Time Management

It has been three and a half weeks since my baby boy was born and I still haven’t fully adapted my schedule so I can stay active and care for him. I am taking three months off of work to learn all about my new baby. Call me Swedish if you like. I have a couple more months to figure out when I can squeeze in a run or a desert excursion or an eight-hour nap. Really what it comes down to is finding the energy at the same time I have an extra hour or two to do something.

I’ve never been good at time management, but I’m discovering that without a structured schedule I’m prone to lazing about and neglecting any sort of physical activity. Usually anything before noon might as well not be planned. Yesterday I had planned on waking up a bit early and taking my vehicle in for safety and emissions testing (I know it’s not really physical activity, but, hey, it requires some effort). Yeah right. After waking up at 7:45 AM, I moved from one sitting position to another as I surfed the Internet and played games on my laptop until suddenly, it was well after noon. Where had my day gone? Talk about dragging butt.

Now don’t get me wrong; I am finding a few moments here and there to take my family on small drives into the mountains, but I can’t really go on a hike. You see, I’m responsible for all the diaper changes and I can’t walk twenty feet without that kid filling up his shorts. I’d take him with me, but you know how finicky doctors are with newborns and how they insist on keeping babies indoors for weeks on end to avoid any illnesses. Anyway, I do what I can to get out of the house and expose my baby boy to the outside world.

Day planners have never worked well for me. If I buy one, I typically go all out for the first two days writing everything I can think of to remember in the coming weeks. After I’ve written all three events that I could think of, I begin writing in birthdays and holidays. Then I start filling in each workday with the word “work.” As if I wouldn’t remember that.

Right now I just need a simple system to help me remember what I want to accomplish each day. Since I’m a night guy, I should plan most of my activities later in the day and into the evening. It’s interesting to see how tired I am in the mornings and how that fatigue melts away as twilight approaches each night. I always get an energy rush around 7 or 8 PM and it lasts until 10 or 11 PM. Most of the time I end up pacing the house trying to come up with an idea of what to do with my energy until my wife places the baby in my arms and tells me to rock him to sleep. That helps because I can at least bounce the baby and use up some of my energy.

At this point I am dead-set on running every other night around 9 o’clock. We’ll see how long that lasts. Perhaps at the end of two months I will have a wonderful schedule system. And then I’ll go back to work and the schedule will be shot to pieces. I suppose that’s just the curse of being a living creature: adaptation. The new baby phase is only the beginning of the long road of adaptation ahead of me. Can’t wait for the teenage years.