Darina Loakman.com

As WAHMs, many of us have shorter and restricted working hours, working around school time or part-time childminers or montessori. 

Well I was going through my mid-year review of goals (I know I’m a bit late !) some had changed and some were on track or ahead and others a little behind, but one thing stood out because I have failed miserably !!  Written on my goal sheet in nice bold writing was

“I will be in bed before 11pm every night” - unless I’m out on the tear - (yeah right !)

I kinda knew I was failing on that one, I think the big black bags under my eyes were a bit of a clue, but it was only when I sat down and thought about the last time I actually left the computer early in the evening and went to bed and I couldn’t remember when that was, that I realised I needed to do something serioius about it.

So with the help of my love of using technology to try and make life easier ! I’ve made a few changes which will hopefully help.

1. I’ve closed down my email application so that I don’t see every email that comes in and get distracted answering it.  I’ve put an autoresponder on my personal email address letting people know that I will be checking email only twice a day at 9.30am and 12pm and if it’s urgent giving them an alternative way to contact me.  (all email from the website had already been outsourced to Nancy my VA which was a great help -I definately recommend outsourcing email where you can )so this new rule applies to my personal email.

2. I’m trying to cure my addiction to message forums and again I will only be checking them twice a day - my goal is to reduce that to once ! There are really only 2 main ones (plus my own !) that I check and a couple of others that I keep an eye on.

3. To help with number 2 I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed of any Forums that have it, this means I just have to check my RSS reader to see if there have been any updates, without having to go to the forum.

To help me do all this I’m using a nifty little tool that I had been using to try and stop fighting over computer time between the boys.  It’s a free alarm clock that you can set up and a little talking microsoft agent pops up and tells you to go to bed, or swap turns or check your email.. whatever you want it to. If you’re interested it’s here

So this is all fairly new so it’s a bit of a novelty for me, so when the little agent jumps up and says “Darina check your email” or ” Darina go to bed” I obey him !! no doubt I’ll start “snoozing” him, but I aim to try and obey him.

I’ll do a review in a couple of weeks and see how it’s going

How do you organize your working hours?  got any tips or hints to share?

Darina