When we welcomed our daughter, my husband and I found ourselves short on a resource we had previously taken for granted–time. In our pre-parenthood lives, time had never felt finite to us. It was always there, available for us to organize and spend as we saw fit. There was always enough. Parenthood was a dramatic change, and we found ourselves struggling to manage our schedules, particularly as we both continued careers that placed a high demand on our time.
If time was money, our account was overdrawn and we were spending poorly. For months, we tried different schedules in efforts to meet all of our priorities–family time, career goals, exercise, civil engagement, and some semblance of a social life. When my daughter was about a year old, we finally hit a groove. Here are some ways we learned to better organize and use our time:
We set priorities–individual and joint–and communicate them to one another.
This is a simple idea that we often overlooked early in parenthood. If I don’t tell my spouse that I was hoping to make it to the gym a few times this week, how could we work together to build it into our schedules? If I didn’t verbalize that I needed some office time that weekend to complete a work task, or tell my spouse that our schedule wasn’t working for me, how could he know? The first step, we realized, was communicating our time needs to one another so we could tackle scheduling together.
We hold weekly “Family Board Meetings.”
Every Sunday, my husband and I open up our calendars and spell out–in detail–what the upcoming week looks like for each of us. Evening obligations, important deadlines that may require extra work time, and our goals for the week. Then we create a schedule that allows for us to meet those needs and desires. We schedule who will take care of each drop off and pick up at daycare, when each of us will exercise, nights we will be handling home obligations solo while the other has plans outside the home. On weeks where the “Family Board Meeting” doesn’t happen for some reason, our weeks feel unmanageable. Understanding each other’s obligations and goals for the week at the start minimizes stress by ensuring that we’ll each have time to meet our obligations and goals.
We strive to invest our time wisely.
Parenthood made me scrutinize how I choose spend my time. Before becoming a parent, I had never thought about time as a resource, or even necessarily something within my control. It was just always there, and available. I now view time as a resource to be spent to my advantage or wasted. I’m judicious in the activities I engage in, and I strive to invest fully in whatever task is before me at any moment. Time at work spent inefficiently is time away from my family. My time with my daughter is precious, so I focus on being present with her when we’re together. When I examined my activities and took control of my time, I found there was always enough to satisfy my family and career goals.
Trying to conquer parenthood and a career is a day-by-day juggle. That is the case for me, at least, and some days I feel better at it than others. But once I took steps to organize and control my time, I felt like most days I won the juggle instead of it beating me.
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