Am I Taking On Too Big A Workload This School Year? What I’m Doing To Adjust
It’s 9:17 PM on the second Sunday before the first day of school, and I’m leaning against my sticky kitchen table (the one that still has a blue popsicle stain from the Fourth of July) staring at three overlapping paper calendars taped to the wall. My 8-year-old needs to be at violin three days a week right after school, my 11-year-old has soccer practice two nights and a game every Saturday, I just picked up a 10-hour-a-week freelance editing job to cover our new swim club membership, and I still promised the PTA I’d coordinate this year’s fall book fair.
My husband brings me a mug of cold coffee I left out this morning and nods at the wall. “Still rearranging?” he asks. I hum and point to the first Wednesday of the year, where I’ve drawn four different arrows between the school exit, violin, and my first editing deadline. There’s a 15-minute gap between dropping my son at soccer and picking my daughter up from violin. I’m supposed to use that gap to answer editing emails. But according to Google Maps, the drive from the soccer field to the violin studio is 20 minutes. I laugh a little, but it comes out tight. “I don’t know if I took on too much this year,” I say.
He offers to just cut the book fair, or ask the kids to drop one activity. But I don’t want to. My 8-year-old begged for violin for a full year after she saw a youth recital at the library, and I can’t say no to that when she’s finally old enough for lessons. My son quit baseball last spring, crying after a game where no one passed him the ball, and soccer is the first thing he’s asked to sign up for since. The extra editing work pays for the swim club, which is the only thing that gets both kids outside and off their tablets on weekends. I wanted to do the book fair because I still remember how exciting it was when I was a kid, getting to pick out a new paperback and a pack of gummy erasers every fall. I wanted to give that to this year’s class.
I called my friend Lila, a 4th grade teacher with three kids who’s been overbooking her own schedule for 12 years, to ask what she does when she gets that tight feeling in her chest that she’s bitten off more than she can chew. She didn’t tell me to just cut everything or slow down, any of that vague stuff. She told me to do a trial run of the whole schedule before school actually starts. “Paper schedules lie,” she said. “You don’t know how long things actually take until you do them.”
So that’s what I did this past week. We set our alarms for the 6:45 AM wake up time we’ll need when school starts, packed the kids’ activity bags the night before, left the house at 8 AM just like we will on school days, and drove every route we’ll take for a full Tuesday and Thursday. I even sat in my parked car between the soccer field and violin studio with my laptop open, pretending to answer editing emails, just to see if I could actually get anything done in the time I’d blocked off.
Turns out Lila was right. I’d miscalculated school zone speed limits by 10 minutes on every trip after school. The 15-minute gap I thought I had was actually negative 5 minutes, meaning I’d be late to pickup before I even left the soccer field. I also learned that my 8-year-old gets really grumpy carrying her heavy violin case from the classroom to the car, so we can leave it by the front door the night before instead of packing it in her backpack. That one small change cuts three minutes of fuss every lesson day.
After the trial, I made three concrete changes that took the worst of the pressure off, no big cuts required. First, I emailed the violin studio and swapped my daughter’s Tuesday and Thursday lessons for Wednesday afternoon and Saturday morning. They had an opening, and that moves one lesson off the busiest days of my week completely. Second, I emailed the PTA president and asked for a co-coordinator for the book fair. I told her I could handle all the pre-event work: volunteer sign ups, pre-order organization, and book delivery. I just needed someone to cover the two half-days a week that I’m doing editing work. She got back to me the same day with a retired grandma who loves children’s books and wanted to volunteer for four hours a day during the fair. Third, I texted my freelance client and asked if I could start at 8 hours a week for the first two months of school, instead of 10, and ramp up once we’re all settled into the routine. They said that was totally fine – they’d rather I start slower than turn in rushed work anyway.
I also added one tiny thing: a shared text calendar that sends a reminder to every one of us an hour before we need to leave the house for anything. My son has his own phone now, so he gets a reminder to pack his cleats before he leaves school, instead of me having to remember to yell it when I pick him up. It’s a small change, but it cuts out half the last-minute panics I had last year.
It’s still a full schedule. I still wake up at 2:30 AM some nights, replaying the first week and wondering if I’m going to forget a permission slip or miss a deadline. I’m not going to pretend this all worked out perfectly and I’m totally calm now. Some weeks will definitely be chaotic. I’m planning to sit down at the end of the first month of school and go through the whole schedule again, ask the kids how they’re feeling, see if anything needs to go. For now, though, the worry I had that I took on too much didn’t mean I had to cut all the things we wanted. It just meant I had to test my plan, adjust the small stuff, and ask for the specific help I needed instead of panicking and cutting everything at once. The calendars still have too many arrows drawn on them. The popsicle stain is still on the table. We’re ready to start, warts and all.
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