“How do you find a schedule to balance work, working out, and family?”
I get asked this constantly. And every single time, I want to say the same thing: you’re solving the wrong problem.
Your schedule isn’t broken. Your capacity is maxed out. And no amount of color-coded calendars or time-blocking will fix a life that’s already filled to the brim.
This question came up during a workshop Q&A while I was discussing the Lack of Consistency Overwhelm Culprit™. In this post, I’m walking you through the five things you actually need to look at and the exact process I use with my coaching clients to get their time and energy back.
How to Balance Work, Working Out, and Family: The Real Problem
We all have the same 168 hours in a week. I know that sounds obnoxious – especially to working moms. But it’s true.
The difference isn’t in how many hours you have. It’s in how you choose to spend your energy during those hours. When you feel disbalanced between work and life, it’s usually because you’ve been prioritizing time for everyone else and leaving nothing for yourself.
You can’t out-schedule a life that’s already at maximum capacity. So instead of asking how to manage your calendar better, start asking: how do I reduce what’s on my plate so I can actually perform at a higher level?
How to Balance Work, Working Out and Family: 5 Steps That Actually Work
Step 1: Identify What Season of Life You’re In
We are energetic beings. We don’t function at 100% capacity all the time and nothing on Earth does.
Think about the seasons. You can’t have the harvest in fall without the rest in winter and the build-up in spring. Our lives work the exact same way. Some seasons are meant to be full-on. Others are meant for restoration.
Very recently, I went through a summer season – book launch, multiple speaking engagements, kids’ school events, all the things happening at once. 100 miles an hour, all the time. That kind of season is sustainable for a short stretch. But it requires a rest season to follow.
Ask yourself: are you in a temporary high-demand season? Or have you been living in that summer season indefinitely, with no recovery built in? If it’s the latter, that’s where the capacity problem starts.
Step 2: Understand How Your Energy Flows
This isn’t woo-woo. This is high-performance science.
Men are biologically designed on a 24-hour energy cycle. Peak energy from morning through around 5 PM, then a steep de-escalation, then renewal overnight. The standard 9-to-5 workday was literally built around this.
Women’s energetics work on a 28-day cycle. There are parts of the month where you are high energy and ready for everything – networking, creating, going full out. Other parts are better suited for analysis, reviewing, and renewing. And during your cycle, your energy is lower. This is biological reality, not weakness.
Planning your capacity and schedule around your natural energy flow – daily or monthly – makes an enormous difference. Stop fighting your biology. Work with it.
Step 3: Do a Time Audit
This is the step nobody wants to do. My coaching clients basically hate me for it. But it is the most important step in the entire process!
For a minimum of one week, track everything you do in 15-minute increments. You can use a simple spreadsheet – I have a free time tracking resource linked in the show notes – or an app like Clockify or Toggl.
Here’s why this matters: if you feel like you have no time for your health, your workouts, yourself – it’s because you have too much shoved into those 168 hours. But you can’t change what you can’t see. The audit gives you the baseline.
I did my first time audit right before having my son. I was the youngest SVP in my industry, the only woman in the room and I was terrified of how I was going to manage everything with a baby added in. The audit revealed I was spending an hour a day on social media without even realizing it. That was the hour I needed.
Step 4: Run Your Data Through a Capacity Filter
Once you have a week of data, run everything through this filter:
Eliminate: What can go out the window entirely? What is taking up time that adds zero value to your life or goals?
Automate: What can AI or tech tools handle for you? Scheduled emails, repeating reminders, automated systems – these exist for a reason. Use them.
Systemize: What repeatable processes could you build out? A simple meal plan that rotates week A and week B is a system. It saves mental energy every single week.
Delegate: Who else could handle this? Outsourcing house cleaning, giving a project to a colleague, asking your partner to take the bedtime routine – all of these free up real time.
Defer: What isn’t urgent? Park it on a list. Not everything needs to happen today. Give yourself permission to put it in the someday-maybe pile.
