Time

As I was driving to the doctor today I started thinking about time management. Every day I have a list of things that I need to do, and I try to schedule my time so that they all get done. Sometimes this approach doesn't work. Most of the time I end up pissing my husband off.

If I know how long a certain activity will take then I have no problems deciding to start it in three hours. in the meantime I may choose to do something that's purely for recreation or relaxation. This doesn't mean that I've forgotten what I need to do, just that, for reasons that might only be known to me, I'm putting it off.

The biggest reason that this approach will fail is unexpected requests. I almost had this happen today. I had a doctor's appointment at 2:00, that meant that I needed to leave the house by 1:00. At 12:45 I was just finishing dinner and still needed to change my shirt, put myself together, and get out the door. That's when my mom decided to let me know that she needed me to fix her some lunch. I had 15 minutes worth of stuff to do, and now I needed to add in something that could take a while. Fortunately she realized my time constraints and asked for a PBJ. I managed to get out of here on time, but barely.

I think that I'm more likely to get frustrated by that kind of thing because of my husband. He used to wait until 10 minutes before I needed to leave for work to let me know that he needed me to take him to the store before I left for the day. It took a little while, but I convinced him that it was in his best interest to let me know the night before that he needed something so that I could add it to my schedule for a time that was convenient for me.

He still gets upset with me if I don't do things on his schedule, and I still let him know what he can do with his schedule, but I don't get as upset about it now. And so we've both learned that one person's time management can sometimes be a family project.