Blog

One of my friends asked me to go out to coffee this week and I had to tell her no. I simply had too much on my plate that I hadn’t finished. That is when I realized that I haven’t been taking my own advice. I haven’t been making the most of my time. I’ve goofed off this week, a lot. I’ve ignored the early to bed/early to rise wisdom (okay, I ingore that one most of the time anyway). I have walked slower when I’m outside because it’s gorgeous here this week. I’ve found excuses to run errands.

that’s when I realized that by working myself into exhaustion to make that extra buck here and there is not productive. It is so important to schedule in some down time for ourselves. When we do so, we are much more productive and things just seem to get done. Here are some ideas for increasing your productivity.

TAKE TIME TO BE YOU
Sounds simple doesn’t it? But we rarely do this, especially if you are a wife and mother like I am plus a freelancer on top of it. Add to that my duties as a daughter, church member, choir member, and friend and life is hectic to say the least.

What is the one thing in this world (other than writing) that truly speaks to your heart and soul? For me there are several things. I love movies and even enjoy studying how they are put together, filmed, and promoted. I also love singing and music. I enjoy studying new techniques for voice, singing int he choir, or going and listening to concerts. I love museums and leanring anything new. This makes life simple. It is easy to find things that interest me even if it is an old movie on AMC.

TAKE TIME FOR YOUR SPIRIT
We are spiritual creatures. While we can go months, years, or longer without nurturing our spirit, it can take its toll. When I go more than a week without spending time in prayer or reading my Bible, I find myself scattered and unable to focus. It always amazes me how I say, “I don’t have time to spend on soul matters this morning,” but yet, when I make time it seems to increase the amount of time I have. There is really no explanation for this phenomenon but it does work. This also applies to…

EXERCISE
When you spend just twenty minutes a day, you feel better. This gives you more energy and focus and tasks are completed more quickly. It probably has a lot to do with the oxygen making its way through your body when you exercise, including your brain. I have found that on the days I truly don’t have twenty minute to give, that if I’ll take a short ten-minute walk or do my eight-minute Tae Bo workout, I will get more accomplished that day. Whenever I try to skimp on this area or spiritual areas, I get little finished.

FIFTEEN MINUTES
I’m getting ready to teach a workshop on using fifteen minutes to accomplish a lot. It doesn’t sound like much time, but I used fifteen minutes this morning while waiting for a friend to come over and teach my daughters about sewing to do the research on a short article I had due. I had already laid some preliminary steps on the article by using fifteen minutes the other day to email questions to some people for quotes. I then used fifteen minutes after my friend left to work up a very rough draft of the article. I cooked lunch for my girls and one of their friends who was visiting, cleaned up and finished up my article. It only took me twnety minutes to finish the article. First of all, I was focused on my task and second I had done much of the legwork already.

JUGGLING LIFE
When you throw too many objects in the air, you’re sure to drop one from time to time. The best thing you can do is to focus on one task at a time. i actually have a really hard time with this becasue I’m a multi-tasker by nature. The problem with multi-tasking is that you aren’t giving your full attention to any one thing and they all come out mediocre. I find that when I hone in on a single topic I present a much more polished product. I often get more done as well because I don’t have the craziness of 18 different, half-finished projects to worry over. My mind is clearer.

TO DO LISTS
These are a necessity. I commit to at least five things each day that I want to finish. Some days I have to stay up until three in the morning to finish them. I don’t recommend this, by the way. It’s just necessary at this point in my life with young children and trying to home school and work from home. And some days I am finished by two in the afternoon and have all day to either catch up on other things or to play. That’s the nature of a freelance lifestyle.

LEARN TO ROLL WITH THE PUNCHES
If you freelance for any length of time, you’ll learn that there are people who won’t pay you or will pay you extremely late. There are a few things you can do to lighten your stress load. When you have less stress you automatically get more done. Try not to go into debt. Take it from someone who learns the hard way. It is a trap that is hard to dig yourself out of. Try to take a sound financial course such as Dave Ramsey’s FINANCIAL PEACE UNIVERSITY. This course, while we don’t follow all of his advice, has helped our family tremendously. The main area where it has helped is in purchasing cars and not making silly decisions that hurt our family long term.

LIFE
Life is short. If you’ve lived any length of time, you probably realize just how precious and short. Don’t get so bogged down in the day to day that you don’t take time to enjoy your family or a beautiful sunset. Work hard, play hard, and dream hard and never ever give up. There is a way to create balance, it just takes determination, organization and planning.

Here are some sites I recommend to help with organizing various things:

* Flylady.net For help getting your home in order
* Refundcents.com For help getting your grocery spending in order
* DaveRamsey.com For help getting your finances in order
* Crosswalk.com Christian site with Bible studies and ideas for Christian living
* Time4Learning.com Full curriculum website to help homeschoolers get organized.

Hi, all.  I had to post a short review about the Time4Learning.com website.  We started using this site this past year.  My children HATE math but now they look forward to getting on the Time4Learning website and trying different math games and learning new facts.  I have noticed a marked improvement in their scores on the tests I give them and amazingly enough I too am getting better at math just from helping them with their lessons.

Time4Learning is a comprehensive curriculum (Try the demo lessons) that covers math and language arts.  Most of the grades also have a bonus of social studies and science.  They do have some printable worksheets, so your child does not have to do all their work online.  Although we do not use this as our main curriculum, a parent could easily do so and cover the main facts their child needs to know for grade level.

Because my oldest has struggled with math so much, one thing that really impressed me was that they were willing to set her grade level where I wanted on each subject.  She is ahead in Language Arts and behind in math and Time4Learning was able to accommodate those needs.

Their customer service is stellar.  Anytime I’ve had a question or problem, they respond quickly and in a professional, the customer is always right, manner.  Visit the parent forum.

My youngest enjoys the playground area at the site, which offers a variety of online educational games.  She earns time at the “playground” by completing her lessons.  I used to spend half my day arguing with the girls to do their work.  Now, when we get into one of those moods where they want to argue, I just say, “Why don’t we do Time4Learning?”  They never argue about working on these lessons, so it has helped us accomplish more this year than we normally would.  Let’s face it, we want our children to do well but as homeschooling parents, it is sometimes a struggle to fit everything in by the end of the year.  That doesn’t mean they aren’t learning valuable life lessons along the way, but at times they really do just need to learn math.

My oldest recently took a test so we could see where we were placement wise on math and she had gone up two grade levels this year.  She is nearly caught up now and I’m sure with Time4Learning’s help, she will continue to excel.  I can’t recommend this website highly enough.  In addition to the benefits of learning, they track your child’s progress so you have a record of his work.  I print this off every few months and place it into their files I keep.  While we don’t have to keep these records in the state of Indiana, it is a nice reference to see what we’ve covered and how she’s doing on a given subject.

It is not a Christian curriculum, but I have yet to find anything in it that disagrees with our family’s beliefs.  However, should we come across something, I would bring it to their attention and we would simply skip that section.  The parent has the ability to review all lessons before the child completes them as well so that should prevent any surprises.

You can visit Time4Learning at Time4Learning.com to learn more about this wonderful curriculum or to sign up.  Check out their free trial.

 

Another school year is almost at a close.  Over the next few weeks, I’ll be looking at curriculum choices for the next school year and posting an article about the debate raging over Virtual Charter Schools.  Stay tuned for details.  If you have something you’d like to add about a particular curriculum, please post under comments.