It’s not something you *expect* to run into, but in reality, it’s pretty likely to happen. Unless you have iron off time boundaries, you’re going to naturally view the weekend as the “catch all” for whatever chores and tasks you *didn’t* have time to get to over the work week – pretty natural to have that view.
And then, you spend all of Saturday cramming in your food prep and your house cleaning and your “run the kids to something fun” on *top* of the 5 different things you didn’t get to during the week (1 for each day you worked), and then what happens?
You’re tapped out, zoo-ed out, absolutely sick of being efficience-ized out. It’s a real thing. You *need* that weekend break.
‘Cause you can’t rely on *Sunday* to be your only break day, what with church alarms and getting kids dressed up when they don’t want to and rushing breakfast in and driving off to be gone for 3 hours.
And then when you get back, you’re exhausted from people mode and “chase the kids” mode and who served what, where, and when mode, and you just need to crash – but you’re the mommy, so you go straight to the kitchen instead to cook lunch. Which everyone expects to be *tasty*, to celebrate the weekend, but *you* know that that means more *work*.
And once you’re done with all *that*, it’s now naptime and you’re completely burnt out, and now *that’s* your weekend “rest.” A crash-y afternoon with supper to cook again, and Monday morning looming.
Uh, uh-uh. I say “not happening.” And this is *exactly* the situation one of my clients was in when she came to me for help.
She’d gotten her work week *perfect* – I mean it was just flowing *really* smoothly for her. Then she had the prep day, church day, catch-up day, and flop day – all crammed into 2 days over the weekend.
No wonder why she was feeling so stressed!
So I told her what I just told you – you *have* to have a break, if you’re needing a spillover day it’s got to be *not* Saturday or Sunday, and you need to take *down* the pressure on your prep day.
Especially since in her case, she combined church day with prep day, so that’s *2* major activities on the same day.
But you know what? When I asked her what *she* wanted Sunday prep day to look like, she knew *exactly* how to answer me. Some busyness, then a break. That’s what she wanted.
The *other* thing we had to deal with was her recurring struggle as an entrepreneur of trying to fit too much in. See, when you have kids and house and husband, on top of prep and school chores and medications to divvy out – and that’s not even counting your business and client work and marketing – something’s going to need to give!
In other words, you can’t just efficience-ize your schedule if you literally have too much to fit in. Something’s going to have to get cut – but there are creative ways to do this.
(Like delegating to others, whether paid or unpaid; cutting your work hours; cutting your husband’s work hours; chopping your weekly prep time to the bare bones; dropping some of your good weekly activities/time blocks; or delegating something during the week to your kids so that you can bump some of your Sunday prep spillover to that weekday).
Things like that.
So we talked back and forth, brainstormed several more ideas for her schedule, and pretty soon the juices were flowing and she was seeing the calendar puzzle pieces rearranging in her brain.
And sometimes, that’s all it takes.
- The knowledge that you *can’t* push through both Saturday *and* Sunday.
- The permission to get everything you needed to done on your weekly prep day, but still have a little free time even then.
- The freedom to think outside the box when hiring out solutions for yourself.
- The mental reframe to view yourself as *worthy* of support (even if it’s just 5 hours a week of a mother’s helper).
You can do this. You *can* do this.
You just need some radical re-cutting and re-organizing on your weekend days, not just your work ones.
Go get it for yourself (so you can *finally* relax into a full week that suits you).
Not just a work week that’s been super optimized.
The *whole* 7-day cycle.
Okay?
And the way you’re going to do this is by first giving YOURSELF the permission to do less of the housework – whether by hiring out or training your kids to do it – and then following up on the scheduling part of it by taking OUT all those reminders from YOUR task list!
And then second, by adding IN that recharge time you need – each and every day – so that you’re keeping your parenting reserves high AND keeping that CEO idea machine in tune.
Because YOU get to, NEED to, take that me time for yourself to show up as a properly functioning mom and business owner. Okay?
