Why do some people seem to get more done in the same number of hours in the day? Dr. Magdalena Battles shares some tips that have helped her as a busy mom that can help you, too!
Interview Links:
Follow her at Living Joy Daily | Lifehack | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
First Book: Let Them Play
Newest Book: Time Saving Tips for Busy Parents
Transcription:
Julie Lyles Carr: Hi, I’m Julie Lyles Carr. You’re listening to the allmomdoes podcast. Part of the Christian Parenting Podcast Network. Today on the allmomdoes podcast I have a doctor in the house. Dr. Magdalena Battles is with me today. Thanks so much for being with me today.
Dr. Magdalena Battles: You bet. Thank you for having me.
Julie Lyles Carr: And I actually know where are you in the world? Tell me about the house, the kids. If there are dogs, cats, whatever…
Dr. Magdalena Battles: and chickens, and yes, we are in Dallas, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, actually in Southlake, um, which is right between Fort Worth and Dallas, so a nice central location. Uh, we have three children. I’m married to my husband, Justin. We’ve been married 11 and a half years and we have three kids.
Brielle is nine, and then we have twins. Twin boys, Charlie and Alex are seven and we have a dog max, and then we have a bunch of silky chickens.
Julie Lyles Carr: Silky chickens I’m so impressed. I’ve I’ve got twins also. So I know that that is really the interesting curve ball to all the things that you thought you had figured out.
Then you have two at once, and it’s a whole other thing. Now, talk to me about this doctorate you have, what is that in and was there a specific lane that you were really going for in that doctorate? What, what about that?
Dr. Magdalena Battles: Yeah. I have a PhD in psychology and I have a masters in professional counseling. I primarily do writing right now and conference speaking so that I’m able to be home with the kids.
But now that they’re back in school, I might go back and practice in the fall is, is the plan tentative plan at this time, but it’s been nice to be able to be home with the kids before they entered school. And then they were in kindergarten only a half a year and were pulled out. So yeah.
Julie Lyles Carr: Starting to get back into the swing of it.
Yes. Yeah, I think there are a lot of women out there who are seeing a little bit of the light at the end of the tunnel, like, oh, yes. Maybe we’ll get back to some activities and things like that. And then there are other areas of the country where we hear from moms who are like, yeah, we’re not back in any kind of way, shape or form.
So it will be interesting to see the impact it has on a lot of women’s lives. Is there a group or an age and stage or a family dynamic that is sort of favorite to speak into, in terms of your psych degree?
Dr. Magdalena Battles: I do, I do a lot with children. So my conference speaking is a lot on parenting and care of children.
So I speak for my audience. Typical audiences are child development professionals, so they are a preschool teachers, sometimes pediatricians, childcare directors. So I speak on topics that relate to typically preschool aged children.
Julie Lyles Carr: What was it like getting that education under your belt and having all of that academically and the importance that that has when you’re going to be speaking into those places and spaces, and then also having children to, I don’t know, keep you humble, teach you other things.
Dr. Magdalena Battles: Oh, yes. I say that all the time. My kids keep me real. They bring me back to reality. You know, it’s been great being in this phase of writing that I’ve been doing, I guess since 2015, I started writing after I had my kids. So I hadn’t written before I hadn’t professionally done work as a writer. Now I have three books published and I’m a writer for lifehack.org.
And I draw a lot on my own personal experience and I’m able to use my education to support what I say, but it’s truly the, the life experience that has been the biggest contributor, I think to my writing process.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. What was the biggest surprise to you when you had kids? What was the thing that you felt okay,
I did. I did the research, not only from an academic level, but of course, a lot of us as moms, we’re reading everything we can read before that first baby is born. We’re talking to everybody we can talk to what for you were some of the things that you went wow. Huh? That was kind of a newsflash.
Dr. Magdalena Battles: Yeah. Yeah.
