How do you manage to fit it all in? Options

[Impressionist]

For the last week or so I've not been able to do any constructive practice. I am a little frustrated. :-(

To give an example, at the moment I am burning CDs for my early years music classes, plus printing off CD inserts and labels. I have baked four trays of shortbread as one of my children has a fund raising day at school, I have to see child 2's teacher after school about maths, then parents evening at child 1's school tonight. In between this I also have to sort out the washing, meals, general tidying (and I would say my house generally resembles the site of a small, but pretty nasty nuclear explosion) and keeping things ticking over at home.

I have lesson plans for next year to sort out, confirmations for the new term to send out, banking and other financial stuff to finalise as well as the dreaded tax return for January!

On top of that I've got two fairly large commissions for music production for other early years groups of which one is needed end of year/early next year and the other by March.

And I've not even thought about Christmas shopping yet.

How do you get any practice done? I need to spend around 2 hours a day to achieve my goal of grade 8 by the summer, or at least by the end of next year (which I really want to do so that I can change career direction away from the under five classes and return to private teaching). I just can't see it happening. Or perhaps it's just a difficult time of year?

[Tixylix]

10 minute spaces are easier to find than 2 hour slots. I don't have kids but I have a partner who works and I'm a student/house-person so the washing etc. is all my job and sometimes it can be tough to fit in everything, especially when essay deadlines are looming (I should really be writing one right now (IMG:style_emoticons/default/ph34r.gif)). 10 minutes here and there adds up and it also motivates you to be more focused. Print all the stuff off in a batch and then have 10mins to practice while it prints (or an hour and a half if you have a rubbish printer like mine). After my washing load finishes I spin it before I put it in the tumble dryer, spin cycle takes about 10mins. Does ironing happen in your house? If so, will some things be okay if they're just hung up - kids school clothes probably depends on what they have to wear but jumpers and polo shirts are generally fine so sayeth my mum. Do you have to write entirely new lesson plans or is it possible to re-use some bits from previous ones? Could you enlist the kids to help with doing the CD inserts and labels, Christmas cards etc. if they are old enough/can be trusted to do this? Apologies if you're already doing a lot of this, just some ideas off the top of my head.

The Open University website has some advice on time management which consists of the 4 Ds - Do it, Dump it, Delegate it or Do it less well. Christmas is a difficult time because everything is supposed to be so perfect and wonderful so you feel under pressure to make everything perfect. Do shopping online - some of my friends and relatives have Amazon.co.uk wish lists so I don't have to spend time figuring out what they might want, and Amazon and some other online shopping sites do gift-wrapping and labelling for you and you can even have it posted straight to them if that makes more sense logistically. It's not lazy, it's efficient. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)