Just about six weeks ago, I had surgery to reconstruct my Anterior Cruciate Ligament.  (ACL)

Having this surgery was a big decision.  For one thing, I really wasn’t debilitated by my injury.  I could still walk (straight ahead), I wasn’t in pain, I had full range of motion.  However, pivoting even slightly caused my leg to give out.

I could have possibly gone on the rest of my life without have this ligament replaced.  However, my life would be altered.  Sports would be gone.  I would also have to think about any lateral move I made.  If I did the wrong thing, I was at risk of tearing my cartilage or tearing other ligaments.  So although surgery was not REQUIRED, it was recommended if I wanted to go back to doing many activities.

Just after surgery, my knee was huge, I had to put a full leg brace on my leg even for getting up off the couch, and I went to therapy three times a week.  There was a lot of pain, but there was also a lot of progress.  Each day got a little better, and at this point, my knee is more of a nuisance than a ‘focus’.

My recovery process reminded me that so many negative things in life are really just temporary.   When my pain medications wore off the day after surgery and I was miserable, I felt like I would never walk normal again and I questioned by decision to have the surgery. In less than four weeks though, the brace was gone and my normal gait was back.   (Not that the knee was fully recovered at that point, it still was very stiff and I still had another couple months of physical therapy to go.  However, day-to-day activities were manageable.) Sure those four weeks were not fun, but it was totally worth going through the pain and physical therapy to regain the ability to run around and live life again.

The Lesson:   Difficult Circumstances (Usually) Don’t Last Forever!

Sometimes you might just have to bite the bullet for a little while to get through certain circumstances, and then life will return to normal.  (Even though it might not seem so short-term at the time.)  This thought doesn’t apply just to health, but to almost anything.

For example, imagine you need to come up with an extra two thousand dollars to pay down a bill.  Maybe all it would take is working a second job for a month or two so that you can earn the needed money.  Sure, it might not be fun, but again, it is something you would only have to endure for a short period of time.   Next thing you know, the time has passed and your debts are settled.

Or, maybe you are considering starting a side business, but you keep putting it off because you ‘don’t have the time’. Well, think about how you really spend your time.  Do you spend a few evenings a week watching TV?  Would it be possible for you to give up some leisure activities for just a few months so you could devote your time and energy to your new venture?  Sure, those few months might be tiring, but the payoff could be huge.

So, next time you think of something you would like to accomplish in the future, really think about what is stopping you from doing it right now.  Do you really have a reasonable roadblock?  Or, could you push through for a few months to attain what you want?

The following is a guest post from Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, where she writes about finding the balance between paying your bills, saving for your future, and budgeting in the fun stuff along the way.

For those of you who haven’t met me yet, hi, my name is Crystal and I am a blogging addict.  I started in February 2010 and quickly realized I wanted to pursue it as my full time career.  It’s just so much fun to interact with so many people and the relationships I’ve developed with people like Kris are invaluable to me.

Of course, while I create my online income streams, I am also balancing my day job and all of my blogging activities.  I’m stretched pretty thin voluntarily, which has led me to learn how to prioritize my time.

Time prioritization is just like prioritizing my spending.  I only have so much time in a day, so I eventually had to start cutting back on some things to make room for others.

When I realized I had to make some tough decisions last November, I made a list of all of my time-consuming activities to see what needed to go:

Daily Activities 2010 – Monday-Friday

1. Getting ready in the morning – 30 minutes
2. Work – 9 hours
3. Commenting on other blogs - 2 hours
4. Blog email – 1 hour
5. Yakezie forums (blogging group) – 1 hour
6. Dinner with my husband – at least 30 minutes
7. Answering comments – 30 minutes
8. Dog chores like feeding and giving Mr. Pug all of his medicines – 30 minutes
9. House chores like the dishes and laundry - 30 minutes
10. Family and friends email and calls – 30 minutes
11. Writing Posts – 1 hour
12. TV – 4 hours
13. Exercise like walking – 10 minutes
14. Getting ready for the next day – 20 minutes
15. Sleep – 8 hours

Just so you don’t have to break out a calculator, that grand total came to 27.5 hours.  I was trying to fit in an extra 3.5 hours to my day and was wondering why I wasn’t sleeping as much as usual, why I had stopped exercising completely, why I couldn’t remember the shows we had just watched, and why I always seemed hurried.

Since that day, I’ve scaled back to a more balanced day.

Daily Activities Now – Monday-Friday

1. Getting ready in the morning – 30 minutes
2. Work – 9 hours
3. Family and friends email and calls – 30 minutes
4. Dinner with my husband – at least 30 minutes
5. Answering comments – 20 minutes
6. Dog chores like feeding and giving Mr. Pug all of his medicines – 30 minutes
7. House chores like the dishes and laundry - 10 minutes
8. Blog email – 1 hour
9. Yakezie forums (blogging group) – 1 hour
10. Writing Posts – 1 hour
11. Exercise like walking - 30 minutes
12. Commenting on other blogs - 30  minutes
13. Getting ready for the next day - 30 minutes
14. Sleep – 8 hours

That actually adds up to 24 hours!  Notice that I’ve pretty much given up watching TV unless it’s on in the background while I’m doing something blog-related.   I’ve also scaled back on commenting on other blogs quite a bit.  That has forced me to read fewer blogs, but I’m developing closer relationships too.  I’ve also added actual exercise time to my day (which I do sometimes follow through on, lol) and have a few more minutes to myself just to get my thoughts and clothes ready for the another day.

