Habits, Routines, and Schedules....Oh my!

I’ve gotten some great feedback from you readers on the recent Routines Project. For some of you, routines are something new, and for others, you are looking to ramp up the routines you already have in place. The next step in the homemaking process is schedules.

Contrary to popular thought, habits and routines aren’t meant to imprison us, but to free us from the mundane so we can reach goals, nourish our families, develop discipline, and have peace in our homemaking. If you haven’t already discovered this truth, incorporating several simple routines into your day will give you the proof you need. Today, I want to focus on the string that ties my routines together: schedules.

If you missed the Routines Project:

(Through the series I walk you through how to create life giving routines and give some printables to help you in your planning!)

But what about schedules? Where do they fall in all this?

I told you in my first post on routines that routines are made up of habits. Similarly schedules are made up of routines.

But, if you have established routines, do you even need a schedule? And aren’t schedules even more confining than routines? Is there even such a thing as a schedule with a young family? Let’s reflect first on what a schedule actually is.

A Schedule Creates Bookends

So, in essence, what is a schedule? Think about your day as a bookshelf. Your habits are the pages within a book, and each separate routine (made up of the pages of habits) becomes a book on your shelf. Simply put, schedules form the bookends that tell your books where to sit.

To extend the metaphor, your bookshelf only has so much room in which to place those habits/routines – only 24 hours a day! Avoid over-stuffing! Even if you get all the “books” to fit, can you remove a book or two and then replace it easily? Or does the shelf get all out of whack? Just so, with our schedules, you can have too much of a good thing. You can fill and fill your schedule until it becomes impractical and unworkable when life, as it inevitably does, pushes in.

4 Types of Schedulers

I find people fall into one of four camps when it comes to schedules. Let’s take a look at them and reflect on what our own mentality is toward scheduling.

The Non-Scheduler: I don’t have a schedule it is too confining.

The Routine Queen: I follow routines, not schedules.

The Super Scheduler: I have a specific time slot for everything and follow my schedule very closely. I’d be lost without my schedule! (Terri Maxwell, author of MOTH: Managers of Their Homes, would fit into the super scheduler category. You can read my review of MOTH here.)

The Balanced Scheduler: I establish routines and have some times assigned to particular tasks, or an estimate of the time a routine should begin or finish.

So which way is right? While there are pros and cons to each, I find the balanced scheduler seems workable for real life and real people. Keeping the time in mind, but not necessarily trying to make tasks fit into the perfect box helps us move along through our day without creating an overly rushed feeling. I think most of us, by nature, fall into this category.

How Schedules and Routines Shake Out for Me

I’ve read lots of books on scheduling and homemaking routines, but have finally fallen into the camp described by #4. I love my routines, and most of the day I go about focusing on my routines rather than the clock, but I also have a written schedule. A schedule to me is just assigning specific times (or approximate times) for routines to begin or end. I don’t follow a schedule to the minute by any stretch of the imagination, but I do know in the general vicinity of when things need to happen. It is a way of making sure all my “books” fit on the “shelf.”

For instance, I know I need to wake up before 6 am if I am going to have a head start on my kids and my day (with Butchie being over a year, I am committing to early rising again, though I often let myself sleep in during crazier seasons of life). I know we need to be done with breakfast by 7:30 at the latest if we are going to get chores and family devotions done before school (which starts promptly at 8 am). Our morning routine needs to wrap up before 11 am so we can start lunch between 11:00-11:30, read aloud by noon, and have quiet hour begin by 1:30. So, on and so on.

I keep several of these time assigned tasks in the back of my mind as we move through our routines. If I completely divorce myself from the clock, I find myself or my children dawdling. For instance, when we know we must be done with our morning chores by 7:50 so we can have devotions and start school at 8 am, we tend to focus better on those chores and get them done in a quicker, more orderly fashion.

School Begins Promptly at 8 am

I am even pretty lax about the time specific tasks in my routines, but the one assigned time I can get uptight about is the beginning of school. We start promptly at 8 am. Knowing this time, and making it known to my children, means less arguing and grumbling when that time rolls around every morning. It also means that if I get sidetracked with unforeseen discipline, clean-ups, or interruptions, my self-starters can begin school without me announcing the start of our day.

