Last week I wrote about making up a gmail calendar schedule, but as you’ve probably already learned, it isn’t enough to just get yourself a gmail account and open up the calendar feature. You have to create a schedule, and then you have to notate it in a way that makes sense to you.
For example, here is my gmail calendar:
My gmail calendar
At the beginning of the summer, I realized that in spite of all the work I’d put into organizing my space, it was getting cluttered and dirty because I wasn’t maintaining it. There are some people in this world who will notice that their space is spawning giant dust bunnies, realize they need to clean, and make time to do it.
I am not one of these people.
I realized that I’d been using my gmail calendar for awhile, and I liked a lot of things about it — it gave me my schedule in nice blocks of color, and I had a number of options to set up reminders of appointments. So why not create a few blocks of time on my schedule called and errands things like that?
Here’s the google document version of the schedule:
Nice and vague.
On the first day that I got a chore reminder, I stood in the kitchen and went, “uhhhhhmmm …”. I knew I was supposed to be doing chores or errands or tasks or … something. I’d gotten a text message that said so. But what was I actually supposed to DO?
After staring at the wall for awhile, I got distracted and wandered away.
I was working with an ADD coach at the time, so at my next meeting with her we talked about my schedule. I told her that I felt overwhelmed by housework when confronted with a vague schedule segment called “chores, errands and tasks”. I knew there was stuff needing to be done, but I was damned if I knew what it was. I honestly don’t know what people do when they clean.
My coach helped me to make a list of housework that needed to be done on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis, and a quarterly basis:
A bit more specific
We eliminated “errands” from that part of the schedule, because they varied too much to fit neatly into one hour chunks. Then I went home and decided what chores to do on what days:
Monday: vacuum kitchen area, mop food prep area, clean microwave
Tuesday: vacuum main room, clean bathroom, put away clean laundry
Friday: vacuum bedroom, wash bedsheets, put away clean laundry
My Monday chore calendar block looks like this:
Monday Blues
I get that text in my SMS reminder, my pop-up reminder, and my e-mail reminder if I chose to have one. Now, instead of getting a text that tells me to do “chores”, which sends my brain off into outer space, I get a text that tells me exactly which chores to do.