This post was first published in January,2020.
Hey mama,
First of all, are you on our mailing list?
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I would even send you the last one I already sent out where I talked about this rubbish shaming culture that we have and how even for my testimony, people still tried to shame me.
Resonated with a lot of you and I got all your email feedbacks.
Like I said, this is the year where we’ll give no human permission to shame us for our portion or season.
The end!!!
Ok so on to today’s gist… GET BACK YOUR HOURS.
Mehn, it’s amazing how we can waste our hours anyhow and not even know. Little little things just steal our hours from us, yet we complain that we don’t have enough time.
This is also something I struggled with. I recall feeling overwhelmed and tired recently, and I took my tail to God like, God I am doing all you asked me to do, yet I keep carrying things over. I mean, I am barely getting 4 to 5 hours of sleep every day, but then I’m waking up SO TIRED that I can barely do anything.
One major thing He showed me was how I was wasting precious hours from 5 or 6pm till when I sleep by catching up on unnecessary chats that I didn’t need to catch up on. Just holding my phone in those hours was making me sleep later than I planned so I would wake up and still be tired.
Then I adjusted.
Kids are all done with dinner and ready for bed at 7.30pm even though they don’t sleep then, so that means I’m free of any kid activities at that time.
I call and ask hubby what he’d like for dinner way before he gets back, get it ready and done with also at 7.30pm.
Spend some family time together until 8.30pm, read, pray or have a few minutes of chat time and by 9pm latest, I am in bed.
Just that adjustment, especially dropping my phone and focusing on the home front and sleeping at that time in this season saved me time and strength.
When I woke, I would be ON TIME, alert, ready to take on my day and be full of energy.
So let me share three other ways we can get back our time as domestic queens.
- Keep an arranged closet.
This applies to you, the kids, and hubby where possible. I have realized that so much time gets wasted in looking for things. I love what Heather Lindsey said. She said that it should not take you more than 30seconds to find anything in your closet, and I agree.
Taking the time to sort and fold the laundry into various sections in the closet means than in 10seconds sef, I have brought out anything they will wear. Ditto me.
It sounds small but being organized is a real time saver.
2. Have a set sleeping and waking time
I know that because we don’t have anything or anyone putting external pressure on our time, we sleep whenever and wake whenever. In fact, some of us send the kids off to school and go back to bed.
Then whenever we feel like, we finally get up, and then lounge about our day. Biggest mistake ever. Girl, be your own BOSS and rock out some discipline right in that domestic kingdom.
I don’t wake the same time every day but every day, I decide when I would wake the next day . That then controls my sleeping time, and then my night activities. If for instance, I say I will wake at 3am, then I can’t be awake till 12 midnight. Between God and me, we have worked out that 5 hours of sleep is good for me, so I always calculate from there.
In this season, I have a prayer meeting with a few of my WILD sisters at midnight so I take that into consideration too. 5 hours may not be a stretch but cumulative, I make sure I do those five hours of sleep.
Legislating my sleep that way has made me save hours on meaningless activities because I know that any time I waste is eating into my sleep time which has already been pre-set. I can’t plan to sleep at 9 to wake at 4 and be scrolling through instagram till midnight.
And hey, this DISCIPLINE is yours to enforce. After all, if you miss that sleeping time, you can decide to wake later, but really is this how things will change for you? At least respect yourself enough to keep the promise you made to yourself.
One other thing that helps my sleep is to have meetings that will surely wake me. I fix a couple meetings, both work, ministry and personal/social between 12 and 6am. That forces me to sleep when I said I will sleep so I won’t be the one with the stupid excuse of I SLEPT OFF when everyone else turned up.
3. Allocate timing to everything you do
Right now, writing this post, I decided I would do two major things between the time block of 12 and 1.30 pm. This post is one of them. As I type, various distractions come to mind, but the timer is enough to keep me focused on this.
I have my diary beside me to jot down those distractions and get to them later but I won’t leave what I am doing now to do another thing. I am ON THE CLOCK, literally.
Every tick is a reminder that I must be done by 1.30pm, and I already have another task for 1.30 which I can’t get away from.
You notice I didn’t say, plan your day… that is fine of course, but I appreciate that some of you cannot plan your day effectively because maybe it can get unpredictable or you just don’t know how.
If you are going to the market, don’t just go, plan the hours and keep looking at the time. That will put some urgency in your steps. If you are cleaning the toilets, put minutes to it. Laundry?
Time it. It is not about the task, whether you think it is senseless or important, it is about what it is doing to your brain. The timing makes you so focused on that goal and your brain is operating at a higher thinking capacity than normal.
Now make sure you don’t allocate 50 mins to a task that would have cost you 30mins oooo. If a task takes you 30mins normally, allocate 25mins.
Trust me, your brain will be forced to find a way to make that 25mins work. Allocate more and your brain will just be encouraging you to lounge.
This is psychology and it works. It is called artificial deadlines. They are not real, in that nobody will beat you if you don’t do it, but if you tell your brain this is the deadline, it will force itself to rise to the occasion. Let us not let our brain be dull and weak just because we are not waking up and going to work in the bank daily.
There are also more ways to use time wisely but I just wanted to share these three that you can start to apply RIGHT NOW.
And I hope you start to GET BACK YOUR HOURS and not spend endless time doing domestic chores, and then invest those hours you gained in other important things that can help you be fruitful right at home.
You have a GREAT priceless calling as a Mom and God’s domestic queen.
I pray the Lord continues to open your eyes to how important what you do is for His kingdom.
Love you and always praying for you,
Eziaha
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