There’s a lot of ’em. We actually lost our first born child. So our first born, he died, he died from a genetic disorder and I remember people were saying, um, when he was in the hospital, it’ll be fine. He’s you know, he’s a baby, he’ll be fine. You’ll get through this. And I guess my realization was no, sometimes kids do die.
Bad things do happen in this world. And we as moms can’t save them sometimes, no matter how hard we try, there are some situations where we can’t fix it. Right. So that was a big one for me, because I’m usually a fixer and I try to make everything right. And in that situation, I, I couldn’t, it was a fatal disorder.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. I think it is an area that is difficult for us to often talk about as moms. It’s one of those things that we don’t want to spook people who are coming up in the ranks. We don’t want to think of those things in terms of our own lives and all of that, but it is important to begin to have those conversations
and to be honest about the experiences that we’ve had given that, that was the experience the first time around. How did that impact when you were expecting your daughter? Do you feel like it kind of made it more challenging? Did it make you have more of an open hand? What was that like?
Dr. Magdalena Battles: Well, we became foster parents after that.
And so actually, when my daughter was born, we had a foster daughter at the same time and we had her for 15 months and we wanted to adopt her and it didn’t work out. She ended up being reunified with her family, which I’m glad, you know, God had a plan and she’s doing well, but it was hard saying goodbye to her as well.
But when my daughter was born, I would say I still had trepidation. You know, worry, like, is she going to be healthy? Is she going to be normal? So I understand with parents that have children that have genetic disorders or disabilities and how you have fear when you’re getting pregnant again, that isn’t going to happen again.
And it takes a lot of faith. And moving forward, we did do IVF with genetic, with genetic screening. But even in that, there’s no 100% guarantee in anything. So we are fortunate, our children are healthy, they don’t have the disease, but gosh, I feel for parents that are in that phase of struggling and working through fertility.
And I understand that sort of pain.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. So there is that place in that sacred space where we have to manage as parents, when things don’t turn out the way that we’re expected things, didn’t go according to the lifetime movie that we thought it would look like and all of that. And so those are the places that I think sometimes we can look to, and that feels like the bigger stuff in parenting, but there’s also the day-to-day that sometimes I feel like we can minimize a little bit.
Now you’ve got these three kids they’re home, they’re thriving, and yet there’s all the challenges just figuring out how to live in the day-to-day to be all the things you’re supposed to be, to be all the things you’re supposed to be for them. What did you begin to find about your schedule, your home life?
Because you’ve been through crisis, you’ve been through some really serious stuff. Now it should feel like, well, okay we’ve got three healthy kids home, everything should just be easy. What did you discover when all of that season of life began to unfold.
Dr. Magdalena Battles: Yes. Well, after we had the twins, I realized life can get really crazy and very, very busy, very quickly.
And it was a struggle in the beginning to find that balance of, you know, what do I say yes to? And what do I say no to how do I balance my life and still have activities for myself outside of being a mom? And how do I balance career with three little ones? And it was a struggle, but we got there and you know, it really did teach me that time with our family matters.
You know, spending time with our children, it is valuable. So I want to make sure that other parents recognize that they have choices and that they can say no to all the busy-ness of life so that they can free up some time to spend with their kids. Because before we know it, our kids are going to be out of the house and on their own.
So it’s important we invest that time in their lives now so that they can learn our morals, our values, and we create a bond that can last a lifetime.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. And as a psychologist and as a mom, why do you think it is that this generation of raising kids probably more than anything we’ve ever seen before
we are keeping our kids so busy. I think back to the industrial revolution, when we had children who were working in sweat shops in the UK and here, of course, that is still a situation that exists for a lot of the world’s children today. When we’re talking about the places where you and I live, we
pushed back against that. We created child labor laws. We wanted children to have freedom to just be kids. We wanted kids to be able to focus on their educations. And now here we are a hundred, 150 years later, and we are jamming their schedules with so much stuff that’s supposed to be good for them, that kids in some ways are living out the same kind of crazy schedules that we were trying to get away from around the time of the industrial revolution.
