Good morning — especially to everyone who is starting the January 2024 Time Tracking Challenge this morning. We have several thousand people signed up (phew!). That’s a lot of time being recorded!
You don’t have to be officially “signed up” to play along. You can just record your time for a week and know that lots of other folks are doing it with you. If you do still want to sign up, you can, and you’ll get Tuesday’s email (Day 2) first, tomorrow morning. You can download any of my time tracking spreadsheets here.
I’ll be posting how I spent Monday later today. So far this day has been a little different – the 16-year-old is home not feeling well, which is too bad (school gets increasingly hard to miss at this age) but had the upside of moving our morning start time later. Normally I set the alarm for 6:30 a.m. but this morning it was 6:55. I thought I’d wake before my alarm as I went to bed by 11:15 p.m. but nope. Guess I needed my sleep.
(The high school start time will move from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. next year — with no one’s school starting before 8 a.m. it might be time to rethink the whole morning routine, but I’ll think about that when the time comes).
This weekend was mostly good – and I realized in the middle of it that a lot of what we were doing will be repeated the first weekend of January for a while. I went to my choir’s annual Twelfth Night party on Friday (getting to use the holiday dress again!). On Sunday morning my choir sang a few pieces from our usual “star” repertoire (Mendelssohn’s “Behold a Star from Jacob Shining” and Libby Larsen’s “Beautiful Star”). And then we had the 4-year-old’s birthday party in the afternoon. This was at a local bouncy house place that had been booked up for a month but they had a cancelation so I swooped in. It was full on standard small kid birthday party (bouncing, pizza, cupcakes, etc.) with the associated chaos but he had fun and loved opening his presents at home after. My guess is I will be scheduling his party on the first weekend of January for at least the next few years…
Anyway, I’ll be back tonight posting Monday. If you’re tracking time, good luck! You really just need to check in 3-4 times per day, and not make the perfect the enemy of the good. That’s how I’ve stuck with it for almost 9 years now (don’t worry, you don’t have to do that!)
We sang the Mendelssohn too. I bet our two churches weren’t the only ones either. Some pieces are just…iconic.
@Gillian – plus, singing the same song many years in a row means that you’re not desperately trying to learn a new piece right after Christmas, and when a lot of people might have been gone for the previous rehearsal…
“Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good” one of my favorite things you often say!! Keep saying/writing it please, maybe it’ll stick into my actions instead of just my brain😅
@Ali – yep, something is generally better than nothing. We do what we can. Good luck with the tracking!
I’m also glad that the past 2 days were mostly good, Ms. Laura Vanderkam.
Your time tracking challenge came along at a perfect time! I am a big fan of BoBW and tried time tracking. Unfortunately the week I chose to start was Christmas week which is anything but predictable and easy to track. I’ve heard you say multiple times on the podcast that no week is a typical week, but today our school district is closed-we are home due to the rainy part of this big storm system, so it seems a little more atypical. Had to write “pack for work…then unpack” as the announcement that the district was closed came in. Happy birthday to your little one! My son turned 7 on Saturday (his actual birthday). We have extended family members who have birthdays on Christmas Day and on 12/27 so we end up doing a family birthday party while everyone is here for the holidays.
@Kristen – glad you are doing the challenge! Yep, Christmas week is unpredictable, but often still interesting. I look through my logs from 6 years ago each week and it was fun to see how I spent the holidays in 2017-2018! I think you’ll enjoy looking back on an entry saying pack and then unpack – that is life. Thanks for the birthday wishes – there are upsides and downsides to a late December birthday. We shall see what he thinks when he is older!