“Decide that you will not try to do everything at once. That is why time is spread out.”
– Norman Vincent Peale

As mothers, we often take one look at our To-Do list and literally become paralyzed with overwhelm, knowing that there is way more on there than is humanly possible to get done as quickly as we would like or feel we “should” be able to. Why do we put all of this self-imposed pressure on ourselves?

When our kids bring home a full agenda of homework or have a big class project to work on, do we just stand their wide-eyed and frozen, and join them in their concern that it is just too much and they will never get it done? Of course not! (Well, we may think this for a moment, but we’d never let them in on that little nugget of doubt!) We help them prioritize their tasks and dig in, checking off each item as it is completed, and moving on to the next. Why then do we put so much pressure on ourselves to simultaneously attack every item on our To-Do list, and then feel like a failure if we don’t get as much done in a given day as we had hoped? We all know from experience that motherhood is not a single-focus activity where you get to give each To-Do item your undivided attention until it is done, and then neatly and smoothly move on to the next. Our lives as moms are full of unforeseen interruptions and schedule de-railers that just come as part of the daily job. So we need to learn to go easier on ourselves when our days don’t necessarily go as productively as we had hoped when we got started on them after breakfast.

Try to choose 1-3 of your top priorities each day and try to schedule their completion into your agenda, realizing that there will likely be something that comes up right in the middle of it all that may slow down your intended progress. That’s OK! If you set the maximum goal of working on 2-3 tasks, and agree with yourself to be completely satisfied with progress on any one of them, then even a baby-step in the right direction is great progress you can be proud of! And to take even more pressure off, you may want to shift your perspective toward weekly To-Do’s, rather than daily To-Do’s. Shoot for completing 1-3 tasks on your list each week, and even if you only get a little work toward one or two done each day, by the end of the week, you’ll have completed some, be able to remove them from your list, and focus on the next. Again, kind of like helping your child with a class project – normally (except in the dreaded “It’s 9:00 PM Sunday night and you’re finding out about a class project for the first time that’s due tomorrow” situation!!) you spread the completion of the project out over days, or with larger projects, even weeks, and break it down into “digestible” chunks to complete a little at a time. You can do the same thing with your To-Do list. Figure out which items are your biggest priorities, take a look at a reasonable timeline for completion, and spread the steps out over a few days or longer. That way, if one day gets away from you and you don’t get to the task, you know that you’ve already given yourself permission to get to it the following day and still feel great about it!