This doesn’t mean we never start school at 8:05 or even 8:10 (hey, life happens!), but it does mean that 8:00 is our goal and we work towards that every morning. I find in homeschooling that being off even 10 minutes can negatively affect our day. When we are off track, even that little bit, it seems to have a ripple effect on the way we approach our day. “Just a few minutes more before I …” becomes the motto of the day. Starting promptly at 8 adds to the disciplined attitude I want my children to have toward school and ultimately life.

6 Easy Steps to Creating Workable Routines and Schedules

1.Start with Life-giving Routines

Always start with your routines (which blossom from the habits and tasks you need to bring order to your days). You’ve already got established routines, whether you know it or not, but if you want to get better about bringing order into your home, you may want to check out my Nourishing Routines Project series:

2.Gage the time

As you go about living your day (again, if you need help with that check out the Nourishing Routines Project) you should have a rough estimate of the time it takes to complete your varying routines. For example, you find that it takes approximately 4 hours to do your morning routine (getting ready, breakfast, chores, devotions, school). Sidenote: Many routines will not take you 4 hours!-This is my longest routine because it includes school time.

Overtime, you will gain a better sense about how long things take you.

3.Find a bookend

Find the time associated tasks that happen naturally in your home (mealtimes, waking, sleeping) and begin using these as bookends in your day. Our family eats lunch around 11:15- 11:30, this becomes a bookend in our day – a scheduling point. Lunch falls in the middle of our Midday Routine, so I know I need to start that routine by 11 am. I can also schedule my Morning Routine from this time point. Knowing my morning routine takes 4 hours, I know I need to start my day at 7 am at the latest.

4.Put in some Cushion

Remember the bookshelf analogy? Well, this is the step where we avoid over-stuffing our day. Yes, in the perfect world my Morning Routine would only take 4 hours, but life sometimes gets in the way. I don’t want to feel like a slave driver pushing our family to beat the clock, so I place in some cushion. For me, that means starting my day at 6 am instead of 7 am. This gives me an hour of cushion between my routines.

5.Be Particular …Sometimes

I am particular about some times in our schedule and less attentive to other time assignments. As an example, I try to feed breakfast to anyone who hasn’t fixed their own at 7 am so we can keep moving along towards school. However, dinner, though scheduled for 5 pm, happens whenever Husband arrives home from work. I know he likes to eat as soon as he gets home so that we can relax the rest of the evening as a family. This means sometimes supper happens at 4 pm and other times 6 pm. (I am able to do this because I serve simple meals that take less than a half an hour of preparation, and call Husband at lunch time for an approximate dinner time. He then calls me before he leaves work in the evening. I know I have 20 minutes to get supper ready from the time of his phone call.)

Look for the times that are really crucial to your family’s day and try to target those instead of worrying about living a schedule by the minute all day long.

6.Get Friendly with Excel

I could create a printable schedule for you, but you will be much better off if you familiarize yourself with Excel and make a custom and editable schedule. Having a schedule file where you can rework your daily timetable for different seasons or when something isn’t working is a great way to stay on track.

Let me know if you want me to do a post on how I create my family’s schedule in Excel and I’ll get to work on that!

Our Daily Schedule

Needing a little inspiration or just want to see how one other family makes it work? Here is what our schedule looks like going into this fall. I tend to revisit our routines and schedules on a quarterly basis to fine tune whatever isn’t working, so this is likely to shift and change. For the most part, our schedule remains fairly constant.

Notice a couple things about our schedule as you peruse it:

Lots of cushion (there is a lot of blank space)
A more scheduled morning with more relaxed afternoons (this works with my energy and temperament)
More and more structure and responsibilities as our children get older (Jim is 9, Apollo is 5, Sally is 3, and Butchie is 1)

I leave you with our schedule, but would love to know how schedules fit into your day.

Family Schedule
	MOM	Jim	Apollo	Sally	Butch
06:00	20 min. Workout/ Shower
06:30	Devotions
07:00	Breakfast
07:30	Morning Routine/Devotions @ 7:50
08:00	Read to littles	Math	School with Mom		8:45 nap
08:30	Phonics/Reading with John	Math/Independent Schoolwork		Playtime alone
09:30	School with Isaiah	School with Mom	Tablework or Freeplay
10:45	Midday Routine
11:30	Lunch

12:30	Read to Littles	Free Computer time	Read with Mom
01:00	Read to Isaiah	Read with Mom	Coloring		1:30 nurse/nap
01:30	Quiet Hour

04:00	Early Evening Routine
05:00	Supper


07:15	Evening Routine
	Reading Time
08:00		Bedtime

09:15	Bedtime