Episode 42: How Simple Planning Changed One Working Mom's Life (A Beyond Balance Client Story)
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Meet my Beyond Balance client Co, a full-time data analyst and mother of two who was drowning in missed appointments, work struggles, and the constant feeling of failing at home and work simultaneously. Despite being a grown woman 😉 with 11 years of parenting experience, she couldn't figure out how to make it all work—until now.
Listen as Co reveals the surprisingly simple shifts that transformed her chaotic days into intentional ones, including the humble notebook that has become her "security blanket" and the permission she gave herself to be imperfect. If you've ever thought "when things calm down, I'll finally..." this episode is for you. It offers a practical look at what it means to be a mom and a busy professional who loves her family AND her career.
Want to learn the time management system that Co mentioned?
Join Beyond Balance → https://themothernurture.com/beyond-balance
links & resources mentioned in this episode:
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Hey there. I've got a quick question for you. What if there was an instruction manual that could walk you through exactly what you need to do to get things done with plenty of time? No more feeling behind on your to-do list or working extra to get caught up.
Just a simple process that you can do no matter how busy you are or what season of working mom life you are in. Well, there's a program for that and it's called Beyond Balance. This is my 12 week long training and coaching program where I teach you the skill of prioritizing and planning so you can create more space in your working mom schedule.
No complicated multi-step processes and no drastic changes to your life like quitting your job or outsourcing everything, just realistic strategies that really work. If you're ready to get things done while feeling more relaxed about time, you can go to themothernurture.com/beyond-balance today.
That's themothernurture.com/beyond-balance. Alright, let's get to the show.
You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode.
Welcome to episode 42 of the podcast. I have a special episode in store for you today. I'm doing something I've not done before on the podcast, and I can't wait to hear what you think. Today I have my very first guest. I'll let her introduce herself to you in just a minute, but I wanted to tell you what you can expect.
CO is in the current cohort of my time training and coaching program Beyond Balance. She has a great story, a very relatable story to tell about her experience. What she's learning and how this is changing the way that she manages her time. And I am sure that you will relate to what she shares in this interview about the weeks when you literally have no extra time, how it's so easy to give up on things when life gets busy, and also how she's bringing her new approach to time management to her office and her team.
I can talk for days about the impact of the work that we do in this program, but I wanted you to hear it from someone who is actively learning and implementing and seeing results. I hope you enjoy this conversation with my client Co. I.
I am excited to get in. We're just gonna chat. This is gonna be very informal and casual, just to kind of give you a glimpse of, what this experience is like. And so maybe Co you could start by just introducing yourself.
Tell us a little bit about what you do and your family life and we'll get right into it.
Okay. my name's co. I work as a data analyst. I work full-time, only occasionally remote, almost always in person. I have two kids, one's in third grade, one's in fifth grade. , I've been married to my husband for 17 years now.
And life is busy. Life is always very busy.
Life is busy. I love that you made that distinction too about most days you being in the office. I think that paints a very different picture in this world where we have all sorts of, I. Scenarios for how we can work, where we can work, what full-time means.
So that's really helpful because it's something that certainly you have to take into consideration when you think about what your days look like. You're not at home.
Oh, for sure. Yeah. Some days I'm, in most days I'm in the office, which I prefer, but some days I work from home for various reasons, just to make life easier.
Yeah.
Yeah. And you work a slightly different schedule than would be a typical nine to five as well. Right.
Yeah. So one of the probably best and most challenging things that I do is I start my day by seven, and then I am done at three. Sometimes I get in a little bit earlier, so that I can pick up my kids from school every day, which means that I pick them up at school between three 30 and four.
I'm with them until nine o'clock at night when I go to bed. If they go to bed, then I go to bed.
Yeah, yeah. Full days. Full days and a choice that you've made to be able to do that, but also comes with its own constraints.
Yeah, and we did it because, so my husband works the more typical like eight 30 to five 30 schedule. So he gets the kids up in the morning, gets them ready, and gets them to school. I go in early so that I can get off and get them from school. They do have like an hour in before care 'cause school's just not that long.
But um, that's how we've made it work for many years now. Is he takes them in and I pick 'em up.
I love that. Just giving examples of how families are making. The school day work for the workday, which is not aligned. So I'd love to hear, if you could share or think about, we're a little over halfway through the program, and so if you could think back to what life looked like or what you felt like some of your challenges were when you decided to join the group, what was the moment or the thing that had you.
Be like, yes, this is what I wanna work on.
So, so interestingly, you had sent this out, I forget, late last year, and I didn't join the group then. Life was absolutely crazy. I couldn't stay on top of everything. I was missing appointments. I was, struggling at work. I was just, everything was a challenge.
