Any non essential to do items are the first to get the boot.  Yeah, I would like to shine up the front window and door glass but...scratch it off.  Ditto with baking a dessert, or organizing drawers.  When crunch time hits, it's the small but numerous "niceties" that get scratched, including cutting back on personal "free" time to read, use the computer, visit with family/friends, etc.  It all eventually gets handled, but not necessarily on the timeline I prefer. 

 For me, the first things to go are housework and cooking.  I admit, I will buy bags of already prepared stew setup so that I can just throw it into the pot with some water and let it cook versus buying all the veggies and meat, then chopping it all up, browning the meat, then having it end up in the same pot and cooking for the same amount of time.  Seriously, the bagged stew setup is 5 bucks.  Buying the meat alone would be the same price, plus the time it takes to prepare it just to start it cooking.  I also buy bagged skillet dinner setups for time saving.  10 dollars worth makes  many frozen meals that will go into my handy dandy baby deep freeze.  I'm ridiculously obsessed with finding things that I can make and freeze, I just haven't really found all that many things I can do that with, lol.

check out www.savingdinner.com  They have free menus but also menus you buy at reasonable pricing. They have lots of freezer meal menus where you put all you need for the meal in the freezer bags.  They have 20 meal ones, sides, just chicken etc. just 5 meals etc.  She has a shopping list. For example burritos one bag for the beans, one for the tortillas/cheese etc and it all goes in another bag so the meall is complete.  The recipe have the making for the freezer on one side and the cooking instructions on the other side so it all fits nicely in a binder.  also nice because you can give them to people as a gift it their are sick or new baby etc.

 MFI,

 Thank you very much for the link.  This is going to come in very handy.  I have been checking out books about "freezer meals" from the library, but they didn't really have the "do this, then do this, then freeze it" kind of layout that I really need.  I need it to be pretty simple, and it looks like the link you sent is exactly what I've been looking for.

The first thing that has gone from my list is the once a week "major" house cleaning. I am fortunate that we can afford to pay someone (one of my best friends who really can use the extra money) to come in once a week, vacuum the entire house, dust, clean the bathrooms, and the kitchen. We pay her $10 an hour, and she usually gets everything done within 5 hours. Sometimes I'm here to help her, or I work on other things that need done (like laundry, the windows, etc.). Having this luxury in our lives, frees me up to do things like volunteer at the school, be involved in the PTO, run errands for Brian if needed, and other things like that that are important to me/us. I'm not a good housekeeper....I get side tracked VERY easily, and more often than not, there isn't much to show for several hours of work that I've put in cleaning the house. I'm not organized, though I keep trying to get there.

If something catastrophic happened like Brian losing work, or worse, and I had to go to work to support us, then obviously, all the vounteer work, PTO, etc. would get cut. But it would be worth it, even though I probably wouldn't like it much!

You're welcome!  It's nice to try her free menus too so you get a sense of the food.  She has lots of good books. I am thinking of getting her basic how to cook for my dh :)

Well, the first thing to go is surfing the Internet. I can lose thousands of hours to that, seemingly daily. After that, I give up some of the sillier things I otherwise do, like ironing our cloth napkins (yes, I'm afraid I do!). I'll also start cutting corners with the housework - taking the "if you can't see it, why clean it?" method.

Some of the other things I'll drop in a hurry are line drying my clothes (at $0.25 a load it's easy to drop), and walking the kids to and from school. It takes almost an hour to do that, whereas driving is less than fifteen minutes roundtrip. $0.30 in gas sometimes just can't compete with having that 45 minutes back!!

If things are tough at night, I definite switch from nightly to once a month cooking. It may be a pain on Cooking Day, but a huge timesaver when you're in the middle of the weekly grind.