33. How to Create a Daily Routine That Works for You in 2025
Have you ever felt like your daily routine as a mom entrepreneur is a chaotic mess? Do you struggle to balance the demands of your business with the needs of your family? What if I told you that creating a structured yet flexible routine could be the key to unlocking more productivity, peace of mind, and quality time with your loved ones?
In this episode, I share a powerful framework for designing a daily routine that truly works for your real life as a mom entrepreneur. No more rigid corporate schedules or guilt-inducing free-for-alls. Instead, you'll learn how to prioritize your time, focus on revenue-generating activities, and create sacred space for family connection.
Get ready to transform your daily routine and experience the freedom and fulfillment that comes with being the boss of your own schedule. I walk you through the five essential blocks of time that every mom entrepreneur needs in her day, and show you how to make it all work in the face of real-life challenges and interruptions.
If you want to realize your dreams of leaving corporate and starting your own business in 2025, join me for a free strategy session by clicking here!
If you're looking for the right environment to start your networking journey, look no further than my group, the Mom Entrepreneurs Circle. Sign up below for mutual support, advice sharing, and the tools you need for both you and your business to thrive. We meet on the 2nd Thursday of each month and participation is totally free!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why a weekly planning session is the secret weapon for a successful daily routine.
How to prioritize your to-do list and identify your top three must-dos each day.
The five essential blocks of time every mom entrepreneur needs in her daily routine.
How to protect your focus time and generate more revenue in less time.
Why batching your connection time can help you avoid distractions and stay present.
How to build in buffer time and flexibility to handle real-life interruptions.
The importance of scheduling sacred family time and modeling success on your own terms.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
The secret to thriving as a mom entrepreneur isn't working harder or longer. It's creating a routine that actually works for your real life. Not the rigid corporate schedule you left behind and definitely not the chaotic free for all that happens when you first strike out on your own.
Happy New Year. I know many of you are thinking about fresh starts and new routines, so today's episode couldn't be more perfectly timed. I absolutely love this time of year and the fresh energy it brings. There's something powerful about creating new systems that help us achieve our goals at the start of the year. And that's exactly what we're diving into today.
Welcome to How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. It’s a podcast that helps working moms just like you, optimize your time, manage your mind, and start a business that helps you create more freedom, flexibility, and, yes, fun. I’m business and mindset coach Jenna Rykiel. And I offer practical tips to help you ditch the nine-to-five. I have been exactly where you are and I know what it takes to make the transition without trading one form of burnout for another. So, let’s get started.
Hi mom friends, you know what's funny? Or actually it's slightly annoying about escaping corporate and going out on your own? We spend years mastering the corporate game, becoming experts at managing our outlook calendars, juggling back-to-back meetings, and somehow fitting in lunch at our desks, only to realize that running ourselves ragged has the opposite impact when we're running our own business. I mean, let's be honest, it's not the best approach for corporate either, but that's corporate culture for you.
Let me share a moment that completely changed how I think about time as an entrepreneur and what really sold me when creating a new daily routine. A few months into my business I had started implementing this weekly routine I'm going to teach you today. I had everything mapped out for the week, every task, every call, every commitment.
Then one morning, a client needed to reschedule their coaching session at the last minute. Now, in my corporate days, that canceled meeting would have sent me into a frenzy of productivity. I would have immediately filled that time with tasks, emails, or impromptu meetings. It's like every minute needed to be maximized.
But something different happened that day. For the first time in my adult life, I actually took a nap. Now here's the thing, I'm not a nap person. My husband, big nap guy. But I've never been able to quiet my mind enough to fall asleep during the day. There's always that voice saying, what about that email, that project, that thing you're forgetting?
But this time was different because I had properly planned my day. I knew exactly when I was going to tackle every single task on my list. Nothing was falling through the cracks. Nothing was forgotten. Everything had its place.
And that knowledge, that's what finally allowed me to rest, really rest without the nagging anxiety about what I should be doing instead. I'm still not a big napper but that nap taught me something crucial. When we have a solid routine and planning system in place, we gain more than just productivity. We gain peace of mind. We gain the freedom to be flexible without feeling guilty, and that's exactly what I wanna help you create today.
