Are the things you feel are important not happening?
Are the things you do each day aligned with your priorities?
Does it seem like you’re always running, with no time to spare?
Do you feel lost in the demands of life?
At times, do you feel invisible?
If so, consider trying “cluster-thinking” or “cluster-brainstorming.”
This isn’t an exercise to overwhelm you but one designed to bring clarity and focus to your life. Take a moment and draw out your life visually.
What is Cluster Thinking?
Start by identifying the big things that press on you—Home? Husband? Children? Work? Volunteer work? Draw a circle for each area of demand or responsibility you are actively managing. Now, make spokes extending from each circle and list the tasks you feel you need to accomplish in each area. Some of these spokes may have smaller circles branching out further, illustrating how one responsibility leads to multiple tasks.
Now do this again, but this time cluster where you actually spend your time.
Look at both charts. Did you include a circle for yourself? Too often, when we feel overwhelmed, we see all the things we have to do, but we don’t see ourselves in the picture. This exercise helps us recognize if and how we prioritize self-care.
But how do we break this cycle of overwhelm?
Evaluate Your Time: The Time Management Matrix
Look at the chart again. Are the things you value reflected in how you spend your time? Often, a hard realization comes when we see that the choices we make with our time are not aligned with our priorities.
Stephen R. Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People introduces a Time Management Matrix that categorizes tasks into four quadrants. Let’s break it down:
1. The Important / Urgent
This is an area we need to manage.
These are probably the areas you listed in your first cluster, where your primary focus lies. This quadrant includes deadlines, crises, and pressing problems. For homeschool moms, it often feels like a constant struggle between running a home, homeschooling, and managing extracurricular activities.
When moms are homeschooling, they may feel guilty for not cleaning; when cleaning, they may feel guilty for not homeschooling. If they have young children, a home business, or both, life can feel like a three- or four-ring circus of suffocating demands. This is crisis living at its worst.
2. Important, but Not Urgent
(The Zone of Victory)
This is where you want to spend most of your time—the zone of planning, prevention, and personal development.
It’s easy to push tasks in this quadrant to the back burner. However, it’s here that you can focus on what truly matters, like building relationships, developing good habits, personal growth, and pursuing meaningful activities. It’s also where you can prevent the crises in Quadrant 1.
By living in this quadrant, you bring simplicity, harmony, and victory to your life.
3. Not Important, but Urgent
Avoid these activities.
This quadrant includes tasks that create an illusion of importance, like busy work or handling problems that aren’t yours to solve. Phone calls, emails, meetings, and trending activities often fall here. Ask yourself: Are you "thickly involved in thin things"?
Minimizing your time here reduces stress and allows you to focus on what truly matters.
4. Not Important and Not Urgent
Avoid these time-wasters.
This is a zone of low stress but low productivity. While a little entertainment can reduce stress and refresh us, it’s easy to let it become a roadblock to growth and productivity.
Activities here include internet surfing, gaming, endless scrolling on social media, or getting sucked into unproductive tasks.
Entertainment has its place, but spending most of your time here means sacrificing your personal power and productivity.
Getting into the Productivity Zone
Please consider spending more time in Quadrant 2, the "Important but Not Urgent" area, to enter the Productivity Zone—the Zone of Victory!
An Invitation to Live in Victory
- Brainstorm and cluster your commitments.
- Brainstorm and cluster where you spend your time.
- Compare your two clusters.
- Evaluate where you spend your time using the 4 Quadrant Matrix.
- Make a plan to move into Quadrant 2 and live in the Productivity Zone of Victory.
Enjoy the Journey!
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