If you’re like me, you love a morning routine blog, what I ate today, follow me around this afternoon type of video content.
If you scroll around TikTok for a little bit, we are completely obsessed with the way that other people live their lives. I am. You probably are, too.
On one hand, I think a lot of that actually comes from a place of wanting to be connected and wanting to be accepted – we want to see other people doing what WE do so we know we aren’t the only ones who do it.
If you flip the coin, it also comes from a place of, I’m not happy with my morning routine, or I’m not happy with what I’m eating in the day, so let me go out into the social media world and see what other people are doing. I’ll get some ideas so I can learn from them and get better.
For me, that’s part of the really cool thing about social media is we have such the ability to learn about things, ways of life, opinions, other lifestyles that we never would in any other capacity.
I want to share with you what my day looks like as a mom business owner. This is what it looks like on a day that my kids are in preschool and I am working from home.
I’m sharing this with you because some of the things that I talk about will hopefully make you realize you’re not the only one that does this.
Or if you’re struggling with how to spend your work days, if you’re not productive enough in your own opinion or whatever that looks like, you can take some of the things that I’m talking about today and implement them in your own life.
Embracing Chaos: Mornings with Kids
At the end of last year, I got incredibly burnt out and I knew I couldn’t keep going the way that I was.
So everything that I’ve implemented this year for my work days has allowed me to have a little bit more of that balance and not just between mom life and entrepreneur life, but balance in making sure I’m taking care of my needs as well.
I’m super type A, so you might find it shocking that I actually don’t believe in morning routines at all. One of the benefits of having my own business is I don’t want to have to get up at a certain time or be on somebody else’s clock. Now, granted, we have to have our kids at school at a certain time, so we’re still setting alarms during the week but what I do changes day to day depending on who is taking the kids to school, how I am feeling and what else I have going on that day.
I know that some people live, breathe, and die by their morning routines, and it works for them. It doesn’t work for me.
A morning routine makes me feel like another to-do item, and I just don’t have the capacity for it. It’s the same reason I don’t make my bed and the same reason that not making my bed doesn’t bother me one way or another.
Basically, in the morning, my alarm goes off. If I have a post planned for that day, I make sure it’s posted correctly, and I get up and I get ready for the day.
Then thank goodness, Jeff has his own business, too. Collectively, we get the kids up. We tag team getting ready, getting them breakfast, getting them dressed, and getting them out the door.
My kids are four and three, and for the 90 minutes that they are awake before they go to school, it is pure chaos. It’s a combination of making sure they are ready, attending to 842 requests (both kids making them at the same time) while still wiping the crust out of my eyes and trying to balance my hormones by not drinking a very large cup of coffee before I eat.
I do try to pay attention to the fact that these are our 90 minutes together before the kids go off into the world – so I do my best, not great at it, to be engaged with them, to talk to them, give them extra hugs and kisses before they go off to school.
Most mornings, Jeff takes them to school – so once they leave, the most important thing that I do for my day is my touch the tree moment.
I need a moment to switch from the chaos of getting the kids out the door on time and taking care of their needs, the amped up nervous system situation to a calmer, more focused mode. My “just” Giana mode.
A lot of that for me is just clearing the energy, shifting the energy from what it was to what I need it to be.
I spend 15-20 minutes cleaning up the kitchen, making my coffee, but I do it in a full dance party. I put on my Brittany Spears, or I put on Nelly, or whatever my late ’90s, early 2000s vibe is for the day. I have a playlist on Spotify called Touch the Tree that has so many different music options and will definitely put you in the good vibes.
I give myself this 15 minutes of switching the energy over from mom to business owner, and it makes a huge difference in how I move throughout the day. I do touch the tree moment at the end of the day, too, which I’ll talk about before I go pick up the kids later in this blog.
The Power of a Controlled Calendar
One of the most important things I recommend is not giving your clients full access to your calendar, whether that’s within an app like Calendly or even just back & forth through email. Just because you technically are open at 9am – doesn’t mean you have to take calls then.
My calendar is sacred to me. I live, I breathe by my calendar. If it’s not on my calendar or on my to-do list, it’s probably not happening because there’s other things in my brain.
So in a normal week: what my calendar looks like is on Monday and Friday, I don’t take any calls. No client calls, no Instagram lives, nothing that I have to actually be ready for at a certain time. These days are for me.
I do that because coming off the weekend, I need Monday to reset. Friday, we’re going into the weekend. It’s like a catch-all, finish-up before the weekend. Having these 2 days for myself allows me to work on my own business, take care of our home and myself. These are days I do longer workouts, unapologetically nap and feel more freedom overall.
Now, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I do take client calls, but I don’t take any calls before 10:30 AM, and I end them all at 3:00 PM. This allows me to prioritize my business in the mornings, which is when I’m the most creative and focused for myself. I end at 3:00 PM because I need to leave at 3:30 to pick up my kids, and it gives me a 30-minute buffer to do what I need to do during that time.
I also block at least 30 minutes to an hour for lunch every single day in my calendar because last year, I was not blocking lunch, and I would be on back-to-back calls from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM, multiple times a week. I wasn’t eating. I was angry and had a headache every single day. I knew I had to make that change. So my calendar is something that I actively control. Now, if I have a client that can’t find a time, which rarely happens, I will make something work for her.
I want to urge you that if you give your clients full control of your calendar, you are making a massive error and causing more stress in your life. There are so many free programs out there, I use Calendly that allows you to be in control of your calendar. So like I said, in the mornings, I’m typically doing my creative tasks first. I’m outlining content, recording podcasts. That is what I do first because I am bright-eyed and bushy tailed in the morning, and I want to put that energy into the activities that matter the most to me.
