3/14/24 How to create effective routines that don't suck
What is the purpose of this podcast? To encourage people to create routines that work for them and maybe ever purchase the Productivity by Personality course.
Live intro with hook - Hello my lovelies. Today we’re talking about Productivity and Personality and creating routines that don’t suck, no matter what your personality is. We’ll be walking through some great ideas that support the principles I teach in the Productivity by Personality course and the Whole Home Reset, which I’ll talk about later, and, if anything in this podcast resonates with you, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast player.
For those who are new to the podcast, when I talk about personalities, communication and relationships, I use the DISC personality model of behavior and refer to people as D or Driven, I or Inspired, S or Supportive, and C or Cautious. You can find links to take your own Personality Assessment in the Show Notes.
I was struggling with this podcast until I saw a video by a creator that I usually enjoy watching. He tends to be supportive of women in general, especially women that are bullied online, but the video today was about women who, in his words, need constant reassurance that we’re ok in our relationship. He goes on to say that he will not be calling or texting while he’s at work because he’s a professional, and if someone wants to be in a relationship with him, they have to do things his way or he’s out because a woman’s need for reassurance is not as important as his drive to achieve his goals, and that, my friends, is the statement of a Driven person who may or may not be out of balance.
As we always do, we’re starting with the D personality, so this video is perfect for this discussion. Like the Driven man in the video, women who are Driven have similar values. When they’re working, they detest being interrupted, and if you do it too often, they will most certainly let you know about it. This is because a Driven person knows what they want to accomplish in a day, a week, a month and longer, and if you mess with their plan, it can get ugly, but these are also the people who spend years succeeding financially only to find out they’ve sacrificed the very people they thought they were succeeding for.
There’s a reason there’s a cliche’ in movies of the old man (typically) living in the giant house with no one around him. For a Driven person, succeeding in their chosen profession and building wealth often comes easily to them, much easier than building relationships, because they can succeed in business by checking off one thing after another and other than determination and some occasional finesse, it’s a relatively emotionless endeavor. That appeals to a Driven person, especially in their profession and where money is concerned.
That’s not to say that the Driven person is not emotional. It’s just that love and vulnerability is more challenging for them than other personality types. So what in the world does this have to do with routines?
Routines, no matter whether it’s in business or at home, come naturally to the Driven personality, and they like to get through them as quickly as possible, but here’s where life can get really sweet for the Driven person. Make sure that spending time with your people is part of your routine, and engage in activities that you all enjoy, and you might find that you have more than you ever thought possible in terms of enjoying family.
This is why meal times can be so important. If you’re busy, and if you’re in the US, I know you’re busy, take that meal time to take a breath and connect. It doesn’t have to be a big deal, but that few minutes of connection can change everything for you and create bonds that last a lifetime. If you can’t do it every night, find at least one night per week to connect. I promise you won’t regret it. When my kids were all teenagers, that became Sunday evening. That was usually the day with no practices or games late in the day, and my kids mostly worked retail, so we scheduled dinner after closing time. On the weeks that were too busy, we sometimes had a car picnic or a weekend breakfast. Yes, it took work to schedule it, but again, it was worth it.
In my course, The Whole Home Reset, I include a master meal planner that makes planning meals easy and gives you more time to focus on family rather than cooking an elaborate meal or getting takeout for the umpteenth time this month. Then you’re saving money and building relationships and doing it efficiently and effectively.
Moving to the I personality, the idea of routines probably kind of makes your skin crawl. Trust me, I know this, but if you want to succeed in life, routines are necessary. The good news is, though, that you are great at finding the fun, and when you use that superpower to make your routines fun, you can do so much, so quickly, it will make your head spin.
When I was younger and my third child was born with extraordinary medical needs, I knew I had to get my stuff together so he could have the best chance at a healthy life. Before his arrival, things were pretty much loosey-goosey around our home, and that worked pretty well for us, but this child needed medication at specific times and a different environment than we currently had. The house wasn’t horrible, but it certainly wasn’t perfect by a long shot, so I got to work.
To make meds easier, I got a pretty platter and set the meds on them where I would see them multiple times as I walked past them. This was before I had a smartphone, so this was a constant reminder for me to make sure my son got his meds on time.