I'm gonna share how to create a daily routine that honors both your business dreams and your family life, one that doesn't force you to choose between productivity and flexibility. And if you're still in corporate but planning your exit, this framework will help you envision what's possible when you're in charge of your own schedule. Because here's the thing in corporate, everyone else owns your calendar. Your day is dictated by meetings just thrown on it. But when you have your own business, you have full freedom and flexibility, which is a big adjustment. So you want to make sure you have a system in place to both move your business forward and allow you to finally rest.
Let's dive into the practical stuff, What your day could actually look like. I'm going to give you a framework that saved countless moms from both the trap of too much structure and the chaos of no structure at all. The foundation of everything we're going to talk about today starts with one powerful habit. Establishing a weekly planning hour. And I know this episode is about daily routine, but trust me, your daily routine truly starts with your weekly planning session. This is your secret weapon, and it only takes one hour a week.
Incorporating just one hour of planning to start your week is going to change everything about your daily routine. When you sit down and invest time in the big picture of what you want to accomplish over seven days, it helps you to be crystal clear in what you can accomplish each day. Here's how it works. Either Sunday night after the kids are in bed or first thing Monday morning, you're gonna spend one hour, just one, doing three things.
First, a complete brain dump. Everything that's swirling in your head, all the things you know you need to do, it gets written down on a piece of paper. Business tasks, family commitments, that dentist appointment you need to schedule, all of it.
Second, I want you to go through that list and decide what you can delete, what can be pushed off to the next week, and of course, decide the most important and time-sensitive things to keep for your week ahead. You're basically prioritizing all the things you have to do because obviously it can't all get done in one week. There's definitely time for all the little tasks that take five to 10 minutes, but any big business initiatives need to be thoughtfully prioritized.
You should also try to break down those big initiatives into smaller 15 to 30 minute tasks, which will allow you to chip away at a big initiative day after day, rather than feeling overwhelmed by it, and which leads to avoiding it altogether until you have enough time to tackle it.
I want you to also identify three things you want to get done each day. These three things are basically how you determine whether you've won the day. Yes, I know you have a hundred things you want to get done each day, but if everything goes to shit, because it often does, these are the minimum three things that need to be accomplished.
Third, I want you to look at your week as a whole and determine your availability for different blocks of time. I'll go over the five major blocks that I want you to shoot for each day, but for now, know that at the beginning of your week, you should already be thinking about organizing each day based on these key areas. Everything you've written down on that list should fit neatly into one of these blocks that I'm gonna talk about.
Now, let's walk through these five essential blocks that will create the backbone of your daily routine. These are the key areas of life and business that I want you to aim to hit each day as an entrepreneur. And remember, you might not hit all of them every day, But if we're talking about creating a daily routine that moves your business forward, you want to try and get to these more often than not.
The first block is your time. It's what I call your morning intention block. This is a minimum of 15 minutes and it's non-negotiable. It's a time for you to sit down, do any sort of grounding exercise that works for you. Maybe sitting in silence or journaling, intention setting for the day. Maybe you mix in a quick run or yoga session to move your body first.
It's a minimum of 15 minutes, but it can be as long as you want. It gets you ready for the day. It allows you to focus in and it should be consistent each morning. Try doing it when the kids are finally off to daycare or school or maybe when the little one is down for his first nap, like in my household.
This sets the tone for the day and gets you in the right mindset for the entire rest of the routine that will follow. This may feel like it's not productive work, but trust me, you will be more energized and focused once you get into the meat of the day. If you take time in the morning to focus on what you need, it's your time to set the tone before entering into the chaos of the day.
And after you've gotten into the right headspace and you've given yourself time to breathe, you'll also want to spend some time briefly reviewing your calendar and identifying the top three priorities for that day. This shouldn't be hard since you already tried to identify these during your one hour planning period earlier in the week so this is really just a reminder.
Notice I didn't say check your email or check social media and this is crucial. The emails will be there and if it's an emergency it's probably best you don't know about it until after you've gotten yourself prepared for the day. Clear your mind before you fog it up with countless emails.