What is it in us that propels us to put our kids in so much stuff?
Dr. Magdalena Battles: It’s the competitive nature of our culture. And especially when we are on social media, most of us are on Instagram and, um, and my husband likes to call it Instabrag.
Julie Lyles Carr: Yeah, I like that. I’m going to borrow that. I’ll give him credit, but I’m going to borrow it.
Dr. Magdalena Battles: Uh, you know, Facebook, Twitter, all of it. We get inundated with these images that are the highlight reel of people’s lives. So we’re not seeing, you know, that they had a fight with their spouse that morning. We’re not seeing that their kid is in the next room, throwing a tantrum. What we’re seeing are the posts of all the happy goodness that is happening in their lives
and it puts pressure on us. We think we’re not doing enough. And we see their kids getting awards and participating in things as well. And so we’re like, oh, well, maybe my child needs to do that. You know, I need to keep up with so-and-so and, and it’s not necessarily us consciously realizing that sometimes. It’s an unconscious thing that is going on where we’re seeing all these things and it’s putting this pressure on ourselves that, oh, I need to make sure I do that for my kids too.
And so it’s been building, especially as social media has grown in our exposure and time that we spend on a daily basis on social media. It does impact how we view the world and how we view other families. So we need to collectively, I think not just ourselves, but as a culture is say, you know what? We need to take a step back.
I think maybe we’re doing too much for our kids and we need to let them be kids because if we want them to really be successful, we want them to have good relationship skills. They’re going to learn that in the home. And also if we want them to develop creativity, for example, which is the world health organization said it is the number one
sought after skill in the marketplace right now. And they said that what happens is children since 1994, their creativity skills have been diminishing. So there’s something they’re trying to figure out what it is. But I think a lot of it has to do with the busy-ness. When we keep our kids going and going and going, we’re not allowing for that free time and that free play where they can be creative.
So we need to allow free play and free time allow them to get bored so that they can use their own creativity. So, especially for those very young children, we need to let them play. Actually, I wrote my very first book was called, Let Them Play. Right. And I’m a strong believer in this and it goes along with cut the busy-ness.
We need to cut it so that we, can give them that time where they can go and be kids and play outside in the streets with their friends and ride bikes up and down the street. You know, just be kids when we’re taking them to and from sports every single night and dance and music and all of these things. They get done with school,
we go to practice you miss dinner because family dinner, because you’re going to practices. By the time you get home, they need to do their homework and then they get ready and go to bed. Right. Well that doesn’t allow for that free time in that free place. So we need to make sure that we’re allowing for that.
Julie Lyles Carr: Oh, you really curious? Idolina when we get to the other side of COVID, whatever that looks like, because for a lot of people, all those extracurricular activities came to a screeching halt, or they began to occur virtually. And you and I live in a state that’s opened up earlier than a lot of other places in the nation.
There are still a lot of kids that trying to get back into the groove of sports and all those extracurriculars that is either just now beginning to happen, or it’s maybe just a few months more out, but they’re getting there. What I’m going to be really curious to see, and I’d love to hear your insight is did we learn
during lockdown that our kids do need this kind of time? Or have we been chomping at the bit so much to get back out there that maybe we’ve missed some of the lessons? Are you seeing any kind of trends in the parents that you’re talking with and the things that you’re seeing that maybe parents are beginning to reevaluate?
Or is there that potential, you know, some sociologists are calling it the roaring twenties, the new roaring twenties that we’re going to forget what maybe could have been the treasures of this time and run real long, real far, real fast and get ourselves back to a place of weeks.
Dr. Magdalena Battles: There is that possibility.
I think most families though, when they were in the crux of COVID, when it was the worst and people were locked up. For months, I really felt that people were seeing that, oh, I love this time with my family. I realized how important my family is and we want to spend time together and we’re going to make it a point to do this moving forward.
