Post-its and prayer- a system to organise chaos
For greedy parents chasing Deen + Dunya on a daily. Here's one way to organise chaos while keeping firm sites on the Aakhira.
Here’s a tiny glimpse of what it looks like to organise a week. I don’t subscribe to the Type A vs. Type B binary. But if you can’t afford to have the wheels fall off, this MIIIIGGHHT be for you.
There are two notebooks in my bag.
One is to speak my mind, and the other to organise it. My recommendations go like this…
Have an outlet - Notebook 1
Here is where you do not judge yourself. Pick this one up consistently because you need a place to put thoughts. I choose to write, but you can leave voicenotes to yourself. Heck, just say it out loud sometime.
If you do nothing else after reading this, do this thing. You can call it a journal, call it a diary. I do not care. But do this for yourself and for others.
Your best bet at metal clarity is writing down all your life sums so you don’t perpetually have to carry the ones.
So, find a place to put your consistent over-spill thoughts, and keep them there. Otherwise you’ll have mind clutter that gets in the way of your actual immediate tasks.
Then, figure out parts of what you want + need to do and work backwards.
Have a place to plan- Notebook 2
Schedule. Figure out which child needs to go where and when, where you’ll end up every evening and which family dinner you’ll need to attend.
Put it in one place so you don’t go nuts.
Find the simplest planning system so you can see all the moving parts before they move out of place.
And if you’re doing it right, it should look so simple that it’s strange that you needed to pick up the pen in the first place. But don’t let that fool you - that means you have a good system, not a simple task.
Everyone plans differently, so I’ll just show you mine to demonstrate.
The best planning tip I can give you, is plan the way you’d naturally lean towards.
If that’s a digital calendar, then do that. But start very simple. Do not let the Notion Influencers convince you that a template will fix your life if you’re not in the habit of sitting by your laptop to plan your next moves, ya know?
Work towards a small change that fits in with your actions. Like get a big piece of paper and write the day or week’s tasks somewhere where you’ll see it or something.
Don’t spend money, spend time and effort first.
The goal is to be in control of how you spent your time. So you feel like you showed up for life on purpose because you’re trying to DO something.
Planning is a way to head towards what you want. So
write what you want,
figure out roughly how long it will take
yhe small consistent actions you need to get there.
Jot ONLY those down.
Then work backwards.
Sounds niiiiice and obvious. So, do it then, innit.
I dare you.
Pick up your pen, and work towards what you want. And do not stop, until you attain it. I double dare you. With kids, life, responsibilities. Just steadily and slowly. I triple dare you.
Marry the ramblings to your scheduling
That’s the key. The small tiny things that you do, write about them in your catch-all. Then almost as if by magic, they should re-orient themselves towards the bigger picture you plotted in the planner. These two tools get you to where you need to go.
Leave space for moments of epiphany - Post-its.
Read a thing from a book that feels urgent? Post it.
Need to go to a place in the immediate future? Post it.
To be honest, that’s the only reason I use them, But “Planning and Prayer” just didn’t have the same ring to it.
So, pray then.
I don’t know how else to encourage this in your life. I can only tell you that my analogy for this is when you’re sewing and the thread gets stuck, and you continue to sew but you know something is up. Not praying is the equivalents of “continuing to sew” while ignoring the loud noise and the thread catching and the sewing machine playing up.
Praying is the equivalent of rethreading the thread several times a day before it catches. It might sometimes get caught before you re-thread, but, still, soon you’ll re-thread and be back at your regular sewing cadence.
Some days we don’t need a new time-blocking tool, we need to beg Allah swt for barakah. So rethread before you need to.
Then leave it to Allah swt
Because you’ve done your thing to be honest. You’ve tied your camel. You’ve vented, plotted and planned. You have a record of your effort in the dunya and the aakhira.
So continue the parts of remembrance that remind you that this is not it.
The dunya is not it. But that does not mean that we fulfil life accidentally and have it happen to us. There’s no mistake in the call to prayer including “Come to prayer, Come to success”.
If you too are seeking success in the aakhira, success in the dunya is a beautiful side effect, in sha Allah.
Here are some more secular mantras
Things I whisper to myself that have been instrumental to achieving daily wins that scale up into life wins…
“Attack the day”.
“I do not wait anymore.” .
“Bang for buck.” Is what I chant when I am doing a big task, and I want to make every second worth it. i.e. garden work - I’ll chop/ remove/ pull out the biggest eye-sore first. Any task, I like to make the biggest dents first in the smallest amount of time.
Sometimes our ambitions are just that
I’ve long given up on content creation goals that seemed achievable in the pen and paper vacuum. I’ve rewritten the same list four times in a week. Often just dragged over from previous weeks. I’m not (THAT) mad (anymore).
And sometimes, it will fall apart
We don’t plan to avoid chaos, we plan so that when chaos comes, it doesn’t take everything. But rest assured that the chaos is coming.
It’s part of it. I get ill, babies get ill. Sometimes we go places we didn’t plan on. I’m getting better at letting it be.
May our notebooks hold evidence of our efforts and may our post-its guide us back to the bigger picture.
How are you planning? You mothers of young ones? How are you maintaining a sense of balance so the wheels don’t come off? How are you doing deen + dunya please?