome mermaid pool party for as little money as humanly possible… I DON’T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS!!! Panic. Panic. Panic. Breathe, calm, I got this. She wants a pool, party… Well Dad and Wife have a nice big pool, in a nice big backyard, and tents, and tables, and chairs, and drink dispenser jug things, (and I’m in such a state that I just said bless you to myself,) and a bubble machine. All of that instantly taken care of. Phew.

I’m calm now, right? No, I’m fucking not! There’s a lot of stuff to a kids party! Too much, too much. Ooooh what am I going to do??? I can’t throw it on someone else, I’m her Mom.

Stop.

Breathe.

Bujo.

For those of you that don’t know what a Bujo is let me briefly explain. Bujo is everything, bujo is life, hail Bujo. Bujo is short for Bullet Journal. It is a very popular system for self organization mixed with creative expression. Some people make masterpieces on each page, I try to keep mine more efficient with a flair of creativity. I like the artsy look but I also know how easily my brain gets overwhelmed so for me keeping it simple is a must. What’s in a Bujo? Oh everything. In my Bujo, after the table of contents of course, is:

Yearly

• A note to myself that I wrote on new year's
• Uhm, female specific tracking page,
• List of books I want to read this year (usually based on recommendation),
• TV series tracker and movies I want to see list,
• Finances and my credit score,
• All of my account usernames and passwords
• Daily, weekly, monthly routine and cleaning schedule
• Little tracker for small wins and important lessons
• Birthdays list

Monthly

• Month intro
• Calendar
• Earn/spend log
• Daily gratitude
• Mood tracker
• Sleep tracker
• Habit tracker
• Two page weekly spread x4
• Two page weekly time management monitoring x4
  Repeated each month

The very last page is a pen test, and from that going back towards the front will be add on's like a @Dreemit says page ;) and maybe, just maybe gasp party planning pages!

Can I be honest for a second here?

I’ve been seriously neglecting my precious Bujo. With some life happenings and health problems I fell off in February, though there’s places you can see I tried through March, I didn’t even make any layouts for April, I started trying to make a simple layout thing for May thinking that would help but I was dumb enough to leave it on the couch one day and just found it again last week so no June. This is bad… why? I can’t function without lists. Say it again,

I can not function without lists.

My alien nature makes it very difficult. You humans may label it something like ADHD-OCD. It winds up going something like “Oh hey I should take this garbage out… look at all of those cigarette butts puts down garbage by front steps to clean cigarette butts “Mama I need you!!!” puts cigarette butts down in nice pile for the wind to mess right back up “What?” “I need you to wipe my butt.” “Okay” Wipes butt and notices dirty towels on floor Okay well let’s clean the bathroom, “I’m hungryyyy” leaves dirty towels at top of basement stairs to make snack Ah this floor is so dirty! grabs broom Well I should probably wipe off the counters first, leaves broom to wipe off counters Where did all these dishes come from, and whyyyy can’t people put them in the sink? sets aside rag to do dishes, forgets to start dishwasher and notices the dirty floors again.

At this point I’ve been cleaning and responding to various children for hours and I look around to see… The house messier than when I started, and now I’m overwhelmed and anxious and just want to take a nap with the kids. Not very efficient is it?

On the other hand if I have detailed premade lists to go back and frequently reference, things go pretty well. I can look at my time management monitor and see ‘I’m supposed to be doing my morning routine’ flip to my always marked routine page and see ‘first is this, I will do this and this only. Second is this, I will do this and this only.’ And low and behold as long as I wake up at a reasonable time, the house is clean by noon, the kids know at this point lunch > clean up > quiet time. If I don’t pay attention they will take advantage but so long as I remind them before hand they’re pretty good about it. Quiet time is generally from 1-4 pm, this is when they go up to their own rooms and either play quietly with their toys, watch tv, take a nap, or a combination. They can do anything they want as long as they’re quiet, out of the way and keep to house rules.

This leaves me time to do things I need to focus for, like Steemit posts. Or if I’m having a rough health day, take a rest myself. At the end of the day I can look at my checked off to do lists, my clean house, my happy children and feel accomplished, even when I only managed to survive the day without it looking like a bomb went off, even if I just check my three “survival mode” boxes, I can look at my Bujo and see that I did something, and feel good about myself.

I am very easily overwhelmed.

Even making a to-do list is overwhelming.