But then yeah, it becomes very easy to get right back into the busy-ness. So it needs to be a conscious decision. We made that decision in our family. I did not put my daughter back in dance, which was like painful to me. I mean, it was almost painful because I wanted her to do it. Meanwhile, she’s not really missing it.
She doesn’t even mention it. So I realized, oh, you know, maybe that wasn’t really one of her passions. Exactly. And I think that parents do that. They see their kid might be good at something right. But if it’s not the child’s passion, maybe we need to let it go. So we need to find the things that kids that are passionate about, and that means try different things at different times.
We don’t need to do it all at once. We can take a season, do soccer, then the next season, perhaps do dance. It doesn’t all need to be done all at once. And I think that’s part of the problem is we’re thinking it all has to be done. Everything right now. And we don’t have to, and that’s putting a lot of pressure on ourselves when we do that.
So now we’ve taken ourselves out of a pressure cooker. When we say, you know what, we’re going to limit the activities. It gives a lot more time for family dinners, which is so important. Research studies show that families who sit down and have meals together on a regular basis, they actually have better relationships.
They have stronger bonds. That’s what we want with our families. Right. I mean, we want to raise our kids and we want them to be able to have that desire to come back home. We want them to want us, even when they’re gone and that’s going to happen if we invest that time in them. And one of those very valuable areas of doing that is the family dinner.
And I understand it. Practices get in the way. And that happens in our household. So some nights in order to eat dinner early enough, we ended up having dinner around four o’clock. It works for us and you know, the kids might come home from practice and they might still be hungry. And I’ll say, good, we have leftovers. But it’s more about
the spending time together and catching up with one another and discussing our day. And it’s sort of like a check-in point for the entire family together.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. Right. And you know, I’ve heard families who choose to do breakfast together. That’s their big family meal. Or we got to a place with all the different, crazy schedules and everything,
and the number of kids that we have that saturday morning, brunch became a thing for quite a season that that was when we all gathered. And I do think that in that way, it can help take pressure off of mom feeling like, okay, so every night I’ve got to have something on the table at this time and it’s, you know, or we’ve got to say no to everything so that we can have that.
It’s I love that you point out it’s really about the intentionality of choosing a place in time for that family to gather. Now your latest project in writing, you’ve been writing a lot about time-saving tips and really trying to help parents and busy parents in particular, try to find these places where maybe there needs to be an audit.
Maybe there needs to be something that needs to be rethought. What got you on this path of thinking about time-saving tips because again, you know, your experience as a mom and your experience as a psychologist, it seems like there could be really big, big issues out there that you could address and you’re certainly well-versed to be able to do so.
But you decided to on this project go for things like time-saving. Why was that? Was there something in your own life? Was there something you were seeing?
Dr. Magdalena Battles: Um, it dawned on me one day and I had a friend in all seriousness she said, what time do you get up? Do you get up at four, 4:30? She said, you must get up really early.
She said, I get up at five and I still don’t get as much done in a day that you seem to get done. And my response was, yeah. Uh, no, I don’t get up that early. I usually get up at 6:45 and my kids are out the door and we’re on our way to school by 7:20. Um, it was a revelation to me that I am good at saving time and managing my time
well. A lot of moms would say, wow, you do everything so well and you do so much. And it’s not that. I’m doing everything perfect, that’s for sure. I’m not a perfect mom, but I do get a lot done. And it is a lot about my time management skills. And so I wanted to share those with other moms so that they could benefit from those tips as well.
And some of them are very basic things, but some are more in depth that involved some psychological aspects, such as, you know, assessing your hierarchy of importance in determining your value system before you get even into the book that’s the first thing that readers should do, because if we don’t have our hierarchy of importance determined, it becomes really easy to say yes to everything.
We don’t want to disappoint our friends and family and so we just say yes to try to be a people pleaser. It becomes easier to say no to activities when we filter it through our hierarchy of importance. But then I give a lot of basic tips. I think it’s important for moms to have basic information on where can you go to get meals that you can bake them at home, but you don’t have to do all the work yourself.
