After my years of schooling and work, I rebelled against deadlines and schedules. The early years of being a mother-at-home were wonderful schedule-free times with my kids. We had general routines but no hard and fast schedule. Then, the early years of homeschooling were never with strict schedules or deadlines, it was great. It felt liberating and so free to live in a spontaneous manner.
As the kids entered the elementary grades they started doing more and more organized things with groups and we had those things in the schedule and things with deadlines but still in the rest of our family life it was pretty loosey goosey and laid back.
Well now I've got a ninth and sixth grader and I have finally come around to realizing how good deadlines actually are. I don't mean just for them but also for me. In an nutshell, deadlines help me be more productive and help me push to get something done that could have been finished prior but was just not made a priority due to it being a non-priority due to having no end date in sight.
Last year's deadline to move out of the house by the date the movers was arriving was a very clear, mandatory deadline. I worked so hard I put my health at risk, but it had to be done. The goal was to get the house on the market to capture a buyer before the school year started so we'd sell it quicker than possibly carrying the mortgage over to the busy spring selling season. Well it didn't work as we'd hoped so indeed we're paying both for a rental house in Texas and a mortgage and taxes on a house in Connecticut.
My health insurance recently sent me an incentive plan for exercising and doing other healthy things to my body. I laughed when it came in the mail. Then I was thinking that even the dumbest incentive prize might be enough to make me come up with an exercise routine schedule and would give me goals to meet by certain date deadlines. Even if I didn't really want the stupid prize just having that structure in place may be what makes me actually get my butt out of this desk chair and get into the gym to work out. So I stopped snickering at the new incentive plan and started thinking it just may work on some people, like me.
My kids get more work done when they have a deadline. Homeschool co-ops and other types of outside classes can force a date on a homeschooled kid that otherwise may not exist if the mother is teaching the subject at home.
What I don't like about deadlines that I create, is for me it's one more thing to impose on my kids, one more thing to monitor. It can be exhausting to both parent my kids and homeschool them plus oversee all their outside activities and deadlines. I cook meals and clean my own house and manage so many other family and household responsiblities. How much can one person do? I wind up being more loyal and responsible to the outside parties than to the things that are in my control.
As I write this we have a new schedule. No more three half days a week at medical appointments for my older son. No more him being brain dead and tired from his neurofeedback therapy. He is doing home doing more homeschool lessons than we did for the last four months. My younger son stayed pretty much on track but sometimes the schedule would mean some things fell off the radar for that day or that week or....
This is a time of transition as we settle into the new rhythm and routine. I am already seeing that the lack of an urgent deadline, the lack of appointments is already helping them slack off. With me facilitating all the homeschool lessons I have no outside sources pushing my kids about academics. It's time for me to buckle down and get organized and do what I have to do in order to keep tabs on my kids to help them stay on task and to see that they are doing enough academics.
While I used to think that deadlines and schedules were bad I now think they can be positive motivators. For now I'm emphasizing deadlines rather than minute by minute schedules as the idea of that still makes me twitch.