Okay, let's talk about the second block. It's your focus block. This is one to two hours a day of revenue producing actions. The problem is we never have a moment of uninterrupted focus within our daily routine. This one to two hours isn't for the small to-do list items, like rescheduling a meeting or responding to an email that we'll talk about later.
This two hour block is for using your whole brain on initiatives or projects that truly grow your business. If you had just two hours of focused revenue generating activity in a week, your business would move forward so fast you wouldn't be able to keep up with it. But I'm recommending that you try to find two hours each day, or at least three times a week. You can get so much done when you properly plan for this block and hunker down to focus.
Most of us in corporate spend hours in unnecessary meetings, dealing with office politics, and stretching work to fill time, that typical eight-hour day. As an entrepreneur, you get to cut all that out. You can actually get more done in less time when you schedule uninterrupted focus blocks. The key is to be ruthlessly protective of these hours. Schedule them when you know you'll have uninterrupted time, maybe during nap time for those with little ones or during school hours if your kids are older.
And here's the mindset shift that I want to adopt. These hours aren't about duration. They're about impact. Two focused hours can generate more results than eight scattered ones, like the ones we experienced in corporate. Episode 18 is all about focus time as a productivity hack so if you want to dive deeper into this element of the daily routine I'll link to that episode in the show notes. You can also go to https://jenna.coach/18.
Now this next block might be my favorite because it helps clear all those little tasks that take up so much mental space. The third block in your daily routine is the odds and ends block or what I call to do block. Those short three to five minute tasks that keep building up, that's what goes in this block. If you set aside a half hour to an hour you should be able to knock out five to 10 quick items. These are less brain-heavy items than the ones that are reserved for your focus block. All of those brain dump items in your list from the planning period that are quick but maybe not painless, they go in this block. So again, just an hour a day will make a huge difference.
Episode 12 is all about how to take control of your to-do list, and I give lots of great tips that apply to this concept. So definitely check out that episode next if you feel like this is where you struggle. As always, I'll link to the episode in the show notes.
Let's move on to our fourth block. I call this the connection block. And this can be five minutes or five hours, but you want to make sure you're connecting with people in some way on a daily basis if you're an entrepreneur. This is when you handle things like client communication, networking calls, social media, email outreach. The game changer here is batching these items instead of letting them scatter throughout your day.
This also includes checking your email. And if you're like me, you have a habit of leaving an ungodly number of tabs open on your browser, and one of those is always email. So you can quickly see when an email comes in. And that's not how email was designed, that's not what I recommend. It's a habit I'm religiously trying to break. I want you to set specific times for checking your email, maybe twice a day instead of every five minutes. The average worker checks their email more than 20 times a day, and it takes about 26 minutes to refocus on what you were doing if you get distracted by email. So let's make sure we're creating a routine that allows you to check email as much as necessary without letting it be a complete distraction from what you actually want to get accomplished that day.
Create specific times that you're available for client communication or social media messaging. You don't need to be available 24/7 just because you're an entrepreneur.
Finally we have the fun block. I mean this is all fun, but this is the family focus block. This is sacred time when you're fully present with your family. No checking emails, no sneaking peeks at TikTok, just quality time with your people. This ensures that you're taking advantage of one of the best benefits of being an entrepreneur, flexibility and freedom.
If you don't block off time each day for family connection and not just running from place to place or the hectic morning or dinner routine. I mean true family connection. These are the out of the ordinary moments of being present with your family. If you don't schedule those, if you don't block it off, it won't happen. That's always why I encourage you to include personal and family items in the brain dump that you create during your planning period. That stuff is most important and you need to have blocks of time in your day and week to honor it or all of a sudden it's winter and you never went to the water park, or all of a sudden your kids are adults and they no longer want to hang out.
Now let's talk about making it work in real life because theory is great, but we live in a world with real challenges. Here's how to make this framework flexible enough to bend without braking, because your kids will get sick, and you'll get a gas leak in your house, and the car will break down during drop-off. All of those things are guaranteed to happen.
Okay, so first I want you to build in buffer time. If you think something will take an hour, schedule 90 minutes. This gives you breathing room when interruptions inevitably happen. Think of your calendar like a game of Tetris. Since you have different blocks of time scheduled each day, and I hope you're using a virtual calendar of sorts, I use a Google calendar. When something comes up, you can easily shift that block into another time or another day.
