When do your routines fall apart?

Identify obstacles, so you can make success more likely

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura, Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is for anyone struggling to maintain a good routine,
try to figure out when your routines tend to fall apart.

(00:27):
When you know when your routines stop working, you can
make adjustments so they are more likely to last. Good
time management is all about strong routines. But routines need
to be resilient and they need to work in people's lives.

(00:47):
I hear from people all the time who get discouraged
when life just doesn't work as they envisioned it would.
They try to build good routines, but then the routines
just seem to fall apart. If that is the case,
I think it is helpful to examine when exactly any
particular routine did fall apart what happened? Of course, falling

(01:14):
apart implies that the routine worked for at least a
little bit. And if that is the case, when was that.
If you are struggling to build a morning routine, do
you have a memory of a morning that went well,
or maybe many mornings that went well, or maybe you
are looking at evenings if they feel like a mess. Now,

(01:34):
was there a time, or at least an evening in
recent memory that didn't feel so messy. Envisioning what was
going well can help you figure out what changed, so
you can address that. For instance, maybe you look back
and see that your evening routine works pretty well when
your kids are in school, but seems to fall apart
on school vacations. If so, maybe you need two different routines,

(02:00):
one for the school year and one for times that
are less structured. You set yourself up for success by
knowing you aren't going to plan on the same routine
when life looks very different. Or maybe every school year
you start strong with your evening routines, but then once
the activities ramp up, things seem to fall apart. Recognizing this,

(02:21):
you can plan for a much simpler routine, perhaps planning
to do family dinners on weekends and having more of
a grab and go dinner style for the work week.
There is no point aiming for a routine that simply
isn't going to work for big chunks of time. Or
here's one I see frequently people start the new year
with good intentions for a lengthy morning routine that involves

(02:44):
getting up early and exercising. They manage this for maybe
three weeks, but then they get sick and simply cannot
get out of bed at five point fifteen to go
work out for an hour. A week of the flu
is followed by a crazy week at work doing everything
that didn't get done during the flu week. So the
early morning exercise routine doesn't happen for two weeks, and

(03:06):
then it feels impossible to start up again. People blame
a lack of will power, but I'm not sure it's that.
Maybe the exercise routine didn't feel compelling or sustainable long term,
so it was hard to rekindle the desire to do
it after a few weeks away. You didn't miss it,

(03:27):
but perhaps a different routine would feel more alluring. If
you planned to meet a friend to exercise two mornings
a week, maybe that person would be understanding for a
week or so, but would really push you to get
back to it. If you stopped for longer than that,
maybe that would be a more compelling routine. Or maybe
you really just don't like getting up at five fifteen

(03:49):
in the morning. Maybe a shorter routine that starts later
would feel more doable, and so you would actually do
it even when life got complicated. Figure out why a
routine falls apart and when, and then you can troubleshoot
to make success more likely. It really is as simple
as that. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening,

(04:17):
and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks
for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas,
or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura
vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.

(04:44):
For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.