Back to School Goals

My daughter is back in school. Yay! It was a long summer but I made it through and now it’s back to the normally scheduled work week. For a work at home mom that means getting as much work finished as I can while my girl is in school. Before she started school I would work at night and while she napped. Naps stopped when she was three, so that left working at night mostly. My husband would help me out on the weekends so I could get work finished, but it was chaotic. 

Now though, it’s a different story. I work while she’s in school and the husband is working his own job. That means a bit of housework in the morning, a mad dash of work later in the morning and then a little bit more housework before I head out to wait in the pickup line at the school. 

This first week is always hard. Getting back into the routine is harder than most people think. With that in mind I always make back to school goals for myself. If you’re new to being a stay at home worker or mom or wife you might find it helpful.

The first week I get back into my basic day to day. I set a word goal daily. It’s not a big goal. Just a 1000 words or so. This keeps me open to get back into the day to day cleaning. With my daughter home I have to clean when I can and she helps out a lot more. This first week is all about catch up. A nice deep clean means that I can maintain easier through the school year. Every day is devoted to a room.

Week two I get back to my exercise. The long months of summer mean that I had to give up my workouts to spend time with my daughter. I don’t mind doing it, but I don’t have a very active job. If I don’t do some type of workout I just gain weight. Not only is that not the healthiest, it’s hard on my bad knee. I’ve found that if I can stay around the 140lb mark my knee doesn’t give me much trouble, but much more than the 150lb mark and I can feel the ache. I’ll talk more about this in a post next week.

So my goals for now are pretty simple.

• ·    Deep clean the house
•       Get exercising

Then there are my work related goals. Those aren’t as simple. I always spend a bit of time working on prioritizing the work. Which project needs to be finished first? Which projects can be put to the side to work on little by little? 

A basic layout of what I’ve figured out so far looks like this:

• ·    Finish two stories before Oct. 
•      Cover art project 
•       Research web design

That doesn’t seem like the clearest set of goals, but I understand what each one means and a loose goal can be a lot easier to reach and surpass than a tight step by step goal. Planning comes later. This is just the beginning.

Everyone is going to have different goals. It’s the spice of life. The great part about goals is reaching them. If your kids just started school try it yourself. 

If you’ve already been setting back to school goals share them with me. I’d love to see what other moms are up to. 

That’s all for now.