I also recommend building in about 30 minutes to an hour of end of day buffer time. Whenever your day wraps up, schedule to end 30 to 60 minutes before that and this open block can be used to fit items in that don't get done during the day. Let's say you wrap up your day at 3 p.m. for school pickup, make sure your calendar is open from 2 to 3 p.m. Each day so that if you haven't gotten to your three priorities for one reason or another, you can do it then.
I sometimes recommend having one full day or a half day each week, usually on Friday, that remains completely open so you can use it for emergencies. If the kids get sick on Tuesday, you still have Friday to make up for all the things you couldn't get done on Tuesday. And if there were no surprises during the week, it can then be a fun day of self-care or family activities, whatever you want to get done.
The third thing is to remember that different seasons require different approaches from you. During school breaks, you might need to adjust your focus block. During launch weeks, you might need more support with childcare. None of these things are failure from the daily routine. They're just being strategic, okay?
So here's what I want you to do this week. Start by scheduling one hour of planning this upcoming Sunday or Monday. Honestly, I recommend Sunday because by the time Monday starts, it's already too late for me. But that's it. Don't try to overhaul your entire schedule overnight. Just set aside one hour and follow the three steps that we discussed.
The first, to brain dump everything that's in your mind that you need to get done. The second is blocking out some time for those five blocks. Daily intention where you focus on you, the focus time, the to-do items where you just check things off your to-do list and it feels so good, connection and family. And third, I want you to start creating those top three priorities for each day. Then take items from your brain dump and categorize them into the blocks of time throughout the week.
Here's the most important part. Give yourself permission to adjust and adapt as you go. Your schedule should serve you, not the other way around. Before we wrap up today, I want to remind you of something crucial. You're not just building a business, you're building a life you love. Right? A life where you can be present for the big moments and the small ones, where you can generate income without sacrificing your well-being, where you can model for your children what it looks like to create success on your own terms.
As we step into 2025, I want to help you make this your best year yet. If you're ready for additional support to make sure you actually hit your goals, there's going to be a link in the show notes to apply to work together. I'll offer a free strategy session to those who apply and we can talk seriously about your business.
In the meantime, if you're not sure what to do with a business, maybe You haven't quite left corporate, but you're trying to figure out what kind of business you should build, check out episode 6. It's all about the different types of businesses that are out there and how to find your unique genius.
And if you're struggling to figure out how to make sure 2025 is the year that you actually quit your job, go back to episode 30, jenna.coach/30, for great tips on making sure that this year is different.
If you found today's episode helpful, I'd love for you to share it with another mom who's thinking about making the leap to entrepreneurship. Remember, we rise by lifting each other. Until next week, keep dreaming big and taking small, consistent steps toward your goals. You've got this, and I've got you.
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. If you want to learn more about how I can help you stop making excuses and start making moves, head on over to www.jenna.coach. I’ll see you next week.
Happy New Year. I know many of you are thinking about fresh starts and new routines, so today's episode couldn't be more perfectly timed. I absolutely love this time of year and the fresh energy it brings. There's something powerful about creating new systems that help us achieve our goals at the start of the year. And that's exactly what we're diving into today.
Welcome to How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. It’s a podcast that helps working moms just like you, optimize your time, manage your mind, and start a business that helps you create more freedom, flexibility, and, yes, fun. I’m business and mindset coach Jenna Rykiel. And I offer practical tips to help you ditch the nine-to-five. I have been exactly where you are and I know what it takes to make the transition without trading one form of burnout for another. So, let’s get started.
Hi mom friends, you know what's funny? Or actually it's slightly annoying about escaping corporate and going out on your own? We spend years mastering the corporate game, becoming experts at managing our outlook calendars, juggling back-to-back meetings, and somehow fitting in lunch at our desks, only to realize that running ourselves ragged has the opposite impact when we're running our own business. I mean, let's be honest, it's not the best approach for corporate either, but that's corporate culture for you.
Let me share a moment that completely changed how I think about time as an entrepreneur and what really sold me when creating a new daily routine. A few months into my business I had started implementing this weekly routine I'm going to teach you today. I had everything mapped out for the week, every task, every call, every commitment.