Some people have absolutes for their mornings: you should always work out first thing in the morning, or else your workout never happens.
For me, I work out three to four times a week, and I do it when it’s best for my brain.
On a Monday, I would never work out on Monday morning if that’s what my schedule told me I had to do. On Monday, as soon as my kids leave, I want to get right to work. I’ve probably had ideas over the weekend or things that I want to just sit down and get my hands into. So I would work out in the afternoon when my brain energy is less, when my body is a little bit tired, so I need that pep up. There’s also times where I want to get up and I want to work out first and do that so then I can continue on with the rest of my day or I can shower and get myself looking all cute.
You’ll find that I have very few hard and fast rules about what my week needs to look like. Every week is different. Jeff doesn’t have a calendar, he flies by the seat of his pants. Last night, he went out to dinner with a client. Literally, he told me 24 hours prior. If my schedule was super rigid, which it has been in the past, I would constantly be frustrated because my expectations weren’t being met or because I had something planned and it was ruined.
Flexibility & Scheduling
There is this level of flexibility that allows me room to be a better wife and mom by not being so rigid. So keep that in mind. If you’re like, I don’t even know how to make a flexible plan, you should definitely check out my free webinar, Build Your Business Without the Mom Guilt. There are a lot of time management hacks and the strategies in that webinar that will actually allow you to create a flexible schedule and adjust it week to week so that it really works what you actually have going on in your life.
So working out happens three to four times a week at a time that I feel works best for me.
Now, the other thing is, and Jeff makes fun of me for this all the time, there’s lots of snacks. I eat every 2-3 hours. So that’s the benefit of working from home is me popping downstairs, getting a couple of snacks and being on my way. So then in the afternoon is typically when I take client calls, catch up with my clients in Voxer or anything that is not really a creative task.
This is when I will do scheduling stuff. I will upload my podcast and schedule them. I’ll schedule my Pinterest pins because it’s just a different side of the brain. All the content is ready, the graphics are ready, and then I’m scheduling them in the afternoon when I’m not as creative.
A really important piece of my day, especially my work days, is my close-out process. I do not complete my full to-do list every single day. It doesn’t happen. So at three o’clock, when I’m done for the day, I essentially look at my to-do list and I decide, are things being rolled over to tomorrow? Do they need to be rolled over to a different day of the week? Am I going to stay up and finish this tonight if it’s one of those tasks that is a commitment to finish today, I make that decision there, move things around on my digital to-do list as needed. Then I just do a final, do my clients need anything from me? Did I promise anybody anything that I need to send them? And I wrap that up.
Then from about 3:15 to 3:30, 3:45 is when I’m getting ready to pick up the kids, packing them snacks for the car ride home (hopefully bringing the right ones, or else it’s like Armageddon in the car on the way home – if you’re a toddler mom, you know what I mean!)
I also use that time to try to have dinner prepped in some form or fashion. If it’s a casserole, typically I’ve made it earlier in the day or earlier in the week, but I take it out.
Tonight we’re having pasta, before I go and get the kids, I’ll just get everything out. I’ll put water in a pot. I’ll bring the pasta and the sauce out of the cabinet. Anything that needs to happen to just cut the steps shorter for dinner is really helpful, because when my kids come home, rightfully so, they want every ounce of attention that they can get from me. It’s not always possible, but I want to give it to them as much as I can. So any steps that I can take to make dinner time easier, I will do before I go pick them up.
When I pick them up, sometimes we have a great ride home. Sometimes your girl is triggered beyond belief because of the screaming and yelling and requests in the car.
Winding Down and The Evening Routine
When we get home, I’ve been using this app called Opal. You can actually set it up to block my distracting apps.
So from 5:00 to 7:30, Instagram, Voxer, my to-do list, my email, TikTok are all blocked out.
I can get into them, but it’s you have to wait to get into them. It has a countdown timer and it’s really helped me to really compartmentalize the work, the distractions, and focus on dinner time with my kids and with Jeff. So that’s what the day looks like. Then we do dinner and the bedtime routine.
My evening routine after the kids go to bed, for the most part, is time for me.
Again, it’s that touch the tree moment of I was mom, I was business owner all day, and now I really want to transition to Giana, the wife.
Taking a shower, doing my skincare routine, putting on comfy, cute PJs, making sure that I feel good as we go into the evening. Sometimes that’s popping downstairs and watching a show with Jeff. Sometimes it’s knowing that I need time for myself and staying in our room and reading a book or watching something that he would never in a million years watch.
That’s what my typical day looks like. Very rarely, I would say maybe three to four times a month, I’m actually sitting at my desk or in front of my computer working in the evenings.
I did that a lot in the early years of building my business, and I had to because my kids were home full-time. I was taking client calls, creating content or sending emails at 8:00PM.
One, it’s just not my best brain time. But two, I don’t want to work all the time. There’s always something to do. There’s always something to create. There’s always another message to be sent, and there has to be boundaries. As often as possible, evening time is really for me. I’ve even gotten in the habit of leaving my phone upstairs in our bedroom because our living room is downstairs, so that it’s not even a temptation. If you’re like me, sometimes I’m just picking that phone up purely out of habit. No other reason besides the tick of reaching for it.
It’s wild to read through this and think that this is the life I’ve created for myself. It isn’t easy, being a mom & a business owner is another level of wild but the freedom and control it gives me and our family is so incredibly worth it.
Helpful links:
Follow me on Instagram HERE
Listen to this podcast episode HERE
Grab my Touch the Tree playlist HERE
Snag my free webinar, Build Your Business Without the Mom Guilt HERE
Try Opal HERE