And, uh, the holidays happened, and then I went into the new year and I went, okay, I can't keep doing what I'm doing. I don't know how I can keep going the way we're going. I don't, I'm not feeling successful at home or at life at work or anything.
So I emailed you and you're like, can I get on the next round? And you said, actually we didn't start yet, so I was able to hop in on that. It was February, that we started, because I just needed help. I'm 42, right? I've been living life a long time.
I've been a mother for 11 years. It's not like any of that's new. So it, I'm like, I just don't know how to make this all work. And I really love my job and I love my family. And I, yeah, that's, I was really hoping for some, uh. Some, what am I trying to say? Tips, tricks, ideas, strategy, whatever it is. Whatever it was.
I'm like, I need to fill in this missing piece of my life to make it so I'm not so stressed.
All of those words are, I hear those so often, right. I just, I can't keep up. There was just so much and I love my work. I love my family. I love my life really, and
I dunno how to do it all and do it all well.
So yeah, that feeling of like failing people failing, you're just failing your family. You're failing your work. And, uh, it's, yeah, it's, that's the hard part. So that's why I joined. And it all worked out well because I didn't actually have time to do it in January, so it worked out really well.
Then I could start,
there's always, it always happens when it's meant to happen, I think. . Yeah, so think through what we've been learning, what you've been practicing, what have been some of the biggest aha moments or learnings for you. And I will just give you permission to say some things that maybe sound so simple, because that I think is often where they are.
They're the things that we know or have heard, maybe something new. But what has come up for you so far? I'm curious. Okay,
so the first, I think my first aha moment was actually just the idea that you introduced that was you only have so many hours in the week, the day and the week and whatnot. There, it's not all going to happen. There's no way. For it all to happen. And so the purpose of what we're doing is to intentionally choose where we spend our time. So that at the end of the day, we feel like we've done what we wanted to get done that day instead of going, oh my gosh, there's still a super long list that I cannot keep up with.
So that was my first one and I've had to come back to that a few times. I also suffer from anxiety, so at times I like go into my anxiety spiral, then I go, no, no, it wasn't all gonna happen anyway. It's okay. Take a step back. What are you gonna get done? so that was probably my first aha moment in the program.
My second. Well, I don't know if this is an AHA movement, but just a, I struggle with organization and planning and prioritization and whatnot, and so, I tend to be one of those people that's like, well, this system's not working. Let's try this. This system's not working. Let's try this. Which is very discouraging and doesn't really get you anywhere.
So going through the weekday planning process, the weekend planning process, and then choosing the method for choosing priorities and choosing where you spend your time was really, that was really important. That's been very, very helpful. I'm still learning how to be consistent and why it still feels overwhelming at times to look at it all, but it's less overwhelming than trying to do it all.
Mm. Which is a good thing. Yeah. and I feel like I'm more on top of everything that I need to be without stressing and thinking about every little thing constantly.
Mm. it's interesting if I can just share my perspective too. So many things that you just said resonate with me and my personal experience, but.
Even just choosing what are the tools that you're going to use? You have already a tool at work that your organization uses so that we weren't gonna click up for anyone curious, right? We weren't gonna change that, and that was for the most part, working relatively well. Maybe you're applying some of the things that you're learning here to the tasks that you have in Clickup.
But choosing something really can be so simple and I hope it's okay if I share co. That you are just using a notepad. Oh yeah. Like yeah. A piece of paper. Yeah. Right. To plan your grided notebook. Yeah. Your life, your family tasks, and what you're going to do in those hours from when you get home with the kids all the way, until bedtime.
And so you're right. It is very common to, to bounce from tool to tool. It's not working. It's not working. I still have all these things. I'm not making progress. It must be the tool that I'm using. And really it can just be about you and the process. And it can be something as simple as just a notebook page and it's about more you sitting down and looking ahead rather than.
You know, putting our head in the sand because it all feels like too much, that it's actually feels so much better to just know what's coming.
So. For months, I have just been, what do I have to get done today? What do I have to get done? Maybe this week like that would be as far in advance as I, you could even think.
And I sat down on Sunday and I made weekly plans. I didn't put in what exactly I was going to do, but I marked out my weekly planning template through, oh gosh, through the week of May 5th, because I wanted to put the different. Appointments on that we have for dentists and doctors and things like that so that when I get to those weeks, I can go in going, oh, I'm gonna lose half a day on Tuesday because we have to go to the dentist.