Without a structured plan I am lost, I am floating, I am stuck in a strange limbo between the human and alien realms. Maybe you aren’t quite as extreme as I am, maybe you can handle your every day existence with ease… I still suggest you give what I’m about to show you a try. Why? Because it can help you to see some areas where you may not be using your time as efficiently as you could and improve on that. Maybe you can fit in some extra time to work on a Steemit post, or a a bubble bath, or a date… Maybe you can begin to break a cycle of stagnation and depression. Give it a try, see what happens, and let me know how it feels!

Because I’m jumping back into it, and I want to show you in all simple steps we won’t head into the Bujo just yet. I’m going to walk with y’all through my entire process. We'll do it together. The very first thing that we’re going to do is…

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Timelines

Draw a line on a piece of paper, any piece of paper. Notebooks, notepads, binders, anything will work really. Now… ask yourself a very simple question. What time do I want to wake up every day? I do best when I wake up at 5 am. When I’m in a good, centered, healthy place I wake up at 5am naturally. I have not been in this place, I started veering back to it but a bout of nightmares threw me back off. So, I’m going to pick a very reasonable 8am to start with. If you currently wake up at noon and want to wake up at say, 7am, I suggest you do what I’m doing and do a step down, start at say 10am for now. If you have to wake up for a job at 7am every day, but you want a little more time start with six, if you wake up at 4am every day and you’re happy with it, start at 4am. Write that time at the beginning of your line. Now do the same thing for bedtime. I want to be in bed at 10pm, yes I realize that gives me 10 hours of sleep time but for me this is a good thing. I have a major issue with nightmares so that extra couple of hours would help to even out my wake time through the night until I ease back a couple of hours in the morning. Now just go through and add the hours in between.

Now log! The first thing that you’re going to want to do if you have a job is to block out the time when you work. I stay home so I’m not going to do that. I, when I’m in this part of the process, set a timer for every hour to remind me to log my activities. You don’t need to write down every time you get up to get a drink (unless you want to), mine here has more detail than it usually would after I get it running for a while. Everyone’s timeline will look a lot different. The purpose at this stage is just to get a general, viewable idea of how you’re spending your time in a day. I suggest doing a timeline every day for at least a week to give you a good look.

Now we know how we are spending our time, let’s talk about how we want to spend our time.

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Survival mode

What is survival mode? Survival mode is when life kicks you in the face and you’re so stressed/sick/busy that you collapse into a blackhole. Survival mode is those times when you just can’t make a gluten/red dye/nut free butterfly snack platter for your kids girl scout meeting, when you have to say no to dinner with friends and leave the guest bathroom unfishished for a while. Survival mode is no extras. For survival mode you want to pick three things, just three that will help you grasp onto that last bit of rope. Three things to do every day no matter what. If you get those three things checked off you win! Anything after is a happy bonus. My survival mode in my bujo technically has nine things, three small things grouped into three larger areas. You can stick with just three simple, in fact I recommend it, but I highly advise against doing more than what I did… remember we’re trying to set ourselves up for success not failure. A good way to think of this is ‘could I get this done if I had the worst flu of my life if I really had to?’ if the answer is no, don’t use it.

I’ll give you a little explanation of my survival mode.

Home

• Dishes
• Laundry
• Sweep

^{This section does not mean do all of the dishes, all of the laundry, or make sure the floors are actually clean. This section means to do each of these things once a day. One load of dishes. One load of laundry. Sweep once. There are a lot of people in my house, and on an average day when I’m all caught up and running effectively I do two loads of dishes, two loads of laundry and sweep three times at least. If I don’t do these things at least once in a day, after a couple of days I’m drowning in them.}

Self

• Nutrition
• Care
• Bujo

^{I need to watch my nutritional intake. If I don’t I go into anemia (like I just did recently). If I ignore this everything I’m barely holding together when in survival mode falls to pieces. Care means remembering to change out of my pajamas, brush my hair and teeth in the morning too, little stuff like that because I do get in states where I’ll be so busy I forget completely to take care of myself. Not kidding, I’ll even forget to eat. Bujo because if I let my Bujo fall by the wayside like I’ve recently done… well… I explained that earlier. Is no good.}

Family

• Cook
• Patience
• Be present

^{Cook doesn’t mean present my family with a 5 star meal. Sometimes it means heating up some dinosaur nuggets, and throwing some fries in the deep fryer. Patience, I get rather testy when I’m stressed. Be present, not physically or mentally hiding. Those last two are soooo super important because if I don’t fulfill them the internal ‘misbehave’ alarm goes off in my kids making any stressful or bad situation much worse.}

So you see what I mean? Survival mode is the three things that you need to do to survive the worst situations. Start doing these things right away. Even if you just have your check boxes on a post-it note do them and check them while we keep building our system. I’m keeping mine the way that it is, because it still fits.

