How to Plan Your Week When There is No Plan: Quarantine Edition
This afternoon I paced around the kitchen like one of the lions at the zoo. Tim had come home from work early - we never know how many hours per week the hospital will be able to give him, so we never know how much he’s going to be paid each week. It’s a fun game we’re playing over here.
Anyways, he came home early, which is such a relief when all 3 kids are melting down and it’s snowing in April. Naturally, as soon as he walked in the door, the chaos calmed. Our big kids started building a fort together upstairs, and Alice found a necklace to put on and take off over and over.
The snow was falling, the kids were happy, and I was, well, restless. It feels unnatural to sit down and just be on a Tuesday afternoon. There was laundry to put away and dinner to prep and articles to research. Throughout the past few weeks, I’ve learned just how addicted I am to productivity, efficiency and structure. I miss my predictable days with my workout schedule, prepped meals and daily writing plan.
With both of our jobs feeling pretty unstable right now, we have no other choice than to take things one day at a time. So what do we do? Just throw out all plans and wing it? Well, a little bit of that, but I would completely lose my marbles if I didn’t wrangle some sort of structure to our time at home.
Maybe you’re also living in an extended limbo period. Even if your job and the other big stuff is stable right now, I think we’re all experiencing such uncertainty and that weighs on you. I’m sharing the process I’m using for planning my week when it’s impossible to plan anything.
Name What’s Not Working
Our first step is to take one massive step back. Living through a global pandemic does not mean we can start with our normal schedules and tweak them each day. We have to let it all fall apart and start anew. I realized that I was feeling so stressed and behind because I had skipped this step of naming what’s not working.
Trying to “fit” quarantine into my normal schedule is not a real strategy. I was trying to force my new life as a home schooler into my already very full schedule of themed work days, regular workouts and oh yeah, caring for a baby. If you’re feeling like you can’t keep up, ask yourself, “what’s really not working here?”
Have you been trying to hang onto your old way of doing things? It seems comforting to grab onto some sense of normalcy, but I think we’re way past normalcy right now. Let the pieces fall, see what’s there, and start again.
Decide What Matters Right Now
Next, let’s start with my favorite question from Kendra at The Lazy Genius: What matters?
What matters to you right now? Is it spending more time together as a family? Cooking from scratch more? Getting out and taking a walk everyday? Just getting through the week in one piece?
What matters to me is knowing that I lived into this time. I do not want to reach the end of this crazy pandemic time, only to realize I spent the entire time waiting for it to be over. I want to experience all of it. The beautiful moments like kneading homemade bread with the kids. And the hard moments like making a financial plan with Tim when we learned he was being furloughed indefinitely. I want to be here.
Think through what really matters (at this point in time) in the following categories:
Family: Whether you live alone or with a gaggle of children, family life is different right now. Being a full-time parent, home schooler and worker is just objectively impossible. That’s why it’s so crucial for us to name what matters. So we can know when to stop for the day. What matters to you for home school, family time, couple time and activities? For us, having a loose daily schedule is working. We get to the school work we can, and I don’t torture myself by opening up the “optional work” folder from Charlotte’s teacher, because let’s be real, there’s no way that’s happening.
Work: Has anyone else noticed how many unnecessary tasks used to take up their time? It’s kind of a gift that we no longer have time or energy to waste. With all the stressors floating around, I simply don’t have the bandwidth to worry about things that don’t really matter. As a writer, I just need to write. I don’t need to read every article that pops up in my feed or worry about developing a business plan for the rest of the year. Put words on the page; one foot in front of the other.
Health: For health, I’m including everything having to do with your well-being. What do you need to feel most like yourself right now? Think through exercise, healthy eating, prayer or meditation time, hobbies and reading. For me, I don’t need a regular workout routine with HIIT classes and mile goals. I just need to be active everyday so I don’t feel like I’m going crazy. Think about what YOU need and do that. Forget all the advice coming at you.
What Do You Know for Sure?
Once you’ve named what’s not working and what truly matters during this season, you can start to piece together a map for your week. I like starting with what I know for sure. Those are the things that are already scheduled. Maybe that’s your or your spouse’s work schedule. Maybe that’s the home school schedule from your child’s teacher. Break out your calendar and fill in what you know for sure.
When planning my week, I started with Tim’s work schedule, since mine is flexible. I then wrote in Zoom calls and teacher FaceTime dates for the kids. While I didn’t know the exact home school assignments, I blocked off time for the basics: reading, writing and math. We’ve been starting our days with a morning walk, and I think it’s a nice way to transition from home to school time, so I wrote that in everyday.
Here’s a very rough draft of our weekdays:
7 am - wake up, breakfast, get ready for the day
8 am - morning walk
9-11 am - school time
11:30 am - lunch
12 pm - start the nap time process (because it’s a process)
1-3 pm - nap/quiet time (work time for me)
3:30 pm - snack and screen time
4:30-5:30 pm - kill time until Dad gets home ;)
6 pm - dinner
7 pm - put the littles to bed
8 pm - unwind time
We haven’t stuck to this schedule perfectly, but I like having some boundaries to the day. As you can see, I’ve only blocked off 2 hours of school time. That’s because I’m focusing on what matters for us - balancing the need for school with taking care of younger kids, working and just keeping the household running. It’s not perfect, but it’s our starting point.
How is your planning process feeling for you? Have you named what’s not working, decided what matters and started with what you know for sure? Let’s make a pact that we’ll wrap this entire process up in a ribbon of grace for ourselves, because even the most perfect planning process won’t save us from the stress and overwhelm of living through a pandemic. But it’s a starting point, and for today, let’s let that be enough.
