The best laid plans of mice and moms most often go awry. This is why we’ve given up on making plans, right? Life happens and we never have a chance to catch up. Our lists get carried over to the following week and that means that other things don’t happen when they should?

All that is about to change for you. The Bizzaro Blueprint was created with all of this in mind. The truth is we don’t know where to start. There are things we’re so good at, and things that come up, and things we stink at. Unless we figure out a way to get it all done, it’s going to stay that way. We’re going to find ourselves in endless cycles of not getting it done, and feeling simply incapable.

Let’s change that, right now.

Step 1: Planning.

If you’re old fashioned get out a paper and a pen. Otherwise open a word document.

Make a list of everything that you have to do. Try and be complete. Include the things you have to get done right now, the things that you know need to get done, but you’ve been ignoring, and the things you wish you could do.

Here’s mine:

   It’s not the best picture, but you can see that I’ve got some domestic things like dishes, laundry, dusting and vacuuming. I’ve got things like “work”, since I also work part time from home. I’ve also got things that I really want to make time for, like leaving the house with Little G, and learning to play the Guitar with Rocksmith.

It actually doesn’t seem as terrible as usual, but that’s going to work in my favor this week.

Step 2: Prioritizing

Now the next step is to prioritize. What I did was make a table in my word document with 4 columns and 20 rows. You could also use excel, or if you’re doing it the old fashioned way, make a 4 column list. Label the first column: Critical; the second column- Daily (I used a longer version of this); the 3 column- weekly; and the 4th column- Occasional/Sporadic. Now take the list you’ve just made, and categorize each one.

Let’s be honest though, we’d love to be the kind of women who dust every day, and keep up with our mopping, but that’s just not realistic. I put each of those rooms into the weekly category. The things that I only “want” to do, I put them in the occasional/sporadic column for now. I will eventually like to make a commitment to do this more often, but for now…it’s only a wish.

As you can see my only critical task is the laundry- cause yeah, it’s that bad. In the daily column I have meals, dishes, and work.

The majority of my tasks fall into the weekly column. There’s a lot of little tasks in here, which probably won’t take more than 20/30 minutes a pop, but some of them need to happen before other. For example, I’m not going to mop the kitchen floors until I clean up the kitchen. The same goes for the vacuuming and the living room.

So when we move on to the next step, it’s important to make sure we keep that in mind.

Step 3– Organizing

So let’s make all of this information useful for us, shall we?

I made a new table with 7 columns, and 2 rows. I label each column with the days of the week starting with Sunday. You could either get a weekly calendar, use an excel sheet to do this, or draw this out yourself. Whatever works for you.

Supermom’s might work every day, but I like to keep my weekends task free. It might not always work out that way, but for now we’re going to try it. To emphasize this I’ve highlighted the entire Sunday and Saturday columns in red.

Next,  put in the concrete daily times you have in your day. For me that’s Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Naptime and Bedtime.

Since work is something that I know needs to be done every day, I’m going to put that up at the top. My work is very part time and pretty much involves me responding to requests when they come in.  There really is no way for me to schedule that. So I’m going to put it up at the top and highlight it in yellow to represent something I have to fit into my day.

Laundry is a critical task, since I have looming towers of laundry. I’m going to put that at the top in yellow as well, because I’m going to do my best to just bang it out this week. Let’s say I have 12 loads of laundry to do. I’m going to commit to washing and folding 3 loads of laundry every day. Since the drying process takes an hour at least, I’m going to find a way to fit that in to my schedule when I can. I’ll write more on the laundry situation tomorrow. I’m taking Monday off of laundry, to give me the time to plan out my schedule, and write this blog. Which means Tuesday-Friday all have laundry highlighted in yellow at the top of the page.

My next daily activity is the dishes. There’s no way around it. I have to do them in order to have things to eat off of.  That takes me roughly 20 minutes, so I’ve decided to do that right after Little G goes down for her nap.

So now it’s a matter of assigning the weekly tasks to a given day, keeping in mind the tasks that are dependent on one another. I’m also organizing this within time periods that I don’t have Little G to actively take care of. Naptime gives me a good 2-3 hours to accomplish things.

Monday, for example, I have a lot to accomplish. I have to write this blog, plan my meals, do the dishes and work. So it makes sense not to try and take on extras.

When you’ve completed your meal planning- you can insert what you’re making for each meal right into your calendar.

Now, let’s get real. As I was writing this blog a work problem reared it’s ugly head and I had to push things around. While I was working Little G woke up (thank God Big G is around this week). I’d finished my meal planning, the dishes, and put everything in the crockpot.Something might have had to move…honestly it was this blog. That’s going to happen. This is why we’re breaking things down into tasks. We need to be able to move each task around.

Pick one or two column 3 items to get done each day.Pick one column 4 item for the week. It’s going to be a busy week.

Print this and post it somewhere you can see it. It needs to be somewhere handy enough for you to write on it when you need to.

Over the course of the week take note of how long each task takes to complete. Sometimes the dishes take 20 minutes, sometimes it takes longer. You need to know about the tasks you’re setting for yourself. It becomes important later on in the Blueprint.

Now get to work! Drop me a line and tell me what works and doesn’t work for you. Ask questions too! We can all beat this together!