So I provide tips in that prep pot meals, you know, the meal kits. And then I love going to Sam’s club and Costco buying the pre-made meals that are fresh, popping them in the oven. And we have a hot meal and I don’t have to do that.
Julie Lyles Carr: Costco pot pie, baby. I mean, that is where it’s at right now, but you know, I think to give ourselves permission to do those kinds of things, I think sometimes when we have these
shortcuts we can put a weird pressure on ourselves that we’re maybe cheating or we’re not really doing it full out and I don’t know where that narrative comes from. And yet it’s there. Where, where do you think we end up hearing that message? Because in this strange way, I feel like we’re both empowered as a generation of women to go forth and do the things for career and chase the dream and have me time and all of that.
But there still seems to be this narrative that good moms do it from scratch. Good moms don’t get outside, help if needed. Good moms, make sure that they’re the ones to sign up for every single thing. Like where does some of that come from? I know a lot of it comes from our social media expectation, but what is it in the narrative amongst women that is still perpetuating this.
Dr. Magdalena Battles: Yeah, I would say it’s, um, our inner sense of perfectionism. A lot of moms struggle with this, this, this sense that they want to do things right, and right means perfect. And they want to make the Pinterest worthy birthday parties and they want to, you know, bring the classroom birthday treats that are homemade.
They wouldn’t want anybody to know that brought in store bought well, I’ll tell you what, I bring in store bought. I’m not going to own makeup. It’s just one thing. I don’t have time for it. If I do for some reason, then I might do it. But as a standard, I say, you know, we need to let go of the perfectionism
and there’s made from scratch mentality because it is causing us to be stretched too thin. We need to start taking advantage of those pre-made options and end. Ask for help hire, help do those things that give you a little bit more free time because moms need to take care of themselves and have downtime.
If we don’t have downtime, we become pretty miserable moms.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. Right. How do we begin to develop what you call that? You know, the order of importance, that place where we really do take something through a filter of understanding what our priorities are, therefore and where, where we’re deciding what’s important
because sometimes I think we come to the table and you know, our church is telling us that these things are important and our kids’ school is telling us these things are important. And we believe that our faith community is important in our school is important. And so we’re like, well, I guess I should do those things because as I I’m saying that faith community and my kids’ education and being involved as a mom, that’s important,
well, I guess I have to do this recipe. How do we take it up another step to, yes. Embrace that those things can be. Important assets and components of our lives, but not allow it to become something that we’re just defaulting to what they say is most important, even while acknowledging that these things are important.
Dr. Magdalena Battles: It is definitely an awareness of, you know, what this person and, and this environment
that is what they do. And so when we’re in church, yes. In my hierarchy, importance, God is number one. And so I make sure that my family does devotionals together every day. That is most important. Is my kids’ academics in my top five? No, no, it’s really not. And with that, I don’t put a lot of pressure on my kids academically.
I want them to try their best. But I’m not going to say that’s the end all be all of what I want for my kids is to have high grades. If they do, they do, if they don’t, they don’t. So we have to filter it through what we value and what we determined for our family. And one thing that we did was as a family, we sat down and did a, wrote a family mission statement.
There’s different ways to set up a family mission statement. And I even write about it on my blog. Uh, but it’s, it’s a great way to have the family talk about what is the purpose of our family? Why did God bring us together? What are we here for? We did it when my kids were very young and one of my kids even said something like, oh, our job is to eat pizza and ice cream together.
And, um, and so what I got from that was, you know, he’s saying time together is important and that eating together is important. So we made us a list of 10 different basically bullet points that go into our mission statement. And one of them is that we spend time together, quality time together. In order to have quality time
you also need quantity time, and so we need to make sure that we are freeing up enough time. So we can spend time with our kids and with our family.