We have to go to the doctor. and that was really important. And then also I'm, my next step is look at the weekends and see what commitments we already have on the weekends. So that I know, , I can make decisions about, when we wanna go visit family or friends or when we wanna try to do a bike picnic, or when we wanna dig in our backyard and try to put in a French drain.
That's weird. Know where to do that. But that's all the fun things. So that was, that was really exciting to actually sit down and think. And I realized that my Myrtle Beach trip is coming up soon, sooner than I, I realized, and I should probably start thinking about planning for it, but I didn't feel like I had to start that right now, which was nice too.
Mm.
The other thing I realized this week was when I put all the things in for the week, I went, I don't really have any uninterrupted time outside of work.
Like I just don't, I have kids with me all of the time, all of the days until the weekend. that I'm not at work and they're not school. So. I went, okay, well what can I do in that time? And so I was able to throw in, I was like, I think I could get some laundry through. I can get laundry. My kids are old enough, I can get some laundry through.
That's fine. So that's all I did. I was like, I'm committing to laundry. And then I actually, last night we came home and the kids were busy playing. They just had a really good time. We were really engaged together, which is great. So I was able to pay some bills and look at a few more of the doctor's appointments that needed to happen and do a couple of other little, like odds and ends things.
And because I already had this structure. Do it in, it went much more smoothly and much faster and I now, I kind of just love my book now. I'm just like, this is my book and I want it to be everywhere with me because it's now my, I don't know, security
blanket.
That's it. It's my security blanket.
That's exactly it.
Yeah. You've got it. Well, what's great about what you did this week? And you know, CO did come into our community space and shared that realization. When she finished her planning for the week, she came in and said, oh wow, I really don't have a lot of time. I think the best I can do is laundry.
And that's the thing is you go into the week knowing or expecting. That you're not gonna get a lot of other things done because we all have weeks like that. But maybe the old version, pre this process, you would've felt really terrible about that. Or like, why couldn't I get more done? Or, what's wrong with me?
Or all of the things that we tell ourselves. And not that those thoughts maybe don't creep in from time to time. We're human, but it's okay if you just do laundry. But bonus, you had options that you could pull in when the kids were engaged and you got a little bit extra done that evening.
I did. And the other piece is just, I can't tell you how many times I've said to myself when things calm down, we'll do this.
When things calm down, I'm gonna do this. And it never calms down. There's always someone who is sick or hurt or, there's doctors or dentists or school events or like, it just never really calms down. You never get a chill normal week when you have a very busy family. And so I finally went, okay. This is actually what my weeks look like right now.
And so my next step is going to be what on my list do I outsource and what on my list do I give up? And how are we going to manage it? Because it can't all get done by me or my husband. I mean, even my husband, like he does a lot too. Please don't think he doesn't.
He does a ton, but. Uh, we just have more to do in our weeks than we have time to do it and energy to do it, and we can't be efficient a hundred percent of the day and all work and no play is exhausting. So. So it's, this is, this week was the week. That was my next aha. Moment I think was, I went, oh, I, I don't, I don't have time to do all these things.
This, the reason that I keep failing at doing all my goals is I literally don't have time to do all of them. I don't even have time to do, you know, I'm lucky if I have time to do one of them. So it's been getting me to think more creatively about how I'm gonna do things. Like I'm not trying to find time to work out, but when I'm at work, I do, I will put my leg up, my hip, leg up and do some hip stretches.
Yeah. Or when I'm at home and the kids are playing, I will do a couple of lunges. I'm not doing a lot, but it's something. Or I'll sit on the floor if I'm tired and I'll stretch my legs out and do some very easy yoga poses. Just the idea that I'm, I'm just gonna do one, just I feel like I just need to move my body and I wanna do one and I'll do one and maybe I'll get two and then maybe I'm off doing something with one of the kids, or I'm switching the laundry.
But I've lowered my expectations around what I needed time to do and I'm, and if it's like, but I still wanna do that. I'm finding ways to fit it in more naturally in my life.
I couldn't have said any of that better.
Yet,
but I mean that is sometimes the season that we're in. And so I love what you just said that you either decide this isn't the season for this goal or these goals, because I have a very clear picture of my time and our commitments and our schedule, and so I'm just gonna table those for now.
I'll revisit them in the future. Or no, this is really important to me. And so what can I do to potentially, I don't know, make a 1% improvement or do it in, three minutes here or there? Mm-hmm. Or like you said, there are plenty of my clients who then do think creatively about, well, are there other things that we're doing that maybe I don't need to own or that we don't wanna be doing because these goals or these other projects are more important.
But you can't make those decisions if you don't have a good view mm-hmm. Of what's going on.
