I find myself constantly needing to learn new things. I think most mothers do. Parenting and running a household both require a lot dedication, commitment, and good management skills. If you’re like me and didn’t really get an education in how to be a wife, mother, and manage a household, things can seem pretty overwhelming when you find yourself stuck with a kid or three, an entire home to care for, and many times a husband to look after too!
So I often find myself learning new things and teaching myself how to do things. I’ve developed a way to help myself learn things more quickly and thoroughly, and I thought I’d share with you.
I pick up new skills and knowledge through periods of intense focus. I actually got this idea from a male blogger. He takes the strategy to the extreme – spending time focusing on what he’s learning and ignoring everything else for whatever his period of time to learn is (days or weeks). It works well for him. That strategy just does not work for mothers. We have too much that needs to be done every day.
If you’re a work at home mom like I am, you have even more that needs to be done each day. But you can’t just dump parenting to take time to work on a project. You can’t forget that your children need three meals a day while you spend hours devoted to your sewing project. Your meals just won’t get planned and your grocery list won’t get made if you’re devoting weeks to a project and decide to chuck everything else. I think this strategy could work very well for a single person, or for someone who is not the primary caretaker of children and home. It could probably work if your children are in school during the day, too. But for me homeschooling my older children and caring for preschoolers the “pure focus on one project/area of study” just won’t work.
However, I’ve found a variation of it that’s very effective, even while you’re a busy mother and/or work-at-home mom.
My strategy is as follows: first decide what you want to focus on. Then devote your time to learning just about that focus. Where you may have read a novel or two, a book on gardening, a book on parenting, and a book on having a well behaved cat all in one month, you’ll now choose just one focus. I did this right after Christmas and through the first several weeks of January with our nutrition. I got a stack of books on nutrition I wanted to read. Then I devoted my free time to reading about nutrition or working in the kitchen to implement what I’d learned.
This may sound like a really simple concept but I’ve found it works tremendously well. Most of the focus of my free time to read was on nutrition. Since the books I was reading were similar in subject I found I could move through my reading more quickly. I could skim over bits that I was already familiar with from another book because the information was so fresh. I could quickly compare what I’d read in the different books. And I could try out many different things in the kitchen throughout the course of those few weeks, refining my time in the kitchen and my family’s good nutrition.
The strategy of focusing intensely on one subject of interest worked really well for me. I’m doing it again right now as I go through several books on parenting and family rhythm. Reading all the books one after the other is allowing me compare the ideas and thoughts each author presents. It’s helping me to look at our day-to-day life and my day-to-day outlook and figure out where to make changes to be more effective. It’s also allowing me to work out a plan for changes that I want to make in our daily routine and my parenting. I can work out my plan now and revise that as I work through all the books. Then I’ll be able to work through the plan and see how things go for us – rather than continuously changing things around as a read a new book on family issues here, and then another one there, and so forth.
As with the nutrition study, I feel like my mind is focused on what I’m reading now and I can quickly increase my knowledge and work through things in my own mind. It’s very nice. During my focus on parenting I’m also keeping a notebook of things I glean from each book – my hope is that when I’m done reading I’ll have my own “parenting book” full of the wisdom I gleaned during my time of focus.
I plan to use this approach throughout the rest of the year with each area that I decided to work on this year (mostly issues having to do with home management and family life, as is evidenced by nutrition and parenting in my examples!)
If I have novels I want to read I’m planning to do so between my times of focus. Scott says I don’t read enough novels or books just “for fun” but alas – I have a lot I want to teach myself and I really want to continuously improve my mothering and my household management. That just doesn’t leave much time for fiction!
I’ve also found that picking focuses that are highly relevant to my life currently helps me to spend more time working with what I’m learning. Since I’m in the kitchen at least five times a day anyways, experimenting with what I learned during the nutrition study was pretty easy to do. And parenting and family life issues… well I get the chance to work on that every day – day in and day out (isn’t one of the joys of mothering that no matter how bad you mess up one day, there’s still the next day, and the next day, and the next day to try again)!
If you’d like to read the article that inspired this one, it’s Steve Pavlina’s article on rapid improvement – I think it’s a good article. I do, however, disagree with a lot of what Steve Pavlina writes and I want to say that I’m not endorsing him in any way, shape, or form. I do find some of his articles to be thought provoking, this being one of them. And I’m sure he’ll appreciate the link. :p
