My To Do List

Hello, gorgeous!

Yes, you.

If you’re anything like me this week, you can use the encouragement.

You’re gorgeous, your house is like a spread in Martha Stewart Living, your baby is a textbook model of perfection, you’ve lost all your baby weight and your hair is clean.

Now, please pass the giant steaming mug of coffee so I can stay awake to finish writing this.

I’ve never had a meltdown before, but I wonder if I’m getting close. I have so much on my plate and so little time, never mind energy, to get it all done, that it’s a daily battle not to just throw in the towel, sit with my baby on the couch and pretend that nothing else exists.

I am feeling less than hot this week. Unless a hot mess counts, in which case I’m ahead of the game.

I’ve been late to work every day this week. Now that school is back in session, the traffic has suddenly picked up again – I’ve been leaving home progressively earlier every morning, and every morning there is a worse traffic jam than the day before to compensate and suck up all my extra time, so that I’m just as late as the day before. And annual reviews are coming up, so, that’s awesome.

Once I’m at work, I’m sucking down coffee and trying to focus on the 500 or so tasks on my desk. At some point soon into that battle, I’m distracted by thinking about the phone calls I need to make/emails I need to send out/ads and info I need to post for my Scarlet Girl Pleasure Party business, to keep parties coming in and commission checks in the bank. Yay for paying off bills. Speaking of bills, I’m also distracted by the number of subscriptions to call and cancel, the snafu with the baby’s insurance that I need to get sorted out, the car insurance issues that need dealing with asap, and so on.

Somehow, I make it to the end of the day. If I’ve had time to pack a gym bag, I head out of the office for a run, which is blissful and all too infrequent.

Arriving home at a little before 7, I am handed baby, who is ready for nursing and mommy cuddles, maybe a bath, and then bedtime routine, and finally, asleep by 8:30pm. During all this, I hopefully find time to eat my own dinner, make some of those phone calls/send some of those Scarlet Girl emails that I’d thought about earlier in the day, and maybe get a few moments to relax watching Survivor or The Simpsons or something.

Once the baby is asleep, it’s a decision of what to devote the next 2 hours to, until she (lately) decides to wake up again promptly at 10:30, or I have to hit the sack myself – keeping up this blog and corresponding Twitter account (@one_hotmomm); reading the novel I want to finish; finishing the novel I’m writing; doing a workout DVD if I haven’t gone running that day; keeping the house from sinking into disaster; doing laundry; planning my friend’s baby shower; planning my own wedding; or some superhuman combination of two or more of those things. Not to mention at some point taking a shower, repairing my chipped pedicure, shaving my legs, or doing my nails. Pipe dreams, I know.

Just writing it all makes me want to take a nap.

Well, being awake makes me want to take a nap, but let’s not split hairs.

How to keep up with it all?

More to the point, how to avoid the depression that looms when all of this seems completely un-doable and too much for any normal person to reasonably attempt?

For one, I am harnessing the power of To Do Lists.

To Do Lists are best used for the umbrella tasks that all the little, chaos-causing jobs fall under. For example, all the memberships and subscriptions I need to cancel, the insurance payments I need to sort out, the bills I need to pay, fall under the Get The Family’s Financial Life Back On Track umbrella. It’s that kind of shifting, roiling, black cloud of a Thing That Needs Doing that can easily be the downfall of a Hot Mama’s sanity. It’s so big, and so important, and yet where does one even start? When looked at as one big black thing hovering there on the horizon, it’s likely to swallow you up and just rain all over your fancy parade.

Enter the To Do List.

We make these kinds of lists at work, to make sure our deadlines are met and the projects we get paid for stay on track. And that’s for someone else’s business. So why not use them for our own? My financial To Do List consists of every single item, no matter how small, that I had dancing around in my brain that needed to be done. For example:

·        Call gym and cancel membership

·        Call medical insurance and figure out why they don’t have baby on coverage

Cancel Netflix membership online 
Return outstanding Netflix DVD

·        Deposit Scarlet Girl commission check

·        Mail check for parking ticket

·        Mail check for Power bill

·        Drop off check to eye doctor

And so on. Writing out the list not only eased my brain by allowing me to have it all in black and white rather than having to rely on my overtaxed memory, but it also allowed me to itemize the chaos. Now, instead of feeling overwhelmed and not knowing where to start, I can look at my list and, each day or each week, pick an item that my sanity and stress level that day is able to handle; deal with that item; and then cross it off the list.

And we all know how satisfying that is.

Suddenly, despite the fact that I still have a lot of things to deal with and accomplish, I feel in control of the situation, which is absolutely key in maintaining that slippery grip on sanity. Feeling as if we’re not in charge of the situation is what leads us to that desire to put on sweatpants and give up on hygiene for days at a time. Once we’re back in control, anything seems possible.

So, having seen just how lovely the To Do List was for my financial life, I decided to write-up similar lists for other areas. Some of these lists reset themselves weekly or even daily. To Do lists for losing weight, for example, start fresh every day, and include things like, Use the bathroom downstairs at work, every time (to sneak in extra stair climbing); Drink at least 3 giant water bottles by the end of the day; Eat a healthy lunch.

Perhaps, once some things quiet down a bit, I won’t need as many lists to keep it all straight. But then again, I’m just controlling enough that I’ll probably wield this tool like my own personal Excalibur for a long, long time.