And it also, when I looked at my calendar and I realized the thing that I definitely prioritize is time with my kids and my husband to an extent. We do a lot of, um, what do they call it, like trading, passing in the night sometimes just because we're back and forth.
But I do really prioritize time with my kids and so that takes a lot of time. But I don't wanna give it up. So that made it easier to be like, oh no, I'm, I'm not going to try to fit this extra, I'm not gonna try to learn Python outside of work hours right now. Which is a coding language for anyone who's not in, in coding.
I'm just gonna have to learn what I can during that, with the projects that I'm working on, because then I wouldn't have that time with my kids. Or if I wanna exercise, we can all go for a walk then go. One time we went up and the kids were bike riding and I just walked the loop.
But, uh, it just made me realize that I have this time with my kids. Am I enjoying it? Is it what we want it to be? You know, there's certain things that we have to do these things, but, there's also a time where it's like, I wanna play, let's play a board game.
We got time, we play a board game. Let's go. You know, walk around the block. You guys wanna run to the library, let's run to the library. Like, just things that don't, that I think would've probably felt stressful or like something that I had to do now feel more like something I get to do with my kids because I'm choosing to do it.
Yeah, it's a perception shift. It's definitely a perception shift.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have goosebumps as you're talking because the energy that you are sharing this with feels so different from maybe how you would've talked about it a couple of months ago. Yeah, definitely. And I was reviewing actually some of your goals before we.
Started this conversation and one of yours is to do more, if you remember Like fun Yeah. Activities and events and outings as a family and with your kids. And just by you mapping out, through May, what do our weekends look like? You'll be able to, probably not every weekend, let's be real.
There are lots of other things going on, but here and there, choose an outing or an adventure or something that the kids choose that they wanna do. But again, if you avoid looking at all of your commitments and what is actually on the calendar. You're right. There will always be something else and you won't do those things.
Yeah. Another moment. Aha. Moment. Another great, well, not aha moment one. That is something else that happened through this program. So. I've started an afternoon chart for my kids, an afternoon routine chart for what they're responsible for, and then they earn, tokens and then they can use their tokens for things.
So they love it. They think it's really fun to earn tokens and there's extra stuff the whole bit, but. I've done things like this before and as soon as it stopped working a little, like, I felt like it wasn't perfect. I just like was abandoning it and was like, this doesn't work. I'm not gonna do this. And this time around, we've been doing it now for four weeks, which is probably the longest I've ever done a reward system.
It has not been perfect. We have day had days where the kids were sick and we just didn't worry about it. Or days, where we're traveling and we did it, did things differently or, and it's fine. Like it's absolutely fine. And I can still, when they get home, say, Hey, did you get your chores done?
Or they'll say, Hey, I wanna do this thing. And I'll say, okay, get your chores done and then you can go do this thing. And it's not an excessive amount of chores, it's just things that they should be responsible for at this age. And it's still going, like I haven't balked at it yet, which is really.
Y'all don't know me, but if you did, you'd know. That's a pretty big accomplishment to not try to reinvent the wheel. Every single time.
Do you think that maybe some of the success with that, and it's okay if you say it's not, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but I remember a very similar moment for you early on when we started the planning process where you wanted it to be a certain way and were overthinking it and came in and were like, I don't know where to start.
Like there's too much here. Yeah. And we talked through that and it was essentially just permission to start where you are. It doesn't have to be perfect. Let's just iterate on it week after week. Yeah. And I wonder if that same principle is sort of bleeding into the afterschool thing, that it doesn't have to be perfect, but actually the value, the benefit, the results is from consistently trying
and
what is true that I just don't, doesn't naturally come to my brain, is that I can put a list up that has three chores and then the next week say, okay, we're adding another one, or we're changing this one. Or, this is what, oh, when we practice music, this is what that looks like.
You can't check it off until you do this thing. And that is, that was a game changer, just to feel like I didn't have to have it all figured out in perfect day one. Because we can adjust it and that's still okay. And that was a big shift. And that was actually true for my planner too.
I've re, I, I don't wanna say I've redone my planner. I took my first running list and my first planner, and I'm still in the same book. And then I rewrote my running list. I organized it a little differently, but not much. And then I just changed the layout of my week 'cause I liked it better.
I tried a couple layouts, picked one that I liked the best. Yeah. So I didn't change anything drastic in any way. But it was gave myself permission to be like, we'll try it. Let's see. Nope, I like this one better. And that's okay because you gave, not that I, you should have had to give me permission, but because of our group, I felt like I could, it was like, it's okay.
