hOMe practices

• Having time and managing time - tips for achieving a well-balanced day
• Stretch break from screens – Lizard Pose and Eye Movements help relieve the big and small muscles stiff from all that screen-time.
• Resources for educating your family about racism and ways to support efforts to promote equity, justice and multi-racial sensitivity.

photo: Trust Your Struggle Collective mural/Oakland, CA (Cianna Jackson)

“Time is free, but priceless. You can't own it, but you can use it. You can't keep it, but you can spend it. Once you've lost it, you can never get it back.”
~ Harvey Mackay

Our happiness and feeling of success seem closely tied to how we feel a day has gone: what did I check off my to-do list, how did I handle that situation or another, who did I truly connect with, what can I improve on?
 
As summer approaches, many parents are feeling anxious about what to do with their kids once school is officially over. With most sleep-away camps cancelled and the school schedules that once anchored the days’ activities gone, kids have will have even more time on their hands than the usual shelter-in-place hours.
 
During the COVID pandemic many families have been able to experience month-long, consecutive days and hours altogether as well. For many it’s been a challenge to juggle working from home while home-schooling and keeping kids engaged on the off-school hours. But for the majority, families have been able to finally slow things down and truly savor time together, uninterrupted by extra-curricular activities and events. Without outside distractions families are engaging in ways that weren’t possible before the pandemic.
 
Board games, baking and cooking together, gardening, crafting, completing home projects, collaborating on ways to serve the community, sitting together for multiple meals in a day. Yet while all this time together has been a gift, it’s easy to lose track of the days and how the time is spent. Before you know it, a whole day has passed and you’re still in your pajamas.
 
I know for myself if I come to the end of a day with nothing to show for it, I can feel agitated and disappointed that I had somehow wasted time or not lived my day as fully as I could have. Conversely, on days that I had a clear project and finished it, or at least put some work into it, my mood lifted, and I attained some sense of fulfillment. Now, granted I’m not saying that every day has to be imbued with purpose or that lazy days are wasteful. What I’m proposing is a more conscious look at how we spend our time and a mindful framework that sets us up for success in achieving more balance in our days.
 
One weekend we experimented with letting our boys choose how they used their time with minimal prodding and nagging: no schedule, no homework, no house chores. That meant binging on movies, lounging in a hammock reading, playing games on devices, a long-play board games, hours crafting. My youngest chose to fill his time (a good 10 hours of it that day) playing video games or going down the YouTube rabbit hole. By the end of the evening he suffered a pretty bad migraine—mostly due to dehydration and eye strain from being on a screen for waaaaay too long. Like overdoing it on “cheat day” he was drunk on filler time.
 
That lead me to thinking, we needed a family refresher on how we spend our time. I brought back an old model we used when on a six-month family sabbatical in Brazil. The boys nicknamed it the “illuminati model” (in name only, for the cool logo: triangle with an eye). Each side of the triangle represents a different area of focus: Body, Mind and Soul/Spirit. The eye is for Others. The idea is that in a well-balanced day you are able to do something for your Body, something for your Mind, something for your Soul and something for Others.
 
Some days are more balanced than others. What’s important is that you have some structure to work with—a guide that keeps you on track and makes you take an honest look at how you spend your time. For those resistant towards any kind of limits, I can say that like the creative process structure leads to freedom. Freedom from worrying about how you spent your time. How much time is spent doing things that you don’t particularly love, or that isn’t exactly what you want to do be doing? Maybe, like a large percentage of us, you are spending a disproportionate amount of time watching TV. Aren’t you tired of saying, if I only had time, or there’s not enough time? When was the last time you actually looked at how you were spending your time?
 
Think about it, if time is money, then it’s in our interest to budget our time wisely. Define what values you live by, and how you wish to be spending your time. Parse out sections of time for areas that hold meaning for you. Using the Illuminati Model can help you make the right choices on how the hours are spent. At the end of the day you can take inventory, individually or as a family, possibly around your family dinner table, and share with each other what you did for your bodies, minds, souls and others and discuss where you could improve for the next day.
 
Investing the time now to into drilling this practice into our kid's consciousness will hopefully result in becoming second-nature for them, and by the time our kids are organizing their own schedules they’ll instinctively budget time for engaging themselves physically, mentally and spiritually, while also providing a service for others.

Steps towards a Well-Balanced Day
The first step is gain awareness of how exactly you are spending your time—track the activities you do each day and how long each activity takes. This includes how long you sleep and when you take your meals. My boys found this part especially surprising. By coloring in my homemade time pie chart, they could clearly see that we were not exaggerating about the time spent on devices (Filler Time). Also, it was clear to both boys that they were lacking in physical activity (Body). The second step is list your personal values (ex: family, creative time, volunteering) and how you wish to be spending your time. Body relates to any physical activity: walking, dancing, biking, yoga, etc. Mind is what stimulates you intellectually: reading, studying, work, research, debating, etc. Soul is all that makes your heart happy: creative activity, self-care, family/friend time, gardening, etc. And Others could include house chores, cooking, volunteering, helping a neighbor, etc. Filler time, for us, covers the time we are on devices: playing videogames, watching television or videos online, checking email or social media. Many categories will overlap, and satisfy each other. For instance, my husband loves to bake so this activity checks off his Soul and Others category because we benefit from his tasty passion. What areas are lacking, what areas are you spending too much time on? The third step is make a plan to incorporate your ideal day (a well-balanced day), visualize it (hello, time pie chart - page 1 you choose your own colors, or page 2 use our color code) and stick to it. When comparing before and after pie charts, my sons delighted in how much more variety in color their new charts showed, and they gained clarity about the next day’s plan. The last step is reflect on how your day went and share what you set out to do and how successful you were in making it happen.
 
Remember, be kind to yourself. There may be resistance and frustration in trying something new. Budgets of any kind are a touchy point for most people. Allow for flexibility and for imperfection—every day is different, and everybody’s needs are different. Customize for your lifestyle. Know that your investment in a more mindful approach to time management will produce some great returns in the end (more deliberate, well-balanced days). You will soon find yourself wealthy in time and healthy in spirit.

Try it for a week and let me know how it went for you. Please feel free to reach out if you need some guidance figuring out the time pie chart. I'm happy to clarify this mindful process further.

image: quora.com (floating time), mistygatlin (balancing), theladders.com (time explosion), acantor (tracking time)