Interview with Julie Morgenstern

he alarms rings. Once again you struggle sleepily out of bed to another day filled with possibilities. You're going to get so much done today--you're a stay-at-home mom! You've got all this time!

At the end of the day you drop wearily into bed and mentally review the day. You didn't get a dang thing done; the day just flew by, like yesterday and the day before that, and probably tomorrow, you admit. What happened? You got so much done during your working days, why can't you get anything done now?

Enter Julie Morgenstern. You may have heard Julie's name around TNH quite a bit; she is the author of the only organizational book that has ever worked even a little for me, Organizing from the Inside Out. I haven't implemented her ideas in more than a fourth of my house, but where I have followed her advice, those areas have stayed organized up to two years later. She's an organizational goddess. One of these days, when I have the time, I keep saying, I'll get the rest of the house done.

Imagine my excitement when I heard she was releasing a book on TIME management! I thought, hey, even if I only get a quarter of my time managed, like the house, that's a quarter of the day where I might actually get something done, like the rest of the house organization. And imagine my excitement when I received the book and a chance to talk with Julie herself.

Analyze, strategize, attack
At heart, Time Management from the Inside Out is the same book as Organizing from the Inside Out. The concepts are just applied to time instead of space: Analyze your relationship to time (instead of a room), Strategize (figure out what you need to do) and Attack (do it). The "kindergarten system" from OFIO is back as well.

When I called Julie two weeks ago to do this interview, you would not believe it; I was late! (I told you I needed this book.) She was gracious enough to talk with me anyway in the time we had left. We began by talking about dividing up the day into categories of tasks, rather than specifics:

Julie: You may decide that the mornings is when you're going to do your chores, so you knock them out by lunchtime, and the afternoon is when you allow yourself time for playing with your kids, getting together with friends or doing helpful projects or whatever. You need to just create a flow to your day and to your week so you generally know when to do which kinds of tasks.

Lynn: But none of this is set in stone. A lot of people with these time management books say do this at this time, do that at that time...

J: I think that you need wider divisions than that. For example, there's helpful chores and then there are maybe projects or fun stuff or people stuff, you know? So maybe the mornings are more related to the household chores and the afternoons are more about people. That's a pretty simple thing. And then whenever you've got tasks to do you funnel them to the morning; if a friend wants to get together with you, you funnel that to the afternoon. Your kid wants to play--"we can play after lunch. Right now mommy's vacuuming," and you give your kid a chore to do, too.

So it's like in kindergarten where there's reading time, and there's arts and crafts time and there's sleep time--you have to create some structure to your day. Otherwise your days fly by and you get nothing done.

L: You're very kindergarten-oriented, Julie.

J: I am! Because it's a very simple model and I think that we need a simple model for our complicated times. There is so much chaos around us and there are so many demands, particularly for a stay-at-home mom. You're so obligated to do EVERYTHING! Suddenly the weight of the world is on your shoulders. You're supposed to be there for your kids, you're supposed to take care of the house, now you're supposed to make great meals, and you know, wallpaper the bathroom. And you're not a supermom, you know what I mean? Even if you are a stay-at-home mom you can't do it all and you can't do it all at once.

But if you have a time and place generally for each thing, it makes it all manageable and you know when to do stuff. I think that not having any structure at all leaves you in a position that you don't know when to do stuff. Your head fills up with to-dos, but you don't have a "when" connected to them so they don't get done at all.

L: This is probably why the tasks seem so overwhelming for a lot of stay-at-home moms. I get a lot of tear-soaked email saying "I don't even know where to start."

J: Right. I was working with a woman who had been a full-time working mom, four kids, very, VERY organized at work and very, very organized in her evenings and weekends because she's done this for years and she's worked it out and really knows her system. And then she decided she really wanted to be there more for her kids, wanted to be home more, take care of the house and the kids a little bit more, so she pared down to three days a week. It was Mondays and Fridays she had off. And she said these days would fly by and she got nothing done. She'd had fantasies about how she was going to get so much done, and she got nothing done. She'd spend all day doing the laundry. [laughs] And that was it!

L: I've had days like that.

J: Yeah, well, we just basically need a list. What are the categories of tasks? it's the categories of task that you want to list, not the specific task. So it's not "I want to put the photos in the photo album, I want to recover the couch, I want to reorganize the garage, I want to pay my bills on time"--you have to do it more by categories. Home improvement projects, routine chores, special things with the kids. That's three categories. And then you lay it out and structure it.

We transformed it in one day. We sat down and mapped it out and gave her a structure. And she just hadn't realized how important it would be to have that, because she thought if she had all this time on her hands she could just do things when she felt like it. That doesn't work, especially when you're a parent, because your kids will pull you in a million directions at once, and if you don't have a plan of your own you'll never get to your stuff.

L: A lot of people complain about overscheduling their time. Their kids have all these activities and they have all these activities they're supposed to be doing. Should people having problems managing their time pare back?

J: I think you should look at it. You have to always start with your big-picture goals, I'm a big believer in that. I don't think you can just jump to that solution--"okay I gotta cut back." You have to have big-picture goals in every department. What are the family goals? You know you want to have time with each other, the extra-curricular stuff and community activities--they're important but if you lay it out by big broad categories, family, community, extra-curricular and study or school or work, you can start to create a balance.

I do think particularly in families that have a lot of kids, 3 or 4 kids, I have seen the families that do the best limit each child to one or two maximum extra-curricular activities. Because otherwise the parents go crazy and nobody ever spends time together as a family. T. Berry Brazelton just came out with this book The Irreducible Needs of Children, and said, all this activity is keeping families from spending any time together and that is everybody's big picture goal, creating really close family relationships. You can't do that if you don't spend time together, so you have to build in that time. And it may mean paring back some of that stuff.

L: Any ideas on why people are filling up every single second of their lives with these kinds of things?

J: I think it's the environment. We are in what I call a sort of an opportunity overload period of time--it's not information overload, it's opportunity overload. There's so much you can do and it's like we're all these kids in a candy shop. It's like, oh! I could play soccer, I could learn French, I should volunteer, I could do this, I could do that. Because it's possible, everybody feels that they should, and I think that people should really pull back from that. You don't have to do anything. Being very focused and selective about what you do will really increase the quality of your life instead of feeling like you have to do everything just because it's there. It's a very high-sped-up society we live in, and it takes a certain amount of strength to step back and pare down. I'm not a "simplify your life" person, I'm an "improve the quality of your life" person. And sometimes that means doing less so you can really pour yourself into what you are doing.

An Excerpt from 'Time Management from the Inside Out' -->