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Ok, I work at home, with three young boys and an almost-crawling baby underfoot.  We homeschool, and I attempt to keep the household running at a basic level of efficiency.  But use this line as often as a high-powered corporate executive.  Why?  Because it reminds me to be fully present in whatever activity I’m involved in.

“I’m in a meeting right now.  Can I get back to you later this afternoon?”

It’s always such a temptation to spend all day with my head in my latest story, or chatting with readers - or blowing off work entirely to make blueberry playdough cakes and play trains!  On the other hand, if I’m knee-deep in a new project, it’s so easy to set the boys up with one independent activity after another and find that I spent all day doing nothing but breaking up disputes over whose turn it is.

So how do I get anything done, without paid childcare?  Meetings.  I schedule at least one meeting every week.  I’m the only person who attends, we meet at the local coffee house for about 2-3 hours, and my husband gets to have the kind of four-on-one parenting experience that I’m lucky enough to have every day.  Dinner goes in the crock pot so we can sit down and have dinner together as soon as I get home, and I get about 4 hours worth of work done in 2-3.

To make it all work, I have to be prepared.  I walk into the coffee house with a to-do list, my word processor already started on the laptop, and my email client shut down (unless I’ll be using it of course).  My research is neatly filed in my briefcase (or stored online, but that’s another post!) and ready to go.  This way, I don’t spend my work time trying to figure out what to do.  I can hit the ground running.

1. Life is messier than it looks on paper.  When I sit down at my nice, clutter-free desk, it’s easy to forget that the baby won’t always take 3-hour naps at hte exact time that the boys are ready for some independent time.  Kids will get sick.  For that matter, I will probably feel under the weather at some point.  Crises will happen that require me to drop everything and put out the fire.
2. As author JA Konrath reminded me recently, I don’t get to control everything.  I have absolutely no control over whether or not a publisher buys my novel, or my next nonfiction book, or the article I queried.  Of course, that doesn’t excuse me from putting together the best submission package I possibly can, but beyond that things are out of my hands.
3. Goals change.  And that’s ok.  New opportunities pop up, and sometimes when we follow out our original goals we find that the destination isn’t as rosy as we thought it would be.  It’s ok to change course, as long as we do it intentionally.

Of course, I still have a laundry list of things I’d love to accomplish this year.  And the top of the list is accepting life as it is, even while I work constantly to improve it.

As a child of the late 70’s and 80’s, I grew up with the general understanding that housekeeping was what a woman did if she lacked the education, ambition, or intelligence to do anything else.  Running a household was the most mindless thing a woman could do.  Of course we could work 80 hours a week and slip in a little housework here and there.  No big deal, right?

Ha!

I’ve done both.  Ok, maybe I’ve never pulled an 80-hour work week.  Not even in the late 90’s when you had to put in 80-hour work weeks before the cool geeks would even give you the time of day.  Sorry, I guess I missed out on that bit of geek cred.  I kinda like sleep occasionally.  But I’ve been a working mother with a corporate job, a work-at-home Mom running my own businesses, and even (for brief periods) a stay-at-home Mom with no outside work responsibilities.

Anybody who tells you that managing a household is mindless has never actually done it.  Running a household - at least a household like mine! - is like negotiating Middle East peace, balancing the federal budget, running a corporation, and changing blow-out diapers, all at the same time at 4 AM on the day after Thanksgiving at WalMart.

For quite some time, I’ve been operating under the idea that if I could only get things to a baseline, get everything organized and figured out, life would run smoothly.  Unfortunately, I really need peace and quiet to do that kind of thinking, and well…that’s a pretty rare commodity around here.  Rather than giving up on the idea and just accepting life as one crisis after another, I’m trying another tactic:

I’ve taken a new job:  CEO of Ballad Family, Inc.

Responsibilities include oversight of various divisions including Education, Food Service, Accounting, Human Resources, and Site Maintenance.

Salary: $1000 per month.