Julie Lyles Carr: What do you think is the sweet spot when it comes to taking a look at your schedule and making sure that you have created that ability to have quantity of time? I’m so with you, because I got really weary of hearing back in the day from various people in my world
it’s, you know, with the kids, it’s just, it’s about quality time. Well, yeah, it is. I mean, I I’ve seen people who have a lot of quantity of time with their kids who don’t. You know, make it count or, you know, and we can be to you as a family, too. Everybody’s on screens or not. I mean, we certainly have pulled that stunt ourselves, but there is a lot to be said in just navigating day-to-day life with each other and your kids observing you, navigating day-to-day life.
So do you feel I’m not trying to be prescriptive, but is there a sweet spot? Because I think for a lot of us, we look at our schedule, we realize the time we’ve got to get up, get the kids going, get to work. We’ve got this, that and the other, and, we don’t necessarily leave a lot of buffer. Now it doesn’t look like a schedule that maybe is overpacked, but we’re not leaving a lot of room for improv.
So is there a sweet spot we should be thinking about when it comes to filtering what we’re going to say yes. To or no, to, or all of those things? Uh, a sweet spot of time that we really need to be thinking about strategically setting aside.
Dr. Magdalena Battles: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it really varies from, you know, different points of children and the different seasons of life.
I shouldn’t say, you know, so it depends when you have toddlers, you’re gonna spend a lot more time with them. That’s just the nature of things. And when they’re babies, you’re going to spend all your time with them, but then when they become older and they’re teenagers, yeah, the time is going to be less.
It’s just going to happen naturally, but we should aim to have time together. And they, I know that research has said that you should spend at least 15 minutes with each child one-on-one each day. So for myself, that’s three kids. That’s 45 minutes I need to set aside to make sure I tend to spend time with them each day.
And sometimes it’s simple things, you know, like just doing bedtime routine. You know, where we have an actual routine and we sit down and read books and we do sing songs. So setting those things up as routines, as part of your life can help with maintaining that quality time and instituting it on a regular basis.
So you have to find things such as the regular dinners. And like you said, maybe it’s a weekly brunch find ways that you work it into a routine so that is something that’s established and part of making that quality time together.
Julie Lyles Carr: Absolutely. You know, it feels like embedded in all of this is a need to have a certain level of organization and household maintenance going on in the midst of this
because I know for me that when things start to re I can put up with a pretty fair amount of chaos, honestly, Magdalena, but we have eight kids so there’s, there’s part of it that you get it just absolutely ground into you that you have to be able to deal with a certain level of chaos over time. But I will say there have been times that doing a better job saying no on some things, trying to do a good job on having the quality and quantity of time having those family check-ins.
But at times it has felt like being as strategic with that, keeping the house up to a certain level that I know can facilitate that, but still just feels almost unmanageable. How do you advise moms who are already feeling really stretched then to get into a place where just maintaining household life, the house, getting the bills paid on time, all of that,
where is that supposed to fit into a schedule that is dropping the kids off, picking them up trying to make time for that family dinner, trying to make time for the rituals at bedtime, trying to have time for one self and one spouse and all that. And yet there still is all of this that needs to be maintained just in the physical structure of a house and in the auspices of a calendar.
Dr. Magdalena Battles: Right. Yeah. It’s not easy, but that’s why we need to get the whole family involved. Everybody should be a part of this solution. For our family we say we’re team battles. We do this together. We know we’re all participating in all contributing. So it isn’t just mom and dad doing all the work and making the house picked up and clean.
It is a team effort. We’re all a part of it. So the kids that are in our house, they’re expected to make sure they make their beds in the morning and open their shades. It doesn’t have to be perfect. They’re little kids. They’re not going to, it’s not going to be a perfect job and that’s fine, but at least we can see the dirty laundry here
once they pick up the covers off the floor, and then they realize, oh, I need to take those and put them in the hamper. So they are part of the process where they have specific chores that they have to do during the day. And the other big component of having an organized home, I would say, and it’s something that is
fairly simple is make sure everything in your home has a home. That means every single possession that you have, it belongs somewhere. So when the kids get home from school, where do their backpacks go? Do the backpacks have a home? Do they just get thrown anywhere in that house? Or is there a little cubbies where they’re going to get
put, so they’re put away and then they know where to find them in the morning and they’re not going to be searching the household for their book bags, their shoes. And then for ourselves, you know, the same goes for our purse and phone. Do we have places for everything that we own so we know where to find it?
