The Prompt: Week 50 – Focus

I stumbled across “The Prompt” for the first time last week,
as I was scrolling through my G+ feed. The idea behind “The Prompt” is to focus
on your writing, rather than the images you use to illustrate your words. This
sounded like a really good writing challenge for me, as my blog heavily relies
on images to showcase the art and crafts projects that I have been working on
with my children. This week’s prompt is Focus, which is a really important word
for me this month, so I decided to have a go and link up my thoughts on what
focus means to me right now.

This year I am setting myself monthly goals, rather than the
usual New Year’s resolutions, which often fall by the way side after just a few
weeks. I am hoping that by setting myself goals each month, this will allow me
to manage my time much better and to focus on what I really need to get done.
Towards the end of last year, I felt my life was just getting far too busy. I
was trying to do too many things all at the same time and doing none of them
very well. I was beginning to lose focus on what I really needed to get done. I
was wasting far too much time stressing over the amount I had to do, flitting
from one thing to another and never really finishing anything off properly.

One of the big problems I was having was keeping on top of
the household chores.  Therefore my main
focus this month is to implement a “Family Cleaning Schedule”. This will
hopefully help us to stay on top of all the household chores that we have been
falling behind on. This may sound trivial to some, but for me if our house is
in good order, then everything else going on around us tends to run much more
smoothly as well. For example getting the kids ready for school each morning is
so much easier, if I don’t have to start clearing surfaces or piles of washing
out of the way first before making their breakfast. Each evening now the kids
are asked to clear away anything they have left out on the counter tops and
then they sweep up, whilst I tackle the mountain on laundry to be folded. After
a few initial grumbles the kids are now enjoying their new routines (and the
little bit of pocket money it has started to earn them) and it is rubbing off
in other areas of the house now as well. The boys are much happier keeping
their rooms tidy. And now that we are asking them to take responsibility for
tidying their dirty clothes into the laundry basket, rather than leaving them
on the floor, when I come up to hover, now I can get straight on with the task
in hand and not waste time picking things up off the floor before I can begin.

To get us started this month I have drawn up a list of jobs
which need doing each week in each area of the house. Then as each job gets
completed we put a tick next to it. This helps to keep track of what has
already been done. It also provides us with a handy reference for when we do
get a few minutes to fit in some cleaning, we can take a quick look to see what
hasn’t been done yet and focus on that. Then tick it off before moving onto the
next job. This has worked very well for the first two weeks of the year and
only time will tell if we can maintain our good start. There has been a
noticeable drop in the tension levels in the house, which are all feeling the
benefit from. So if we can keep our focus on what needs to be done, then we are
in with a good chance of keeping our house clean and today and more harmonious.

I’ve really enjoyed taking the focus of my writing away from
purely arts and crafts for a short while in this post. This is something I plan
to do more of as the year develops. I am certainly looking forward to seeing
what the next “Prompt” will be and joining in again sometime.

What have you been focussing on this week?