According to the budget, there should be about $1000 left over at the end of every month.  So why have we been living paycheck to paycheck?  I have no idea.  I can’t even begin to tell you where that $1000 goes every month.  So, that’s my first goal.  To accurately track our budget, eliminate waste, and stick that $1000 into a savings account where it can’t go wandering off.  To achieve this, I’ll need to examine each area of this operation and streamline it.

I’ll be sharing my progress with you, in the hopes that what I’m doing will inspire and give you some practical tools to use in your own household.

And yes, I even have a corner office.  My Christmas present from DH was a complete re-organizatin of our bedroom.  What was once a storage and sleeping room is now an oasis of order!  I’ll post more about that on Tuesday, when I re-join Tackle it Tuesdays.

So I’m throwing the question out there:  What do you read online when you’re supposed to be working, and why?

The Holidays are just around the corner - coming up way too fast in my opinion - but I’ve got a resource that will make the whole thing easier AND more environmentally friendly.

Celebrate Green!  Creating Eco-Savvy Holidays, Celebrations & Traditions for the Whole Family is a great handbook for the holidays.  Instead of getting caught up in the madness and chaos of creating the perfect Good Housekeeping Holiday (and spending the small fortune and generating the pile of waste that goes along with it), Celebrate Green! gives solid, practical advice for injecting real meaning into the Holidays while reducing waste at the same time.

With four kiddos to outfit in Halloween finery, I flipped instantly to the section on costumes . . . and were my eyes opened!  I always knew I didn’t like the Halloween store fare - it’s expensive and yet feels cheap.  But I had no idea it was manufactured with (among other things) lead and formaldehyde.  Fun, huh?  So instead I pitched some of the ideas from Celebrate Green! to my kids, and voila - they turned on their innate creativity and started coming up with great ways to create costumes from what we have at home or could create ourselves.  This way, they get a double benefit.  Not only do they get to dress up, but they get the fun of creating their costumes as well!

We’re having a blast with this book, and I look forward to incorporating many of the suggestions all year long!  I enjoyed it so much I signed on to join the blog tour.  Check out a few of the other blogs talking about this book:

Check out http://www.CelebrateGreen.NET, where you can sign up for updates, blogs, find more tips, ideas, receive special offers and discounts. Authors Lynn Colwell and Corey Colwell-Lipson are also interested in hearing from their readers, be sure to let them know what you think!

• Miss Elizabeth joined our family in May
• We spent a marathon month or so adding 100 pages to Securing PHP Web Applications (Addison-Wesley - due out in December, 2008)
• Our school year started

And here we are.

Needless to say, after all that crisis I’m hitting a major organizational reset.  But I’ve learned something as well:  I’m a crisis junkie.  That rush of adrenaline you get from focusing on just one thing and ignoring the rest. I’ve learned something else as well.  Either I’m getting old, or maybe just getting wiser, but I’m not not getting that rush of adrenaline from sprinting toward a deadline and making it just under the wire.

This weekend I finished up a minor project for an editor I’ve worked with for a few years now.  The project is due on Tuesday, but I finished it on Saturday morning.  I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve ever handed this editor a finished project days before the deadline.  And you know, while crisis mode is exciting, this whole “smooth sailing” feeling ain’t bad either . . . I think I’m going to give it a try!

Anyhow, here’s what I’ve got planned for the next few weeks.  I have about half a dozen posts that are half written, but I don’t want to slam them all out there at once.  If you’re interested in one of these and don’t see me posting for a few days, please leave a comment here and remind me to stay focused!

Thanks!

Tricia

I’m so all over the place that I can’t really say that any one thing is my inspiration. But I’ll share what comes to mind this morning.

1. The pure joy that is a preschooler up to his elbows in finger paint. I want that uninhibited sense of pure creativity back! It’s there, hiding in the back of my soul, buried under years of responsibility. I can’t wait to be a grandma so I can join the little ones in finger painting without that annoying little voice in the back of my head reminding me that I have to clean it up when we’re done.