I know at this point you’re probably giving me funny looks at the epic simplicity of what I’m telling you, but think about it. You don’t just plop a building out of the sky do you? No, ground up piece by piece work is how it’s done… and what makes it fall down if you f’ it up, right? Right, so stay with me because its time to…

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Prioritize

Fuck everyone else, their desires and expectations and think for a minute about what your priorities are. Pick one. For me the top priority is Home. Managing the house and the kids is what I do. I do this so that Ski and Bil don’t have to worry about it, and so I don’t have to worry about things like electric bills. Temporary situation yes because not having my own finances is madding, but that’s how it is right now. Now we’re going to pick sub-priorities. What are the little things that make the whole? Is it most important to you to have the sink clear, or always having fresh linens, or a certain standard of meal? Pick up to five. It is important for me to have my home be…

Notice I didn’t put “clean”. I didn’t put clean because most people see dishes in the sink and that completely overrides the white clove countertops. I am the type of person that will spend eight hours cleaning a bathroom. I have also realized that you can spot clean every single inch of the house, but if you’re too tired to mop the floors at the end of the day those floors become the cause of a fight. Most people are more concerned with general tidiness rather than cleanliness. So “clean” is not my priority, tidiness is. Does that mean that I’m going to let a layer of filth accumulate? No of course not, but keeping the whole house tidy and cleaning in a rotation of smaller sections is more important than spending time regularly cleaning off every hundred something DVD cases on the shelf. What’s the best way to keep the house tidy? A place for everything and everything in its place.

I’m an organizational nut job. I like everything a certain way, the most sensible and efficient way possible. That can be hard to do in a house of twelve. I can get the kids to go through their toys and throw out dirty/broken/missing pieces toys every once in a while, like yesterday… but with twelve people constantly accumulating and never putting anything away let alone in the right place… it hurts my brain. So yes, priority. If I can get this house running like a well oiled machine, everything falls into place. I like my home to be comfortable, beyond just efficiency things, I like a little ambiance, scented candles and flowers on the table. I’m not sure why exactly those things are so important to me but they really are. Last but not least fun; I don’t want my kids to be bored little robots for the sake of a clean and orderly house, I want to make sure they can have fun (while hopefully also being clean and orderly).

Hopefully my selection process helps you in yours, because we’re going to do four more. You can spider web them, in fact that’s encouraged, because then you can work on two priorities with one activity. Example this weekend I plan to go on a long walk with a friend along the river, which will hit four marks because I’m sure we’ll wind up talking about Steemit, we always do.

So you see, this walk will hit four priorities making it a worthy use of my time. So you know, this is exactly the proper goal setting strategy as well. When you’re mapping out your priorities, you’re goal setting too. ;)

You should get comfortable saying a big NO to anything that doesn’t fit into your priorities. You can of course do things that don’t if you have the time and desire to, but your priority bubbles always come first. Got it? Good. After establishing our priorities we can break them down into…

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Tasks

This is where you break down into even bitty-er steps. Let’s look at my priorities and how they can be further broken down.

Home:

• Tidy
• Dishes
• Laundry
• Pick up
• Sweep
• Mop
• Dust
• Clean bathroom
• Kids rooms
• Upstairs
• Fridge
• Linens
• Windows
• Glass
• Under furniture
• Basement
• Organize
• Set coffee pot each night
• Make sure kids know what to expect
• Incorporate things to make the kids happy

Health

• Do yoga
• Exercise
• Drink more water
• Go on hikes
• Monitor eating
• Cut back smoking

Spirituality

• Meditate
• Astrology
• Meetings

Social

• Spend time with family
• Spend time with friends

Education/Career

• Plan education
• Get job
• Pay on current loans
• Improve finances
• Post/interact on Steemit
• Meetings

I know, I know, looks like a lot of shit. We ain’t done yet. That’s just our baseline, but it's okay don’t get overwhelmed I promise you, we got this. Now we’re going to take these little puzzle pieces and put them together into…

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Daily Routines

Do you remember that time line we did? This is where it starts to become important. Study it. Study that week of data. I’ll show you an old one. The first thing you’re going to look for is things that you do around the same time every day and use those to make blocks. If you for example, wake up at 7am and go to work at 9am, 7am-9am is your morning block. 9am-5pm is your work block. 5pm until you eat dinner at 7pm is your afternoon block, after dinner at 7pm until you go to bed at 11pm is your evening block.

