Missing in Action
Are there times, or areas, in your life when you’re MIA? Sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day to handle all the chatter that’s coming from every direction. Your job is demanding, your children are demanding, your spouse, church, family, school, extracurricular activities and strict deadlines can cause your head to spin. How do you handle the demands of life and make the most of your time?
1. Evaluate what’s demanding your time and attention. Make a list of all that is vying for your time and attention. For each item, decide if YOU must absolutely do it yourself or if you can delegate the task to someone else–a family member or co-worker. If you cannot delegate to someone else, perhaps there’s someone with whom you can share responsibilities. If necessary, consider letting some things go.
2. Let people know what’s going on with you. Communicate with people that you’re going MIA for a brief period. When people come to expect certain things from you, the last thing you want to do is to leave them hanging. It’s only courteous to inform people that you haven’t abandoned them or lost respect for the relationship.
3. Try coming up with a way to make it all work. Rather than throwing up your hands in frustration, think of alternative ways of making things work without having to eliminate them altogether. You and your spouse may need to sit down and re-visit which parent will attend certain school and sporting events with your children. There may be activities that you will need to cut back on your frequency of participation.
4. Set your priorities based upon what has the greatest consequences, if not done within a certain time frame. As much as you might desire to do it all, or not disappoint anyone, there are only 24 hours in a day, and only ONE of you. Consequently, you must prioritize your time demands. What has the greatest consequences–missing choir rehearsal or parent/teacher conference (just keeping it real)?
5. Get away from it all. In the midst of all the madness, schedule a time in the not-so-distant future to shut it all down and walk away for even a short period of time. If you don’t take time to replenish yourself, you will be of no benefit to anyone else. Take care of YOU first and let the rest fall into place.