Run everything through that filter and watch your capacity open up.
Step 5: Set Boundaries to Protect Your Time
This is the last step – and the most important one. Once you’ve freed up capacity, you have to protect it. Otherwise it will immediately fill back up.
Boundaries come in two forms here. Boundaries with yourself and boundaries with others. For me personally, I use the Brick app to literally block my phone from social media when I need to. It’s a physical boundary I set for myself. When I’m on it too much, I brick the phone and it’s done.
Boundaries with others look like telling your spouse: I’m waking up at 6am to work out. You’re handling the morning routine with the kids. That’s not negotiable.
The confidence to set and hold those boundaries is everything. Because without them, all the capacity you just freed up will be claimed by someone else within a week.
How to Balance Work, Working Out and Family Starts With Capacity
Stop trying to fix your schedule. Start looking at your capacity.
When you understand what season you’re in, how your energy flows, where your time is actually going and what you can eliminate, automate, systemize, delegate or defer – everything shifts.
You don’t need a better calendar. You need a better framework. And now you have one.
Download the Free Time Tracking Spreadsheet
If you’ve never done a time audit before, this is your starting point. I created a free time tracking spreadsheet that walks you through logging everything you do in 15-minute increments for seven days. It’s the same tool I use with my coaching clients and the same one that showed me I was losing an hour a day to social media without even realizing it.
No guessing. No overwhelm. Just clear data on where your time is actually going – so you can start making intentional decisions about where it should go instead.
Go Deeper With the Capacity Clarity Hour Workshop
If you want step-by-step guidance through this entire process – with worksheets, tools, and resources to help you identify your capacity and build a better schedule – I created the Capacity Clarity Hour specifically for this.
It’s an instant access workshop that walks you through everything I just shared in under 60 minutes. No fluff. Just the framework, the tools and the clarity you need to take back your time.
Access the Capacity Clarity Hour Workshop here.
Get the Full Framework in the Book
Everything in this post is part of a much bigger framework. In my book, I cover the Lack of Consistency Overwhelm Culprit™ in full detail – with even more strategies, stories and tools to help you build the habits and systems that actually hold on your worst days, not just your best.
The Five Overwhelm Culprits™: Strategies to Save Your Sanity Without Sacrificing Your Success is available now everywhere books are sold.
This is the book for the high-performing woman who is done running on empty and ready to build a life that actually works.
CLICK FOR TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] How do you find a schedule to balance work, working out, and family? This is a question that I received during a recent event Q&A while discussing the Lack of Consistency Overwhelm Culprit™, and I realized that it’s a great topic to cover here since so many people struggle with finding time to do it all in this nonstop world that we live in.
But here’s the truth, it has absolutely nothing to do with your time management or your calendar. It has everything to do with your capacity. If you’re a type A overachiever and high performer who struggles with staying consistent with everything that’s on your plate, you’re gonna wanna stick around because by the end of this episode, you’ll know how to address both your capacity as well as your consistency.
If you’re new here, my name is Corrie LoGiudice, otherwise known as Corrie Lo, and I’m a professional keynote speaker, facilitator, leadership expert, and author, and I help leaders transform overwhelm into confident action, even if you’re in a time of [00:01:00] crisis. Now, this question came up as part of a workshop audience Q&A, and it is such a great question, not only because, number one, I get asked it all the time but also because we often think it’s a calendar management and scheduling issue, that if we focus on calendar management and scheduling that somehow that will balance out our work and our lives.
But by focusing on that, we’re actually focusing on the wrong problem. You can’t out schedule a life that’s already filled to max capacity. We all have the same 24 hours in a day, 168 hours a week, which I know sounds obnoxious, especially to all the working moms out there, but it’s the truth. We all have access to the same amount of time.
So it’s really how you choose to spend your energy during those 168 hours that makes all the difference because when you’re feeling disbalanced between your life and your career, [00:02:00] between work and life, that comes from prioritizing your time for others instead of prioritizing yourself.