Then one morning, a client needed to reschedule their coaching session at the last minute. Now, in my corporate days, that canceled meeting would have sent me into a frenzy of productivity. I would have immediately filled that time with tasks, emails, or impromptu meetings. It's like every minute needed to be maximized.
But something different happened that day. For the first time in my adult life, I actually took a nap. Now here's the thing, I'm not a nap person. My husband, big nap guy. But I've never been able to quiet my mind enough to fall asleep during the day. There's always that voice saying, what about that email, that project, that thing you're forgetting?
But this time was different because I had properly planned my day. I knew exactly when I was going to tackle every single task on my list. Nothing was falling through the cracks. Nothing was forgotten. Everything had its place.
And that knowledge, that's what finally allowed me to rest, really rest without the nagging anxiety about what I should be doing instead. I'm still not a big napper but that nap taught me something crucial. When we have a solid routine and planning system in place, we gain more than just productivity. We gain peace of mind. We gain the freedom to be flexible without feeling guilty, and that's exactly what I wanna help you create today.
I'm gonna share how to create a daily routine that honors both your business dreams and your family life, one that doesn't force you to choose between productivity and flexibility. And if you're still in corporate but planning your exit, this framework will help you envision what's possible when you're in charge of your own schedule. Because here's the thing in corporate, everyone else owns your calendar. Your day is dictated by meetings just thrown on it. But when you have your own business, you have full freedom and flexibility, which is a big adjustment. So you want to make sure you have a system in place to both move your business forward and allow you to finally rest.
Let's dive into the practical stuff, What your day could actually look like. I'm going to give you a framework that saved countless moms from both the trap of too much structure and the chaos of no structure at all. The foundation of everything we're going to talk about today starts with one powerful habit. Establishing a weekly planning hour. And I know this episode is about daily routine, but trust me, your daily routine truly starts with your weekly planning session. This is your secret weapon, and it only takes one hour a week.
Incorporating just one hour of planning to start your week is going to change everything about your daily routine. When you sit down and invest time in the big picture of what you want to accomplish over seven days, it helps you to be crystal clear in what you can accomplish each day. Here's how it works. Either Sunday night after the kids are in bed or first thing Monday morning, you're gonna spend one hour, just one, doing three things.
First, a complete brain dump. Everything that's swirling in your head, all the things you know you need to do, it gets written down on a piece of paper. Business tasks, family commitments, that dentist appointment you need to schedule, all of it.
Second, I want you to go through that list and decide what you can delete, what can be pushed off to the next week, and of course, decide the most important and time-sensitive things to keep for your week ahead. You're basically prioritizing all the things you have to do because obviously it can't all get done in one week. There's definitely time for all the little tasks that take five to 10 minutes, but any big business initiatives need to be thoughtfully prioritized.
You should also try to break down those big initiatives into smaller 15 to 30 minute tasks, which will allow you to chip away at a big initiative day after day, rather than feeling overwhelmed by it, and which leads to avoiding it altogether until you have enough time to tackle it.
I want you to also identify three things you want to get done each day. These three things are basically how you determine whether you've won the day. Yes, I know you have a hundred things you want to get done each day, but if everything goes to shit, because it often does, these are the minimum three things that need to be accomplished.
Third, I want you to look at your week as a whole and determine your availability for different blocks of time. I'll go over the five major blocks that I want you to shoot for each day, but for now, know that at the beginning of your week, you should already be thinking about organizing each day based on these key areas. Everything you've written down on that list should fit neatly into one of these blocks that I'm gonna talk about.
Now, let's walk through these five essential blocks that will create the backbone of your daily routine. These are the key areas of life and business that I want you to aim to hit each day as an entrepreneur. And remember, you might not hit all of them every day, But if we're talking about creating a daily routine that moves your business forward, you want to try and get to these more often than not.
The first block is your time. It's what I call your morning intention block. This is a minimum of 15 minutes and it's non-negotiable. It's a time for you to sit down, do any sort of grounding exercise that works for you. Maybe sitting in silence or journaling, intention setting for the day. Maybe you mix in a quick run or yoga session to move your body first.