Before anyone asks, both of those schedules are obviously guesstimates of my time.  I don’t cut off my friends or family in mid-conversation at the 30 minute mark or anything like that.   (From Kris:  I am glad you did not cut off this post mid-way, thank you…) I also usually get 7-ish hours of sleep instead of 8 on the dot.  But the overall point of the schedules was successful – I was able to show myself where I was spending my time and make an actual effort to change it.

Yes, I am still balancing two jobs and am pretty busy, but I feel calmer about it all.  My weekends are usually spent with friends and family and I don’t have to worry about wasted time while I am trying to relax.  My best bet is that even my most stressful day now is healthier than a normal one towards the end of last year.

How do you prioritize your time?  Have you found any tricks to balancing it all?

From Kris:  How do you avoid burnout!?  If I had a schedule like Crystal’s, I would probably lose my mind.  Thank you Crystal for the guest post!

OK, so the title might be a stretch.  However, my return to employment has had an unexpected benefit:

I am making the most of my time!

Before, I had all day long to take care of little things.  The problem was, I kept thinking ‘Oh, I have all day tomorrow, I will do it then’.  Unfortunately, things were not getting done, and I cannot even explain why.   Now, I know my available time is limited, so I work like a whirlwind to get everything done with the small amount of time I have.

You should see me go!  Permission slips are promptly signed, appointments are made, dishes are done right after breakfast, laundry is folded.   I even have ‘to do’ lists and get to check things off!  My biggest question is, how much time did I waste before?  Yikes, I cringe to think about it.  (I know some of my time was spent exercising, I haven’t done that as much since I started working again.  At least that was a good use of time…)

I have seen this phenomenon before.  One winter, my son didn’t play school basketball for about 6 weeks.  He ended up joining the team mid-way through the season, but during those 6 weeks, his grades suffered and he was kind of a lump.  The exact opposite happened that I expected.  I thought he would devote more time to studying and his grades would be off the chart!  Instead, I think he had the attitude of ‘I can always do it later tonight’.  Next thing you know, it was MUCH later, and he ended up having to rush to get things done.  His grades were still very good, but I thought they would be fantastic given all the extra time in his schedule.  What is funny is I didn’t think the same thing would happen to me.  I am a mature adult for God’s sake!  Well, I thought I was.

Has this ever happened to you?  Did you ever find that you were more productive when you had LESS time?

I am on a mission…

A mission to get rid of extraneous things in my life.

I will be streamlining my activities.  I pledge to do the following:

1. On the computer, I will answer email and tend to my blog.  Useless statistic checking (for my blog) and non-value-added surfing will be held to a minimum.  Facebook will be viewed once or twice a day.  (Unless something really exciting is going on, like someone is in labor or something.)
2. I am deleting or filing all email as soon as it is read.  No more than 20 items in my inbox ever again.
3. I am unsubscribing (email) to everything I do not read everyday.  Goodbye notices from restaurants and the like.   Email clutter is no longer going to be a part of my life.
4. I am going to research how to reduce the flow of junk mail that arrives in my mailbox.  (If you know how to do this, please comment.)
5. Miscellaneous postal-mail will no longer grace my kitchen counter top.  Mail will either  be recycled or filed as soon as it enters my home.
6. I am turning off my notifications from Facebook that tell me when a thread I commented on is updated.

It is so easy to waste time ‘rehandling’ things, be it email, regular mail, whatever.  I don’t want to waste anymore time.  I am going to do an overhaul that will hopefully pay off in many ways.  So, if you send me an email or comment on my blog, you may not get an immediate response.  However,  I am guessing you really aren’t waiting on pins and needles to get my response in the first place!

Do you have any other streamlining suggestions?  What works for you?  What areas am I missing?  I am curious to see how much ‘new’ time I will gain in each day!

This past weekend was incredibly hectic for us. Of course, it is our own fault.  We have 3 kids, all close in age, and each one has a couple activities.  I have basically turned into the mom I said I would never be.  (“My kids won’t play travel soccer”, “my kids won’t play more than one sport in a season…”)  I will never forget when I was a ‘new’ mom with just young kids at home and a friend of mine said she could not do anything in the spring.  I thought that was insane.  She couldn’t even go out to dinner one time for an entire season?

Now I understand…

Whereas the above example may seem a little extreme, I think my friend had it right.  Sure, she probably did have a few evenings where she could get away for a little while.  But she recognized that her time was precious, and she had learned the art of saying  ‘No’.

Each year of my life, my calendar seems to fill up quicker and quicker.  When I was younger, I tried to do everything anybody else wanted, except myself.  I was exhausted.  But guilt ruled my life back then.  I guess it still does to a degree, but I think I have a little better of a handle on it now.  I have backed away from commitments at school.  I don’t go to every Avon/Pampered Chef/Whatever party that I am invited to.   As much as I want to help others, I realized that for me to be a sane and nice mom/wife/friend/daughter, I needed to be a little selfish sometimes.  I had to remember that my happiness mattered too.  Too many things I have volunteered for started out as small commitments.  However, certain organizations just started asking more and more until I was completely burned out.  It is awful when something you used to take joy out of turns into a tedious task.   That is what can happen when you do not control your commitments.

It isn’t easy to say no.  It is a learned skill, but it is one you may need to acquire in order to save yourself.  I am not saying that when your best friend calls you up after a bad breakup you should say “sorry, too busy” and hang up the phone.  But just as parents learn to choose their battles, people also have to learn to choose when to say ‘no’.  It is unfortunate that for many of us, we have to go through decades of sacrificing ourselves to learn this lesson.

So next time an offer comes up that really doesn’t fit into your schedule, or you just flat out don’t want to do- decline it, and don’t feel bad about it.