2. Women who do it all, raise large families, homeschool their children, run a home business, and still manage to keep a peace about them that makes me want to just sit in their presence for half an hour to recharge my own spirit.

3. Edward Abbey - author of several “coarse, rude, bad-tempered, violently prejudiced, unconstructive - even frankly antisocial” books, including my favorite, Desert Solitaire. It would take me weeks to decide on just one quote that inspires me from this book, so I’ll share one of my favorites from the introduction:

When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not. . . . This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot — throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?

4. Pioneer women who raised 10 children in a one-room cabin, with no heat, no running water, and none of the modern conveniences that I can’t imagine living without. Those women remind me of how strong we women are when we have to be.

5. Victorian mansions. The lives lived in those old homes was so much more graceful than my own. I miss that gentility and elegance in modern life. Yes, I know - all that gentility was enjoyed on the backs of generations of the poor, but somehow when I tour a home like this one (the David Davis Mansion in Bloomington, IL), all that cold hard reality fades away and I relax into the fantasy of polite society.

That’s enough for now, I think! I’m sure, the moment I publish this post, five more things will come to mind.

My laundry room has always been a messy area with piles of dirty laundry arranged on the floor - one pile for whites, one for colors, one for reds, one for jeans, one for towels and linens. As you can imagine, with a family of 5, those piles get big and topple over on a pretty regular basis!

When you have little boys doing their part to carry dirty laundry downstairs to the laundry room, that doesn’t exactly contribute to the neatness factor. I’ve never caught them at it, but I suspect sometimes those piles of laundry are a bit too tempting and get jumped in too!

Sure, this isn’t exactly a life-altering burst of inspiration, but it’s amazing how a half-dozen plastic bins can make a huge difference! Last weekend, I found 32 gallon plastic bins on clearance for about $7 each (ok, so they’re pastel blue and purple, Easter colors, but who cares? They’re in the laundry room!). I bought one for each of my laundry piles and voila! No more laundry on the floor, and the whole laundry area takes up a lot less space.

This was such a spur-of-the moment Tackle, I don’t even have before pictures (although if you saw my Basement Storage Room Tackle, you’ll get a pretty good feel for what the laundry room looked like….). Here’s the After picture though - I’m sure you can see the vast improvement! That reminds me, I need to switch laundry while I’m down there taking pictures!

As an added bonus, the clothes are easier to sort now too, because the piles are clearly separated. So now I have boys who can carry dirty laundry to the basement and put their own clean clothes away, I feel a lesson on separating laundry coming on! (Hey, at least I can rest easy knowing that they won’t go to college without a clue how to achieve clean clothes.)

1. Take a deep breath.  You can do this!
2. If it’s not physically dangerous to be outside (i.e. severe
   thunderstorms, blizzard, wind chill below zero, or a heat advisory)
   kick the kids outside for a minimum of 1 hour.  If it’s raining,
   fine.  A little water and mud never hurt anyone (although it will do
   a number to that freshly mopped floor….sorry!).  You stay inside
   (where you can see them, of course!) and pour yourself a cup of
   coffee/tea/soda/water or whatever spells comfort in your world.
3. Brainstorm 5 article ideas and research markets for them
   while you’re waiting for editors to get out of
   meetings and call you back.
4. When the kids get back inside, escort them to the shower -
   odds are they’re going to need it, even if the weather’s fine!
5. When they’re clean, feed them.  That always buys me at
   least a 1/2 hour of sanity.  Use this 30 minutes or so to come up
   with an obscure task or project for them to do.  I like scavenger
   hunts for things that don’t actually exist
6. After lunch, send them on their quest or sit them down for a
   project.  Free art time is good too - dump a bunch of random stuff on
   the table, provide scissors, glue, and construction paper and see
   what happens.
7. Chore time!
8. After they’ve worked so diligently, reward them with an hour
   of TV or computer games or whatever activity Dr. Sears would probably
   frown upon.

Congratulations, by now it should be mid- to late- afternoon and you’re practically done with the day!