It's a minimum of 15 minutes, but it can be as long as you want. It gets you ready for the day. It allows you to focus in and it should be consistent each morning. Try doing it when the kids are finally off to daycare or school or maybe when the little one is down for his first nap, like in my household.
This sets the tone for the day and gets you in the right mindset for the entire rest of the routine that will follow. This may feel like it's not productive work, but trust me, you will be more energized and focused once you get into the meat of the day. If you take time in the morning to focus on what you need, it's your time to set the tone before entering into the chaos of the day.
And after you've gotten into the right headspace and you've given yourself time to breathe, you'll also want to spend some time briefly reviewing your calendar and identifying the top three priorities for that day. This shouldn't be hard since you already tried to identify these during your one hour planning period earlier in the week so this is really just a reminder.
Notice I didn't say check your email or check social media and this is crucial. The emails will be there and if it's an emergency it's probably best you don't know about it until after you've gotten yourself prepared for the day. Clear your mind before you fog it up with countless emails.
Okay, let's talk about the second block. It's your focus block. This is one to two hours a day of revenue producing actions. The problem is we never have a moment of uninterrupted focus within our daily routine. This one to two hours isn't for the small to-do list items, like rescheduling a meeting or responding to an email that we'll talk about later.
This two hour block is for using your whole brain on initiatives or projects that truly grow your business. If you had just two hours of focused revenue generating activity in a week, your business would move forward so fast you wouldn't be able to keep up with it. But I'm recommending that you try to find two hours each day, or at least three times a week. You can get so much done when you properly plan for this block and hunker down to focus.
Most of us in corporate spend hours in unnecessary meetings, dealing with office politics, and stretching work to fill time, that typical eight-hour day. As an entrepreneur, you get to cut all that out. You can actually get more done in less time when you schedule uninterrupted focus blocks. The key is to be ruthlessly protective of these hours. Schedule them when you know you'll have uninterrupted time, maybe during nap time for those with little ones or during school hours if your kids are older.
And here's the mindset shift that I want to adopt. These hours aren't about duration. They're about impact. Two focused hours can generate more results than eight scattered ones, like the ones we experienced in corporate. Episode 18 is all about focus time as a productivity hack so if you want to dive deeper into this element of the daily routine I'll link to that episode in the show notes. You can also go to https://jenna.coach/18.
Now this next block might be my favorite because it helps clear all those little tasks that take up so much mental space. The third block in your daily routine is the odds and ends block or what I call to do block. Those short three to five minute tasks that keep building up, that's what goes in this block. If you set aside a half hour to an hour you should be able to knock out five to 10 quick items. These are less brain-heavy items than the ones that are reserved for your focus block. All of those brain dump items in your list from the planning period that are quick but maybe not painless, they go in this block. So again, just an hour a day will make a huge difference.
Episode 12 is all about how to take control of your to-do list, and I give lots of great tips that apply to this concept. So definitely check out that episode next if you feel like this is where you struggle. As always, I'll link to the episode in the show notes.
Let's move on to our fourth block. I call this the connection block. And this can be five minutes or five hours, but you want to make sure you're connecting with people in some way on a daily basis if you're an entrepreneur. This is when you handle things like client communication, networking calls, social media, email outreach. The game changer here is batching these items instead of letting them scatter throughout your day.
This also includes checking your email. And if you're like me, you have a habit of leaving an ungodly number of tabs open on your browser, and one of those is always email. So you can quickly see when an email comes in. And that's not how email was designed, that's not what I recommend. It's a habit I'm religiously trying to break. I want you to set specific times for checking your email, maybe twice a day instead of every five minutes. The average worker checks their email more than 20 times a day, and it takes about 26 minutes to refocus on what you were doing if you get distracted by email. So let's make sure we're creating a routine that allows you to check email as much as necessary without letting it be a complete distraction from what you actually want to get accomplished that day.
Create specific times that you're available for client communication or social media messaging. You don't need to be available 24/7 just because you're an entrepreneur.
Finally we have the fun block. I mean this is all fun, but this is the family focus block. This is sacred time when you're fully present with your family. No checking emails, no sneaking peeks at TikTok, just quality time with your people. This ensures that you're taking advantage of one of the best benefits of being an entrepreneur, flexibility and freedom.