So I’d love to know, do you feel like you have work-life-health balance. Go ahead, drop a comment below. I’d love to hear what the consensus is on this
So solving this challenge actually requires you looking at five specific things, and I’m gonna break them down for you one by one.
So the very first one is, what season of life are you currently in? The way I like to describe this to my clients, whether they be in the audience or folks I work with one-on-one through coaching and advisory, is we are energetic beings, and we don’t function at 100% capacity all the time. Nothing on Earth does. When you look at, seasons here on Earth, you’ve got spring, you’ve got summer, you got fall, you have winter. Each one of those seasons serves a very specific purpose. You cannot have the harvest in the fall without having the rest in the [00:03:00] winter and the build-up to having that harvest.
So our life functions the exact same way. So as a great example, and I always use myself as the case study ’cause it’s the easiest to explain. Very, very recently I went through a season where it was 100 miles an hour all the time. I had a book launch going. I had multiple speaking engagements. I had a lot of things going on with my family.
We just came out of Maycember, so it was all kids school events and everything else. It was 100% on all the time. So that season of my life, you could describe it as being the summer season. Very, very active, utilizing as many hours in the day as possible, so on and so forth. For me, moving into the next season, that’s gonna be more of a restful season because I need something to balance that out.
So are you actually in a season of your life where it’s temporary and it’s 100% for a short amount of time? Are you in a season where you may be able to roll things back? So identifying what season you’re in can be very [00:04:00] helpful. My guess is if you found this video that you’re in more of a summer-like constant nonstop season.
That or you are living your life like that and not incorporating various energetic seasons throughout your year, which is one of the reasons that you feel like you’re maxed at capacity. So that’s first, what season of life are you in?
The next is looking at how your energy flows on a daily basis. So I talk a lot about energetics, not in like, the woo-woo way, but in the high-performance way.
So comparing men versus women or male versus female energetics. Men are biologically designed on a 24-hour clock. Which the standard corporate workday, it’s basically from 9:00 to 5:00. And a big part of that is because from a male perspective, you are at peak energy from that time in the morning through 5:00 or so in the evening.
Then from there, there’s a steep de-escalation in energy where you need to renew, and then right [00:05:00] overnight when you go to sleep, when you wake up the next day. Then you’re at peak capacity again very first thing in the morning. Now, female energetics, on the other side, are very different. So folks who identify as female, your biology is actually on a 28-day cycle, so that’s throughout the course of a month. So you’re going to have a certain period of the month where you have high energy, where you’re ready to go out, to network, to do all the things.
You’re gonna have other parts of the month where you’re going to need to be more reserved and actually, it kinda works great because you’re very good at that point in time at doing things like data analysis and reviewing and renewing. Then you’re gonna have time when you’re on your actual cycle.
That takes energy out of you, so you are low energy at these times.
So really looking at how your energy flows, either daily or monthly, makes a really big difference in how you should be planning your capacity and your schedule moving forward. So that’s the second one, looking at your energetic flow daily versus monthly, whether you are male or [00:06:00] female.
Now, from here and this is the part that really is eye-opening. You need to actually look at where you are spending your time. And this is my recommendation, it is gonna sound incredibly tedious. I do have resources available to help with but what I recommend you do is for a minimum of one week that you track everything that you do in 15-minute increments.
You could do this simply on a spreadsheet. I actually have a free resource for you. We’ll make sure we link to it in the comments, where you could download a time tracking spreadsheet for this specific purpose. But basically, you wanna go through, and you wanna look at 15-minute increments, how you are spending your time.
And the reason why is because if you’re feeling that you’re at full capacity right now and you don’t have time for your health and you don’t have time for yourself, and you’re constantly tapped out working, and you have no balance. That means that you have too much stuff shoved into that 168 hours in the week.
