Becoming Domestic

This morning was spent helping my newest local friend Janet tidy up our next door neighbour’s garden. Janet is a trained horticulturalist and has many years of experience under her belt. Despite being retired for several years she maintains a number of local gardens and has a huge wealth of knowledge which I was very fortunate to tap into as we worked together in the strong September sunshine.

I learnt the names of loads of plants, how to prune a honeysuckle properly so that it is neat and tidy throughout the winter abut yet promotes vigourous growth in the Spring, why it is best to pull up evening primrosesafter they have finished flowering (they are biannuals and are finished while their seeds will have started growing elsewhere) but need to cut back echinacea (periennial so mustn’t dig up the roots or would damage next years growth).

The best bit of wisdom I gained from Janet today however, was how she works systematically round the garden starting at one point and finishing at the same place with a fairly clear goal of doing one type of job (she pointed out that the start/end point was chosen proximity to the bonfire heap so we could easily tip our huge bundle of prunings on to it at the end). This way of working is so different to my scatty, chaotic and distracted gardening style of hopping from one area to the other all the time thinking of the hundreds of other jobs which needed to be remembered and then completed. It is this novice and stressful way of working which makes me think that I dislike gardening but learning from Janet made me remember how rewarding gardening is as a pastime if one works methodically and sensibly.

Here is a quick review of how Janet worked this morning.

Janet explained we were only doing a quick tidy up and were therefore concentrating on removing all brown/dead stems, straggly overgrown areas and any huge weeds. All the tiny weeds look ok amongst the plant borders as they are green and innocuous.

We worked together round the back garden and into the front for about an hour. The garden looked remarkably neater than before

My kids started preschool today which means that I now get a guaranteed two and a half childfree hours each day to crack on with some of the chores & projects I have put off or felt unable to do whilst looking after 3 year old twins.

Suddenly I feel overwhelmed by the number of things I want to achieve and how small an amount of time I have each day to achieve my goals (exercise, write more of my book, sell the enormous pile of things we have accumulated on eBay, plant up and maintain the garden, help Darren with his new enterprise, work on the piece of software Darren and I have identified as being needed by lots of people, shop for food without kids etc etc etc).

I guess I need a system of prioritising each of these areas so that each gets some of my time and energy but some get more than others. I should also write a list of every single tasks make up the end goals and see which of the tasks can be done with the children around (eg. hoovering, food shopping, cooking), which I could do with low energy reserves after putting the children to bed (eg. researching and writing, household finances admin) and which definitely need the child-free hours (eg. phoning D’s clients to chase invoices).

I recently read on Steve Pavlina’s wonderful site that one should dedicate a ratio of 50% of available time to long term projects, 20% to medium-term goals and only 10% to things that bring very short term benefits.

I’m not sure that I agree with this as being a fulltime mother most of my days are taken up with laundry (washing, drying, folding, ironing, putting away), cleaning (sweeping, vacuuming, wiping, washing up). Perhaps I need to allocate a definite chunk of time each day to ‘project work’ and the rest to ‘urgent housework’.

The basic principle of little and often is what I will do for now. A 15 minute cleaning session followed by 15 minutes of household finances followed by 30 minutes of gardening etc.

The trick which works best for me is setting the kitchen timer for 15 minutes and getting stuck in to a task. Usually I surprise myself at how much I have accomplished within the 15 minutes. The rule I then apply is to move on regardless of how much more of the chore there is left and reset the timer for another 15 minutes for the next job. After a few of these sessions I make sure I have a timed 15 minutes where I have a big drink and a sit down or a walk around the garden.

If 30 minutes are spent on a task or a project for just one short month then a whopping great 15 hours of dedicated energy and thought will have been spent on it by the end of that month.