I was thinking about productivity today. When I was very pregnant with Xander last summer I was often awake for the day at 5am, so I would get up and sit in the kitchen with a cup of tea and my laptop, the sun streaming in the patio doors and the chirruping of the birds the only sound.
I’d often get a good couple of hours’ work done before anyone else appeared, uninterrupted by emails or the phone or text messages from friends. I was definitely at my most productive and it was an amazing feeling to know I had broken the back of my workload before anyone else had started their day. (It also meant I could fit in a nap mid-morning.)
One of the things I’m finding hard at the moment is that there is absolutely no opportunity to feel any sense of achievement. The only tasks that require my attention need to be done continuously, on repeat, seven days a week. I love a good list, and no job is ever ticked off the to-do list once and for all.
I’m barely working (I work in PR and many of my clients have gone into hibernation, so business has gone very, very quiet) so get no satisfaction from a good day’s work.
I’m finding no time to read so can’t enjoy that very pleasing feeling of finishing a book. (I saw someone on Instagram the other day reference a virtual book club they were in, complete with arty shot of a Penguin Classic and a G&T. I nearly unfollowed them.)
I’m not even cooking anything interesting now. There are several reasons for this:
We invariably eat with the kids at the moment and obviously to serve anything they don’t recognise would require sufficient energy to push back against their untold fury, so that’s a non-starter.
I spend all day in the kitchen so to stand there of an evening fannying about with a new recipe holds zero appeal.
I’m trying to avoid the supermarket as much as possible so I have to plan meals more than a week in advance and, quite frankly, I can’t be arsed to think beyond stir fry, a roast chicken or anything involving mince. (Sometimes I sit there and genuinely cannot think of a single meal other than those three.)
It’s impossible to feel productive when you finish cleaning the kitchen 10 minutes before serving the next meal, or you tidy the playroom for the 65th time in a week, or you spend approximately 30% of your day doing nothing but moving school work/plates off the kitchen table to make space for plates/school work.
At the end of the day you have nothing to show for the last 18 hours beyond a tension headache and the realisation you’ve left the washing on the line and it’ll have gone damp by now.
However - and like the key change in a Boyzone song, here comes the positive - I have started tapping into when the kids are at their most productive!
Before Easter we were letting Joe Wicks mark the start of our day. Until then it was all PJs and Netflix (them) and washing up from the night before (us). After Joe Wicks we got about an hour of work out of them before they would get restless. I’d let them have a snack and a 15 minute tear around and then drag them back for another stint of studying. This was when it was all a novelty plus Andy was still off work and we could operate a man on man defence. This all added up to some productive mornings.
However, I learnt early on that once lunch has been had there is nothing that will get them back inside and concentrating so that was basically all I was going to get out of them.
And then over Easter even that sad little schedule went to pot. They completely lost interest in Joe Wicks workouts so there was no incentive to crank themselves into anything resembling action, and at 9.30am were still wafting about in their pyjamas.
So on Sunday when I saw the email from school with the New and Improved Workload, I realised we needed a new strategy.
Now our day starts at 8.15am! I find this leaves us all more time for rubbing out spelling mistakes, too big handwriting, too small handwriting and nonsense answers, more time for unquenchable thirst, pencil sharpening, loo trips and being too hot/cold, and more time for me to read out the instructions another couple of dozen times just so EVERYONE IS CLEAR.
Today, three days into the new regime, we’d tackled 60% of the school work before lunch and then I just had to spend the next five hours cajoling him back to the table to finish the final assignment. Easy.
I’m putting that down as a big win. We celebrated by making pizzas. (WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF?)
And now I’m sitting writing this at 8.45pm immersed in the most beautiful of domestic scenes: the gentle swishing of the dishwasher in a dimly lit, clean kitchen. Bliss, isn’t it?
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