Creating Structure

A Prompt from this Week >> Disastrous

Structure. To those of us living with mental health conditions, structure is often a critical force to be reckoned with. We often need structure in our lives otherwise we wind up too much in our own minds, and that can lead to dangerous situations and disastrous outcomes.

So how do we begin to structure our time?

First, it’s good for us to have an outlet for creating our structure. A structure for the structure, so to speak.

For almost two weeks, I’ve taken a liking to the stationery I’ve got from Target that has a daily schedule (8am – 9p), priorities and notes section. Examples will be shown below. The way I’ve gotten it to work is by writing in pencil what I think I’ll be doing during selected hours (and even writing tasks in multiple blocks, so that I’m being flexible and realistic rather than rigid and not adaptive) and then going back later in pen what I actually wound up doing.

It was definitely easier doing this when I was going to the partial, as this is my first day without it, but I have a couple of exercising ideas to keep me up and active and not falling asleep with Mocha on the living room floor. 🙂 (Such as walking and bike riding).

I would also fill out a Weekly to do list with about 10 goals, must do’s and later on’s.

Here is what those look like:

This helps me to focus myself on what I want to get done overall in the week, what little notes to remind myself of and building in these goals to my daily structure/goals.

Here’s a slideshow of my daily sheets:

A couple of them are a little blurry, sorry about that. :3 They end on Tuesday since that was the initial day I was going to write this post!

It’s also helpful to put into the blocks of time when you need to eat and take your meds.

It’s also important and great self-care to schedule in an hour of reward time or me time each day. 🙂

I also started to score my day last Saturday and have been keeping up with that all right.

Soon, I want to also add filling out workbooks to my list as well as doing better with reading. Maybe this weekend, even. 🙂 For the reading. Hehe

 

That’s about all I’ve got for now, TV and music going makes it a little hard to focus. >_<

See you guys tomorrow for another post!