Focus on Routine – Crafting a Plan

It is very difficult to focus on improving our daily routine when every other day is a snow day. Or a delayed opening. Or something.

Seriously, how are you supposed to get into any kind of rhythm when there just isn’t even a beat to follow? And hasn’t been one since like…Thanksgiving?

There has been one distinct benefit to the disruption and the down time. I’ve had a whole lot of time to work on the de-cluttering and a whole lot of time to think about what is and isn’t working and how to proceed from where we are now. I have some ideas…

In my last post on focus, I mentioned one of our biggest problems – reacting to the world around us rather than being proactive about the things we need to do. This is a pretty common problem for ADD/ADHDers, it seems. I suspect it’s a common problem for just about anyone. There are so many things to pay attention to in a day that it’s difficult to keep track of them and there are always bound to be unexpected and unplanned things that enter anyone’s day. These are tough enough to manage for people without focus and distraction issues. Ask someone with ADD/ADHD to handle the unexpected and you may find someone frozen in her tracks. It’s not that we aren’t smart enough to dodge the flying nonsense; it’s just that our brains process this kind of information differently.

All too often, our mornings around here start with “oh crap it’s way later than I thought it was.” This is followed by mild panic and a mad scramble to get everybody moving and out the door. Right now we have a routine for sure – but it’s one that’s frazzled, stressful, and puts everyone in a poor frame of mind to start the day.

What we need is a much calmer start to our days – all of us. And the truth is that this means getting up earlier. Not one person in this house is a morning person. At least two of us struggle with insomnia and night-owl issues. Far too often, we are awake far too late to be rested enough and so we’re grasping for any extra fifteen minutes we can get. The Fab Hub claims that he’s great about getting up in the morning. He’s not. He also claims that when it’s time to move, he moves. He’s about half right. It’s true that once it’s time to move, he will do so…but it’s after hitting the snooze button for about an hour and me finally hollering that it’s the absolute last minute and everybody needs to haul butt. I’m no better. But instead of hitting the snooze button four or five times, I just sleep right through the alarms. Kidzilla is impossible to move unless she’s had her magic number of hours to sleep. And if she hasn’t? She needs to “stretch” for about 30 minutes before she’ll move. See the struggle we have? Mornings are awful around here, to be quite frank.

And so begins the day. I race through traffic, driving up my blood pressure in the process, skid into the parking lot on two wheels wishing desperately that I had the brains to just get up earlier.  Zilla is frustrated and upset which often begets difficulty for her at school. And once he has both of us out the door and delivered, the Fab Hub digs in his heels and delays starting tasks once he’s on his own because he much prefers to be in control of his time than to be told what to do or when. Too many mornings, tempers and words are short and our time together before parting ways for the day is just not right.

This is not working. The obvious answer is to get all of us out of bed and moving earlier in the morning. But that fix is not as simple as setting the alarm earlier. For the adults in the house, at least, it has to be about getting to bed at a reasonable time and getting enough sleep so that it’s even possible for that earlier start time to happen. And that means fixing our afternoon and evening routines a bit. Or maybe more than a bit.

Our afternoons and evenings definitely have a routine – come home, spend some time doing homework or playing or prepping dinner, eating dinner, bath and bedtime for Zilla, then parent crash and decompress time. It’s a routine, but it’s not a great one. Homework time is often stressful because one or all of us forgot what day it is and Zilla has to finish her work right this minute and there really isn’t enough time to do it without rushing and prodding to hurry. Dinner is sometimes done easily and with grace, but other times is a struggle and a last-minute frenzy because no one will offer a suggestion about what they’d like to eat. If homework time runs long or the dinner decision takes long, then dinner is late. Then bath and bedtime are late. And then grownup time starts late and ends up lasting far too long into the hours of the night when we really should be asleep. Clearly, we need some work in these hours of our day as well.

It’s not like we live in a constant state of frenzy – we really don’t. Some days things work pretty well. Very well, even. But other days really are a struggle to maintain control. It’s not like we don’t know what works and what doesn’t – we really do. But we do not always put the things we know in theory into actual practice. We know what to do to make our lives simpler and less stressful; we just need to actually do it.

I’ve watched the three of us for quite a long time as we go through our days and weeks. The answer for all of us not just that we need a routine in place. We need a routine in place that is well-defined and proactive, not reactive. We need that routine to be something that works for all of us, not just looks good on paper. And we need to actually think ahead and have a plan for our routines – especially on those weeks when an appointment or other obligation is going to throw off the normal plan.

We already use a wall calendar in the kitchen for the entire family – appointments and other daily info goes there, as you would expect. I also write menu options for the week there – when I remember to do a menu plan. In the last few months, I’ve gone back to using a day planner to better manage daily responsibilities and tasks for myself. I could get into a lot of detail here about these tools and how we’re using them, but I really think that’s enough discussion for a separate post.

It’s not like any of this is rocket science or even something new and innovative. This is the stuff that kept my Mom and all of her children on time and on task, no matter what obstacle got thrown in our paths. I’m sure as she reads this she’s thinking, “no kidding – I’ve told you this a thousand times.” She has. And I’ve heard it almost every time she’s told me. But there’s this part of my brain – maybe it’s the ADHD, maybe it’s not – that needs to come to a conclusion all on my own, not just follow because someone said it’s a good idea. (I’ll need to keep that in mind when trying to figure out why the Hub doesn’t seem to want to jump up and de-clutter with me every day.)

So for this month, I’ll continue to work on the de-cluttering just fifteen minutes a day. I hope to get all three of us on board with this one before the month is over. And in addition to the de-cluttering, I plan to have all three of us sit together and work out routines for morning, afternoon, and evening that work for all three of us. We aren’t going to be amazing by the end of the month. But we’re going to be a little better off than we are right now. And that’s OK.

In the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, I hope to help this little family to “act, that each to-morrow find us farther than to-day.” Our goals may not be as Longfellow’s in his quest to find purpose in moving through his life. But they’ll sure as heck get us to a calmer, more peaceful way of purposefully moving through our days.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~