Building Onto Your Foundation Routine

For the first part of the month, we spent a lot of time working on our daily foundation routine for the area of our life that we’ve chosen to focus on for this challenge.  The dailies are the toughest ones to nail down because they require some of our attention each and every day.  I know it can be fiddly, but when you’re going from scattered to sane, taking these small steps is really important.

 Now that we have had a chance to focus strictly on our dailies, it is time to add another level to our foundation routines.

We started with our daily routines because those are the ones that have the biggest in our lives.  They also require a little more work.  That’s part of the reason we start with one life area choose just three things we need to do daily.  Today we’re taking that system and expanding it to encompass other need-to-do items that are important but don’t need to be done daily.

Building Onto Your Foundation Routine

Remember, back in the beginning when I asked you to choose an area of your life you wanted to focus on?  I included the following printable:

If you need a refresher about what this printable is and how to use it, check out the post – Where to Start? Choosing the Beginning of Your Time Management Journey – it will explain it all.

For today’s step, I want you to grab your sheet and take a look at your list of tasks, responsibilities, and other things you need to do section.  Go through your list and highlight or star any tasks that don’t need to be done daily.

This is a great time to evaluate the frequency in which you feel you should be doing things.  I’ll use myself as an example.  

In our old home, we only had one small bathroom that four of us had to use.  I used to give it a quick cleaning every day and then twice a week (or more often, depending) I would deep clean it. When we moved into our new home we suddenly had 2 1/2 bathrooms, but I tried to stick to my twice a week deep cleaning routine.  

It took me about three months before I realized that I didn’t need to be deep cleaning them quite that often.  I adjusted my cleaning schedule to take into consideration our new needs and lifestyle.  Five days out of the week, I’m the only one home during the day (for most of the year anyway) so I could easily adjust the frequency of my cleanings to fit into the new situation.

How to Evaluate Your Tasks

Go through that list and ask yourself how often you really need to be doing something on it.

• Do you need to clear your desk daily, or is better to do it weekly?
• What about the filing?  Is that important enough to do every day, or could you set aside one day for filing each week?
• Do you really  need to do laundry daily or could you adjust how you do it to when you have a full load?
• Do you need/want to play board games with your kiddos every day, or would family game night once a week be something to consider?

Spending some time thinking about this will help you with our next step.  If you’re feeling ambitious, write a new list of all your non-daily tasks on a new piece of paper.  You’ll need this list tomorrow.

Just because we’re focusing on adding a new level to our foundation routine doesn’t mean we can forget about our three daily tasks.  Have you been keeping track of whether or not you’ve been doing yours?  Here’s the habit tracker printable in case you need it.  And remember, it is never too late to get started.

If you’re having a hard time getting your three things done each day, maybe take a moment to think about what you can do to set yourself up for success.  It’s really important to keep working towards getting those three things done each day. I promise you the more you work at it, the easier it will become.  

I know it seems like a pain at times, but remind yourself that it’s only three things.  You can so totally do three things!  If you’re feeling like I am – in need of a little motivation go grab one of the inspirational quotes I shared on the weekend.

Don’t Give Up

For now, I’ll let you get to it.  Tomorrow we’re going to take another step towards reclaiming our lives, and I’ve got a few more tools I want to share with you this week.

Now it’s your turn – drop me a line in the comments below and tell me about one task on your list that you feel you could do less frequently.