Married Single Parenting Tips!
Being married and parenting alone can be challenging but that doesn’t mean it is impossible. One will always have days you are on top of everything some days you drop the ball or, so it seems.
In my journey to finding me and making sense of life. I have found few tips to help manage life’s activities.
Plan! Plan! Plan! Write them down, the required task or activity.
It helps give clarity, when they are all in your head, you can get this overwhelming feeling or sense of inadequacy. Thinking it’s all just too much, I’m not going to be able to complete tasks. These negative thoughts set in even before you have started.
In writing them out, I find it slightly therapeutic and decluttering my head. I guess half the battle is kind of half won, next thing is to prioritise them.
Recently I stumbled across Darren Hardy’s Sunday-Planning -System and that has helped develop my personal planner. Its four quadrants, 3 sections houses your main goals or area of focus. The last quadrant houses miscellaneous activities that might be important but doesn’t really contribute to achieving your goals.
Anything that falls within the Miscellaneous tab, will get done as at when. They are niceties they may not positively affect or contibute to the focus/goal, but they may still be required or even important.
As I write out my to do list I put them in each category and add a timeline of completion or target date/due dates. This I find helps me focus.
Another tip, to is let go. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Sometimes I forget to use the journal and I end up struggling to juggle everything, scrambling around. Hey such is life! But with the grace with God, I start all over again.
Find time to relax. Just sitting in your favourite chair, nursing a mug of your favourite flavoured coffee or just tea, hot chocolate? whatever! Just to sneak 5minutes break into your day. Relax, you need to, you deserve it.
Find a hobby, learn new things. Start knitting- YouTube has lots of training videos.
Read a book – few pages a week/day.
Importantly, start a weekly gratitude log (I’m struggling with this myself, but I’m trying to keep up with this. So, like me, start with five things you are truely thankful for in that week).
Gratitude opens our eyes to see things as they really are. When you are going through a rough week/day, there and then you might not see the blessings or opportunities attached to the circumstance. With time, when you take a step back and reviews thing, you will always find a reason to be thankful.
Like everyone else, I sometimes tend to dwell in the ‘how,why and if’ of an issues or circumstances. There is nothing wrong in reviewing issues and understanding the circumstances. However, in dwelling on an issue, you risk being stuck in the review process and never see the opportunities attached it. I strongly believe, everything has an advantage or disadvantage no matter how small or insignificant we think it is.
Gratitude propels one out of the pits of despair and confirms there is hope for another day.
Finally and most importantly Pray! Pray!! Pray!!! That’s where you get the strength and those wonderful ideas of doing things.
I hope to post images of my planner and gratitude log on the next post.
As always, thank you for reading. Hopefully you find some of the tips helpful.