Now ask yourself, what needs to be done every single day? What do I only need to do a couple of times a week? What do I only need to do once a month? You can even add yearly if you want to, I don’t want to. Most of this is staying the same for me, the biggest change is Steemit. When I did this at the end of December I had an account, but wasn’t yet active on Steemit. I also now have a more vested interest on keeping my evenings free after bedtime.

Daily	Weekly	BiWeekly	Monthly
Dishes	Mop	Steemit Meetings	Linens
Laundry	Dust	Spiritual Meetings	Windows
Wipe Down	Bathroom	Hike	Glass
Pick Up	Kids Rooms	-	Under Furniture
Sweep	Upstairs	-	Basement
Yoga	Mop	-	Bujo Layouts
Exercise	Fridge	-	Organizing Project
Steemit	Family/Friends Day	-	Loan Payment
Set Coffee Pot	-	-	Credit Check

See? Now the tasks are a little spaced out, but let’s take it a step further and set days for those weekly tasks.

Now, I can go to Steemit meetings every other Tuesday, and Spirituality meetings on the other Tuesdays so I only have 2-3 hours for meetings once a week.

Sunday, written as God’s day (meaning my ain’t doin’ shit day), would be when I spend time with friends and family, probably hiking.

The monthly items usually just happen on any random day where I have an extra half an hour. The loan payment and credit check take about ten minutes on the first of the month, so I can take care of them while I smoke my morning cigarette.

Frequency is established. It’s time now to round out our everyday process. Review your everyday items, and sort them into your available blocks. Because there are so many people constantly revolving in my house a lot of my daily things need to be repeated. It wound up looking a like this.

My blocks don’t necessarily take an entire time chunk. They just need to be done in that time chunk. If I finish my morning block on time, I can fit in weekly, and monthly house work, spend a few extra minutes on Steemit, read a bit, so on and so forth.

Here’s that older timeline I promised. This is from January, right around then I was having a really bad bout of nightmares, hardly sleeping at all so I was going out overnight a lot, which didn’t fit into the hours listed. The way that I do this is on one side I timeline how I want my time to be used, and on the other how my time was actually spent. This is the best way to see the discrepancies and smoke out your biggest time offenders. Eventually you’re going to want them to line up nice and pretty of course, but this really isn’t something to beat yourself up over if it doesn’t. Remember as long as you hit your boxes on survival mode you’re winning. This is just for self-awareness.

You can throw yourself into it all at once, but it is a little easier to get your toes wet. Start with your morning routine, try to get your morning block done every day. Once you feel comfortable with it, add another routine block, and another. If you feel like that’s a little too much structure that’s fine too, leave a block or two empty for spontaneity. That’s Sundays for me. I never block anything for Sundays. The rest of the week because of the many, many children I really have to keep it rolling.

^{I keep my routines in the beginning of my Bujo after all of my lists, always with a page marker for easy flip-to. I don’t include them in my weekly To-Do section because I think of them less as a To-Do and more as a lifestyle structure, and weather or not I’ve done them is included in my weekly timeline. You can of course, make them into a checklist if you’d like. If that seems like a lot of writing out each day, you can write out the list with sharpie on a white board and do the checks in dry erase markers. I used to just have a reference sheet for routines and check off “amR [ ], pmR, BedtimeR [ ]” as I finished with each one. I also timed out each routine to see how long they would take to better schedule them into my time blocks, I encourage this, but it really isn’t necessary.}

These are the bones of your well organized, time effective life. Take it slow if you need to. NOW we can hit the Bujo! I like the Leuchttrum1917 grid dot notebook because it I like to make pretty chart-y groups. It overwhelms my brain less to look at smaller lists squared off into groups than to just look at a list, but any notebook, or paper grouping method would work. All I’m going to do here is take what we just did and make it pretty.

^{Like my ruler?}

Start here my lovies, and next time we'll dive deeper with monthly and weekly layouts.

(images and video credit moi, @Accio)