We all want to be able to “do it all” and we think there is a formula to do so that we just haven’t figured out yet. But I’m here to tell you that instead of striving to do it all and to do everything perfectly, it’s far better to learn to develop rhythms in your life that help you maintain your sanity despite the common overwhelm we so often feel. We can take steps against overwhelm when we learn to approach our lives with intention and better time management.

Listen to this episode for four tips that work for me, but then tweak them to work for you and your unique life!

Enjoy!

Resources:

Print my “Prioritize” worksheet to help you determine the parts of your day that deserve the most of your focus!

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The Next Right Thing: Design Your Rhythm of Work – Theme Days

The Lazy Genius Works From Home

Podcast Transcript:

Hey friends! It’s been a long time since I’ve recorded a podcast episode! I said from the beginning that podcasting isn’t going to be my full-time gig so I hadn’t set a set schedule for sharing podcasts. But I do want to be more consistent and have a lot of ideas for what’s to come, so make sure you have clicked “subscribe” on my podcast so that you get alerts anytime I share a new episode! Another way to support the podcast and help it reach the ears of many more people is to leave a review, and oh how I’d LOVE some five stars ratings if you would! The more ratings and reviews I have, the more likely I am to reach more people and grow the podcast! Thanks in advance!

So, today I come to you with a topic called “How To Do It All!’ You may quickly realize you won’t leave this podcast being able to do it all, and that I actually don’t do it ALL! But, I still want to offer an inside look of how I juggle my life in case you can take a few tips from what works for me and tweak them to work for YOU! I have listened to several podcasts recently with a rundown of how people do their day to day work, and since I get asked: “How do you do it all?” so often, I decided it’s time to share some of my day-to-day rhythms — even if I don’t actually “do it all.”

So for those who haven’t listened to the podcast episode all about my story, I’ll briefly tell you what a day in the life looks like for me. I’m a mama to four kiddos and I homeschool two of them. Four out of six of us are in weekly therapies or some kind of life coaching (and, yes, I’m one of them!) I think therapy is amazing and more people should be doing it, just like hiring a life coach! So we really make it a priority in our family!

I also am active in my church and try to volunteer in multiple areas like leading worship, helping my husband teach a small group, and helping in kids church on Sunday mornings and evenings! I volunteer at the kids school when they need me, and then I run two businesses…one part of my business consists of life coaching clients and the other is content creating for clients as a freelance writer! I also run social media pages for a lot of my clients and then there’s running a household, which is a full-time job in itself. 

Now, I know not everyone who listens to this is married or has kids, but there are still plenty of tips in this podcast for you too! I know some of my single friends who are just as busy juggling school, volunteer work, their jobs, housework etc. We all can learn from each other and I hope to be able to share some advice to help you feel like you can handle your life without getting too overwhelmed.

Now, when people ask me how I juggle everything, my first response is to laugh inside because most of the time I just feel like I’m drowning, but I guess I put on a good front! Ultimately, I have had to put together some systems to manage everything that I’m excited to share with you. Please know everyone is different and you should add tweaks here and there to the advice you hear to make it work for YOU! That’s what I’ve done with a lot of what I’m sharing. Nothing is exactly “original,” it’s just me changing the advice of others to fit what works for me and my family!

Here are four steps to help you feel like you can do it all!

The first step to better managing your time is to never believe that someone can actually do it all. It’s just not possible and those who look like they do aren’t showing you the intense moments of stress, tearfilled nights, or the guilt of not being able to give anything 100% no matter how much they try because they are simply spread too thin.

I want you to approach your day with both the motivtation to be productive while also giving yourself grace. At the end of the day, completing a checklist is far less important compared to maintaining your sanity.

The second step is to work as a team. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean your team has to be a spouse. Maybe it’s a parent, a friend, a housecleaner, or a babysitter. I’m going to start with the spouse, though, since that’s who is a part of my day to day team. We live in a day and age where if you are married, more than likely both of you are employeed. And maybe this doesn’t mean full-time employement for both, maybe it’s just a side hustle! But either way, we have a lot going on now more than ever! I want to first talk to the women here. We have this thing that’s often engrained in us that we are in charge of the house and our kids and anything our spouse does is a “bonus.” But that’s just not going to fly if you want to be productive with your work or be able to do more of what makes you come alive! There has to be equal partnership! My husband knows that four times a week for a big chunk of time, he’s in charge — not babysitting, just doing his job as dad! He cleans the house during this time just like I do when I’m home with the kids. He feeds them, gets them to bed whenever I’m gone for an evening, and he helps prep for the next week! This allows me the time and space to have distraction free time to work. Sure, it’s often late hours, but we have to be willing to fit the work in when we can and not always think it has to be an 8-5 time slot. 

If you’re a single parent, find a community of stay at home moms or dads and do trade offs for babysitting! At one point, I was trading babysitting with a friend and I would get work done while she had my kids and she would run her errands and do her grocery shopping when I had hers one day a week! It’s false to believe that our kids only need us. Now, I know there are some exceptions where there are true anxieties about leaving your kids, and that’s not the person I’m talking to when I say to be willing to leave them. In those cases, it’s important to seek help and to honor your needs of security for that time. I get those feelings because no one will love our kids the way we do, but for those who simply make an excuse that we can’t leave our kids but don’t actually struggle with it, we have to remind ourselves that we are created to live in community and that our kids need more than just us speaking into their lives. Sure, you want to make sure who you choose to be around your children is trustworthy and would parent in the same ways you do, but we need to be willing to take that step and live in community. It also helps us show up as better parents when we are sharing the load and not carrying everything ourselves.

For those who are single and do not have kids, maybe you have a roommate or a friend and you can trade off tasks with him/her. For example, you do yours and their laundry one week and vise versa or you do dinners three nights a week and he/she does three nights and then the last night is a free for all? Get creative! If you live alone, I’ve heard of people who will cook in bulk three meals, put them in freezer bags, meet up with a small group and everyone shares meals! If meals aren’t an issue, pick the one or two things that seem to not get done and figure out how you can find a person or team of people to help support you in those areas! You don’t have to do things alone! We often want to sit back and complain about all we have going on, but if we sit down and think outside of the box and be a problem solver instead of a problem finder, we can truly find solutions to our overwhelm! 

The third step that I’ve recently been trying thanks to a podcast called The Next Right Thing by Emily Freeman, I’ve been implementing “theme” days. So Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays are my homeschooling and therapy days. I do all the cleaning these days and my husband does dinner. On Monday mornings part of the “theme” is meetings. I schedule all my meetings related to the kids or doctors appts. etc. on these days. Wednesdays I’ve kept the early mornings open for time with friends where we do playdates and I get to be with other mamas. And Friday early mornings are my catch-up days where I either do some house organization, read some of my self-help books or catch up on listening to work-related podcast episodes while I grocery shop.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, my kids who are homeschooled go to a classroom setting in the morning and then I