If you don't block off time each day for family connection and not just running from place to place or the hectic morning or dinner routine. I mean true family connection. These are the out of the ordinary moments of being present with your family. If you don't schedule those, if you don't block it off, it won't happen. That's always why I encourage you to include personal and family items in the brain dump that you create during your planning period. That stuff is most important and you need to have blocks of time in your day and week to honor it or all of a sudden it's winter and you never went to the water park, or all of a sudden your kids are adults and they no longer want to hang out.
Now let's talk about making it work in real life because theory is great, but we live in a world with real challenges. Here's how to make this framework flexible enough to bend without braking, because your kids will get sick, and you'll get a gas leak in your house, and the car will break down during drop-off. All of those things are guaranteed to happen.
Okay, so first I want you to build in buffer time. If you think something will take an hour, schedule 90 minutes. This gives you breathing room when interruptions inevitably happen. Think of your calendar like a game of Tetris. Since you have different blocks of time scheduled each day, and I hope you're using a virtual calendar of sorts, I use a Google calendar. When something comes up, you can easily shift that block into another time or another day.
I also recommend building in about 30 minutes to an hour of end of day buffer time. Whenever your day wraps up, schedule to end 30 to 60 minutes before that and this open block can be used to fit items in that don't get done during the day. Let's say you wrap up your day at 3 p.m. for school pickup, make sure your calendar is open from 2 to 3 p.m. Each day so that if you haven't gotten to your three priorities for one reason or another, you can do it then.
I sometimes recommend having one full day or a half day each week, usually on Friday, that remains completely open so you can use it for emergencies. If the kids get sick on Tuesday, you still have Friday to make up for all the things you couldn't get done on Tuesday. And if there were no surprises during the week, it can then be a fun day of self-care or family activities, whatever you want to get done.
The third thing is to remember that different seasons require different approaches from you. During school breaks, you might need to adjust your focus block. During launch weeks, you might need more support with childcare. None of these things are failure from the daily routine. They're just being strategic, okay?
So here's what I want you to do this week. Start by scheduling one hour of planning this upcoming Sunday or Monday. Honestly, I recommend Sunday because by the time Monday starts, it's already too late for me. But that's it. Don't try to overhaul your entire schedule overnight. Just set aside one hour and follow the three steps that we discussed.
The first, to brain dump everything that's in your mind that you need to get done. The second is blocking out some time for those five blocks. Daily intention where you focus on you, the focus time, the to-do items where you just check things off your to-do list and it feels so good, connection and family. And third, I want you to start creating those top three priorities for each day. Then take items from your brain dump and categorize them into the blocks of time throughout the week.
Here's the most important part. Give yourself permission to adjust and adapt as you go. Your schedule should serve you, not the other way around. Before we wrap up today, I want to remind you of something crucial. You're not just building a business, you're building a life you love. Right? A life where you can be present for the big moments and the small ones, where you can generate income without sacrificing your well-being, where you can model for your children what it looks like to create success on your own terms.
As we step into 2025, I want to help you make this your best year yet. If you're ready for additional support to make sure you actually hit your goals, there's going to be a link in the show notes to apply to work together. I'll offer a free strategy session to those who apply and we can talk seriously about your business.
In the meantime, if you're not sure what to do with a business, maybe You haven't quite left corporate, but you're trying to figure out what kind of business you should build, check out episode 6. It's all about the different types of businesses that are out there and how to find your unique genius.
And if you're struggling to figure out how to make sure 2025 is the year that you actually quit your job, go back to episode 30, jenna.coach/30, for great tips on making sure that this year is different.
If you found today's episode helpful, I'd love for you to share it with another mom who's thinking about making the leap to entrepreneurship. Remember, we rise by lifting each other. Until next week, keep dreaming big and taking small, consistent steps toward your goals. You've got this, and I've got you.
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of How to Quit Your Job: A Mom’s Guide to Creating a Life and Business You Love. If you want to learn more about how I can help you stop making excuses and start making moves, head on over to www.jenna.coach. I’ll see you next week.
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