I suppose that most organized mothers are good about sticking to a schedule, regardless of whether they have another job besides catering to the small people underfoot. And if you work for someone else, adhering to a schedule becomes essential, I’d imagine, or you risk losing your job.

I am very organized about some things and less organized about others, and what I found as I began my life as a freelancer was that I am naturally given towards prioritizing and compartmentalizing my work. Whether a vestige from my corporate days or just a side effect of wanting to appear perfect to my clients, I’m quite good at conducting my life as Business Mir with near-military precision.

This is a good strategy because clients like it when you do what you say you’ll do when you said you’d do it. Hooray! In fact, if I promise to have it for them on Wednesday morning, say, it goes into the calendar on my computer (with a scheduled reminder) as well as the calendar on my cell phone, and chances are excellent that I’ll have it done by Tuesday night. Because I am just that anal-retentive.

What I found, though, is that although it was effortless to maintain and stick to my work schedule, the more amorphous spaces in-between tended to fill up with… more work. And my children? And husband? Well, I squeezed them in when I could, which is wrong about five different ways. Maybe other people don’t need to “schedule” time to focus on their families, but I found that I really do. I’ll stick to a schedule, but the decisions I make on the fly aren’t nearly so reliable.

So I started doing more scheduling. Some of it is absolute necessity; the kids need to be in various places at various times. What I’m working on doing is grabbing those occasions as chances for a bit of quality time with the other child, if I can. Some of what I’ve been doing is picking special activities to do with the kids in small chunks—for example, my daughter and I are currently working on a jigsaw puzzle together. We rarely get in more than 10 minutes at a time on it, but it’s fun.

Anyway, it’s a lot of stuff to have scheduled, but it seems to be working out. Or at least, it did.

Yesterday I had a busy day, then the kids came home and had homework and then we had to head out to activities, and by the time they’d showered it was close to bedtime. “Puzzle?” my daughter asked hopefully. Yes, we had 15 minutes to spend on the puzzle, and I was actually just starting to relax and unwind when my husband asked me wasn’t I supposed to be at choir practice?

I had remembered everything yesterday—three deadlines, countless communications, one meeting, soccer practice, a last-minute change on a project, a church dinner—everything except the one activity that was just for me. Somehow I hadn’t put that on my schedule, and it had completely slipped my mind.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in there. If only I can find a slot in my schedule to sit down and think about it….