Lost

I have a tendency to get "lost"--as my husband calls it.  I find it often happens after meal times.  Here's the scenario: I work hard coordinating everything that goes into preparing a meal for my family.  We eat.  And then I wander over to check my email or work on a planning page or chart on my computer, and an hour later, I wonder how I could have spent so much time there.

Does this happen to anyone else?

In analyzing this phenomenon, I notice that after a meal, the kids are usually content to play on their own for a good, long stretch, which leaves me free.  But I rarely use this time for something on my To Do list.  Instead, it's blogging, "checking" (ie., my email--my eldest's term for it), surfing, finding a cute picture with which to illustrate a page and making it work just so (that could encompass a post unto itself).

I know that I tend to have a lot of inertia (and I wonder where my first-born gets it...).  What I'm doing, I want to keep doing for a long time, and I don't want to think about where I need to be next.  Staying on schedule takes a lot of mental energy for me.  I'm a task-oriented person, rather than time-oriented, and getting a bunch of things done in one day requires a bit of both.

I've been experimenting with a new homemaking routine (somewhat based on this), which I'd like to post about in-depth at some point, but I am finding that, mainly, I can still get only one thing accomplished in a day (in addition to all the childcare activities and cooking that I do), be it homeschooling, cleaning a zone of the house, or walking to the library.  After that, I get lost. 

Do I just need the time to recharge my "schedule batteries" with some unstructured "play" time like my kids do?  Is this something I should build into my day or something I should try to curb?  I am currently undecided, but I know that pretending that I won't continue to do this is not an option.