To help with the house, I would have phone conversations with friends while I cleaned. This was also a time before texting was free, so talking was the preferred way of communicating. Long before this, I had a friend that I would talk to every weekend, and while we chatted, we would clean our homes. Air pods would have been quite welcome back in the day, but both of us got a lot accomplished while we chatted.
I joined a chat room to help me get my home in order, and we would work for 15-25 minutes and then check in and share what we accomplished. That’s where I truly learned the meaning of the magic of fifteen minutes, and if you follow the Moving Toward Better Facebook page , you have seen that magic in pictures, and it is amazing. May also be a future podcast or blog post, so stay tuned.
It took me a while to realize that the same thing applied to my business, and I do some things very differently than other people do. Here are just a couple of examples. First, I write my podcast outlines and scripting with music on. Sometimes I listen to ambient music, especially when I’m struggling with focus, but even on a good day, I play music with words that shuts out the ambient noise in my house and lets me focus on the content.
I also co-work or body double regularly, and I love it. Essentially, we get on a call, chat for a few and then set to work. If you’re people oriented, you might have to give someone permission to curtail your love of conversation, but when you do that, it’s gold.
I get more accomplished in that hour or two, depending on the day and group, than I sometimes do in an entire day when I’m on my own. I also find that corded headphones keep me tethered to my desk and require me to think about getting up whereas when I’m wearing my wireless earbuds, it’s easy to wander away from my work. These may seem more like hacks than routines, but the fact that I put on headphones nearly every time I sit down at my desk, whether I am listening to something or not, signals my brain that it’s time for the routine of work to start, and for another quick tip, stay away from your email in the morning. I know that will be difficult to do, but trust me, it’s a game changer for focus and creativity.
Now, let’s talk about the S personality. The Supportive Personality is probably the person that struggles with routines the most because they put their people first always, sometimes to their own detriment. Being an I/SD personality, I struggled with this mightily because I adore my people, and especially when my life was fully focused on being a stay at home mom, I truly struggled to create routines until they were absolutely necessary, especially since I didn’t understand the value of routines, and it might not be what you think.
You see, when you’re task oriented, you are naturally drawn to routines. When you’re people oriented, you’re naturally drawn to people, and as a young mom, I could lose the entire day engaged with my children. Then I would have a mess at the end of the night when I was exhausted which would often make me resentful of the very children I was enjoying all day. If you’re people oriented, you know exactly what I mean. It’s a vicious cycle because you love hanging with your children much more than cleaning and organizing, so the house slips and gets to the point where you’re completely overwhelmed and don’t know where to start because it feels like everything needs attention.
The amazing thing I found out was that routines that got and kept my home in order, actually gave me more time to spend with my loved ones without resentment. What a revelation that was! For my I part, the routines actually made it so that I could be spontaneous without guilt because I had a way to catch up or get back on track when we spent a day away from home. For the S part of me, I was supporting my family in a way that showed them how to balance caring for a home with caring for loved ones. I know this might seem like a “DUH” moment to some people, but for me, it was truly life changing.
When my children were as young as 8,5 and 2, during summer and break times, I would make a list of 10-12 age appropriate items to accomplish each day. We would decide who was doing which task, and then we would set a timer for 15 minutes and work toward finishing the tasks. As long as everyone worked for the entire 15 minutes, we would stop at the end and add anything that didn’t get finished to the top of the next day’s list. Then we would do something fun. It could be anything from going to the zoo or local amusement park to having a movie day or going to the library or the park.The truth is that my house was never cleaner, and we had so much fun. I truly miss those days sometime.
When it comes to work, you may be the person that needs to leave the house now and then, even if the reason you started your business was to spend more time with your family. One of the things that astounded me when I first started working from home was how much more I could accomplish than when I was in an office if there are no interruptions. Kids in the house mean distractions, So, if you can set things up to have fewer distractions, great. You can accomplish tons. If that doesn’t work, finding alternatives will save you so much time and frustration.