It's okay for it not to be perfect. It's okay for it to be, just to be. And then you can see what's working. And then two weeks, you told me I had to do it for two weeks. The routines. That's what have the chart one you're like, we gotta do, we're gonna do it for two weeks. You said it very kindly, but I was like, okay, I gotta do this for two weeks and now we're four weeks in and now it's just routine.
Yeah, a little external. Accountability never hurt anybody. It's helpful. And to see all these other, you know, the other women in the group too are doing their own iterations and their own versions of things, and we're all just figuring out what works for us, for our work, for our families. And there's a lot of permission that comes with that when you see, oh, everyone else is doing this too.
Yeah. It's validating and it's confidence building to talk things through and go, oh, oh, it's okay to. Do that. That's okay. It's okay that it's not totally figured out. That's okay. And to have structure, just to have some structure to follow so I don't have to make all the decisions by myself was actually very helpful.
Like, here's something, just try it. Oh yeah, that that works pretty well. I'm gonna tweak it a tiny bit and now, yeah, that's great. That was really nice to just not have to try to invent from scratch with my brain always tries to do, and there's so much so you can go on the internet and there's so much, it's like, let's just pick, here's a thing.
Let's try this thing. Okay. Try this thing. Yeah.
Here's your starting point. Yes. You don't have to go search through Google articles or blog posts or social media or wherever you go to crowdsourcing your information. It's like, let's just start with this.
Mm-hmm.
And see how that works for you or what works and what doesn't, and then we can go from there.
Yeah. So helpful. So, so we still have more time together, which I'm so excited about, but what are you focusing on? where is your work? Moving forward
my, so my first, first I, like I said, the first activity I think is to get a little more realistic about what I can do in a week and figure out how to make that manageable.
So. Instead of trying to do everything, try to make it so that I can do the things that need to happen and, you know, enjoy the time with my kids and whatnot. So I think that's kind of my next like little step. my next big step is going to be taking these concepts. And applying them more at work than I currently am.
I knew I couldn't tackle work and home at the same time. 'cause they're just, they're different and they're a lot. And, so I tackled home first 'cause I was like, if I can get my home life feeling normal, then I can, I have more energy for work. So the next step is gonna be to try to take. What I've learned here and take it to work and set up work in a way that makes sense.
And that one's a little more complex because I've got other people that I'm working with and teams and then deadlines and then time estimates and like all that sort of thing. But that's, I think what I'm gonna do next. And I'm gonna look at energy, like look at the when, when do I have the most energy?
When do I have the least energy? And try to plan my time, my activities at work around that.
Mm, I love that. And everyone does that a little bit differently. For some people, work feels like an easier entry point. I've had some, women who go through and do both simultaneously. So your choice was home.
Let's start there and just continue working the way you've been working. But there are always things that you can bring. That you like, that you can think about to, to the other facets of your life. I love that for you
Our lives are so inner connected. The different parts, we see them as separate. Like, I have my work hat on now, or I have my mom hat on now, or I have my. Life admin hat now on where I'm paying bills and doing all these things, but you can't help but learn something and see it bleed into or carry over into the other areas of life.
So I bet there are even more examples of work changes that you've very subtly made, and so now you're just gonna shift into the more intentional changes.
Yes, I think so. I think that's happening. We kind of plan in a six month block. It's kind of how we do our planning. So we're entering our next planning cycle for our next six month block.
So this was very timely because as I'm planning out my next six months, I'm thinking about it differently. And I am planning it differently and I am projecting. Differently. I'm thinking, I'm thinking about things like transitions and communication and all the things that take time that we don't give ourselves time to do, and then we're overwhelmed.
So it's gonna be a really interesting planning period this time around over the next few weeks. So that'll be, it's fun. I'm excited and I, I feel more confident about it than I have in the past, for sure.
Yeah. Oh, I can't wait to walk through that with you. Good. Yeah. I can't wait. That makes me so excited.
I'm like, I'm chomping at the bit over here. Let's go. So good. Okay. Oh co. This was great. I appreciate your willingness to share examples and behind the scenes and what things have been like for you. I hope that for anyone listening you hear that. No one's perfect. We're not doing it all. But we are, we're making progress.
We're shifting the way we see things and we are making choices about what's important to us, what we wanna use our time for, so that we can Yeah. I mean, it sounds so cliche, but like, we have one life to live. Really at the end of the day, we all wanna feel good. We wanna enjoy the lives that we're working so hard to create.
So I appreciate you and it has been so fun and will continue to be an honor to have you in the group. Oh, thanks.
I enjoy it. I look forward to it actually.
I do too. Yeah, it's the highlight of my week, my Friday
coming.
So good. All right, well, thank you again and I'll see you in our next session. Alright, thank you.
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