We waste a lot of time in our lives, looking for things in the house. Things we know they’re there, you know, those batteries, the flashlight lighters, whatever it might, maybe we’ll go. You know, I know where I bought that somewhere. Yeah. A way to solve that problem is to have bins for those items and have them labeled so that when you walk into my pantry, I have stacks of bins and the bins themselves
if you open them up, they’re not nice and organized. I just throw the stuff in, but I know that’s where I can find it. So if I need a flashlight, I have a bin that says flashlights on it. And then if I need batteries, there’s a bin battery. It makes life a lot easier because we’re not searching for things that
we know we already own, and we also are purchasing things that we’ve already paid for. So it’s a way to simplify life. And again, the family is a part of the process too. They are responsible for putting things back in the bins when they’re done. So if they’re asking for, Hey, I need cookie cutters, you know, say, go and get them out of the bins.
Make sure you put them back and it’s their responsibility to put it back when they’re done.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. Overseeing that. What role does procrastination play in just really sabotaging some of our best time-saving ideas because for a lot of people, I think they’re very willing to take in all kinds of advice
and new strategies for doing these kinds of things and getting the calendar under control and, and starting to work with the schedule. But there can be this nascent procrastination that really starts creeping at the door and I find sometimes when I feel really overwhelmed or when I’m encountering moms who are feeling overwhelmed, this strange drive, if you will ironically allow me, to procrastinate what needs to be done weirdly
feels a little better for a while, but then of course is also completely kneecapping all the things that we’re trying to do. So how does procrastination make its way into our best time-saving effort?
Dr. Magdalena Battles: Yeah, it does definitely hinder our ability to save time because when we’re procrastinating, obviously we’re losing time.
I think a lot of procrastination occurs because we don’t feel ready. We don’t feel that we could do a good enough job or we start a project and we don’t finish. You know, we procrastinate on finishing because it’s just not up to the standard that we have in our mind. It’s a bad habit that we have, this tendency to, oh, it’s not good enough,
oh, it’s not good enough. We need to say to ourselves, I am good enough. And what I did, it’s good enough and just be done with the job so you can move on to something else. A lot of times we slow ourselves down because we’re procrastinating and telling ourselves we’re not good enough, or we’re not going to do a good enough job.
So we need to stop thinking that way and realize, oh, it’s also recognized that that might be going on. A lot of people don’t even recognize I had to talk with a friend last week and in the conversation we had about this and she said, I never realized that is exactly what’s happening to me. I had no idea.
She said, I never thought of myself as a perfectionist, but you’re right. I’m so worried that I’m not going to do it right, or do a good enough job. So I stall out on a project. So we need to give ourselves permission to do things less than perfect and just keep going.
Julie Lyles Carr: Right. Right. I what’s the statement, um, done is better than perfect or maybe yes.
I mean, there are situations strictly when it comes to managing the household, that done is way better than perfect. If we can just get it there. Well, Dr. Magdalena Battles and the new book is called 10 Time-Saving Tips For Busy Parents. You also have other books that listeners can check out as well.
Magdalena, thanks so much for being with me today. I really, really appreciate it.
Dr. Magdalena Battles: Thank you so much for having me.
Julie Lyles Carr: Hey, you love listening to the podcast, do me a solid. It is so great. When you go over and give us a five star wherever you’re listening to your podcasts, it helps bump it up. So other listeners can find it as well.
I want to send out a big thanks to Donna, our producer and Rebecca, our content coordinator. Be sure and check out the show notes that Rebecca puts together each and every week. And I can’t wait to see you next time on the allmomdoes podcast.
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