I know women who work from home that get up an hour or two earlier than their children and get the bulk of their work done before the rest of the family stirs. Others work at night because their children get up as soon as someone else stirs in the house but they can get an hour or two in after the kids go to bed, and others use school and/or preschool time to get work done and sometimes hire someone, a mother’s helper, when the children are at home so they can attend meetings or do work with someone to set the boundaries that the Supportive personality sometimes struggles with.
Another person I worked with had several children and felt so guilty and overwhelmed about even the idea of getting a mother’s helper. This is a woman who had her own business and homeschooled, so she spent plenty of time with her kids. The overwhelm came with looking for a sitter, but after a short conversation, we realized she had a teenaged, high school neighbor that was also homeschooled, who was looking to make extra money and was within walking distance of her home. To make things even better, she had helped out with the older children while my client was in the hospital giving birth to her youngest, so she already knew her children liked the sitter. The most difficult part, then, was getting over the guilt of needing a babysitter, because for some reason, this homeschooling, business owning multiple children, some with special needs mom thought she could or should be doing more. Oy!
For the C personality, you live for routines and you love to think about them and tweak them and think about them and tweak them some more, but are you actually doing them? I know people who struggle with executing routines because they feel like they aren’t perfect yet. They’re stuck in the planning phase, which they love, but they hesitate to actually implement their plan because they don’t want to find out it isn’t perfect yet again.
I also know people who have overcome that tendency who are amazing with routines, and I am constantly amazed and impressed by their natural inclination to stay organized and their execution of that.
Ironically, a few of those people have told me how easy it is to get and stay organized, and some have gotten frustrated with me when I laughed at them, but here’s one of my favorite stories about that. I help all kinds of business people, and one time I was talking with a coach and her client about who she served. The client, as a blogger, said she wanted to help hot mess moms get their lives together, but in our short conversation, I knew this was not her ideal person.
I asked her why she thought she could help hot mess moms and she started talking about how she can teach them to be organized and stay on top of housework, even with kids and a business, and the coach and I started laughing because we both tend toward the hot mess mom arena. I asked her if she even had any piles around her home, and she said she absolutely did, so I asked to see them.
She picked up a stack of papers that wasn't even a quarter of an inch high and said, See?. I laughed again and then the coach showed her one of her own piles that was over a foot high, and the client was clearly shocked. Then I asked the client how she felt when she vacuumed and all the lines on the carpet were perfect and going the same way, and you could see the absolute joy on her face, while the coach was looking at both of us like we lost our minds. At that point, I told the client, her coach had no idea what I was talking about because that had never happened in her entire life.
Now before you get mad, please know that we did talk with this woman and hash out her perfect client, which happened to be someone who, like her, was extremely organized and put together as most C personality women are before children. Then the children come, and the level of chaos requires a shift in thinking, expectations and activities, that she was ideally suited to help, and they deserve just as much help as the hot mess mom, but by trying to help the hot mess mom she was pursuing a client she couldn’t even relate to because she moldy cheese in her fridge, sprouted potatoes in her pantry and a sink full of dishes was an anomaly for her, not a regular practice.
The routines that will help each of them thrive are different, and both deserve to find their happy place with their routines, as all of us do.
So, how are your routines? Do you love them? If so, I’m so happy for you. If they could use a bit of tweaking, I would love to help with that. This month I’ve reinstated DISCovery calls, which are a 15 minute chat to see how I can help you with whatever area of your life you need assistance in. We might resolve your issue in that 15 minute conversation. We might schedule a one time strategy session or something more in depth, but I assure you that whatever we chat about, you’ll feel better about yourself and your life when we’re finished, and you’ll have some next steps to help you live better based on your personality rather than someone else’s plan that may or may not work for you.
So, go to the Moving Toward Better homepage and sign up for your DISCovery call to start living better asap.
As always, if you like what you’ve heard, please share and subscribe.
Until next time, keep moving toward better, whatever that looks like for you.
Show Notes
Routines, love them or hate them, here’s a way to look at routines through a different lens. You have routines whether you know it or not, and I’m sharing ways to make them more efficient, more fun, easier and effective.
Give a listen and maybe you’ll be changing your routines like I did when I figured out what works for my personality.
I participate in the Amazon Associate and Influencer programs which means if you make a purchase, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.
Thanks for listening, and if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share so others can benefit from it too.
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