To make changes for this, you have to identify how you’re currently spending your time, ‘ cause otherwise you have no [00:07:00] baseline to know what you’re working from. So I remember the very first time I did this, I was so freaked out when I was about to have a baby. I had been the youngest person in my industry working as an SVP.
I was always the only woman. I was having a baby. I did not know how I was gonna manage everything that I was working on for work as well as at home while adding a baby into the equation. So that was when I learned this concept and when I did the very first time audit for myself, and it was amazing how many places that I time and energy leaks.
So things like even scrolling social media seems so mundane, but it adds up. So for me, during that timeframe, I found I was spending like an hour a day on social media where I’m like, “You know what? No, I’m gonna be fine when this baby comes because I eliminate all that, and then I have time and space and capacity for the baby.”
So you have to be able to audit where you are currently spending time. So that’s number three. After you collect a week’s worth of data, and I know too, my coaching clients who have gone through this, they, like, hate me while they do it, but it’s so helpful to get to this point.
So you’re gonna analyze [00:08:00] how you are spending that time. And you’re gonna have all the data in front of you on your spreadsheet, or you could use an app like Clockify or Toggl, all these different time tracking spreadsheets.
but either way, you wanna be able to look at how you spent the last week.
From there, you could run it through a simple decision filter. So what I usually recommend is what can you eliminate? What could go out the window altogether that’s not important? So for me, with the example I shared before, social media could just go out the window.
I didn’t really need it at that point in time. From there, you could also look at what can you automate? Now, if I was sharing this information even five to 10 years automation wasn’t necessarily anything that the public could do easily. You had to be very tech savvy. Nowadays, with AI, there is so much stuff that you could do with tech tools to be able to automate things, and automation doesn’t necessarily need to mean that you’re using AI for it.
You could automate things through repeating reminders. You can automate things through scheduled emails. There are so many different ways that you could automate things. So that’s definitely one of the [00:09:00] ways that you wanna filter. What ways could I possibly automate these things?
The next one is, what things can I systemize? So what are repeatable processes that I could do that would make my life easier? So great examples of this would be if you’re meal planning, for example. Could I create a system where maybe I have week A and week B and I rotate them. So again, very simple.
But it’s a way that you could systemize something that you’re already doing, more or less create a standard operating procedure or an SOP for it, and ultimately make your life so much easier in the process.
Then one of my favorites, which not a favorite for a lot of my coaching clients I start working with especially those that are new to leadership, is delegate.
Who else could I give this task to? A lot of times, when we’re looking at that week of data on how we’re spending our time, there are a lot of tasks on there that we do not need to be doing. Whether that be something like, outsourcing to clean your house, it could be delegating a project to a colleague or a coworker, it could be asking your spouse or partner to take care of [00:10:00] the bedtime routine with the kids.
What can you get off your plate? What can you delegate to other people? And then last but not least what can you defer? So if it’s not urgent, you’re gonna park it somewhere, whether that be in a notebook or on a list. I prefer regularly updating task lists. But what are some ways that you could defer certain tasks so that it’s not something you need to do today, it’s more or less like a someday, maybe kind of thing.
Once you have run it through this kind of filter, from there, there’s going to either things that you’re going to delegate to people or things that you’re gonna have to protect time for to make sure that it stays your own.
So the last and most important step is you have to set boundaries to protect your time where it’s leaking. Whether that be a boundary for yourself. An example, when I get too crazy on social media, I set a boundary. I have that Brick app and I will scan it to brick my phone, so there is a literal boundary, so I cannot look at social media.
So that’s one type of a boundary. Other boundaries could be boundaries that you tell people. Hey, I’m gonna tell my spouse that I’m gonna wake up at 6am to work out and you need to get the kids [00:11:00] ready for school. That could be a boundary. But you have to have the confidence to be able to set those boundaries for both yourself as well as for others in order to protect what time you have and where you are prioritizing it.
All right. So to recap everything I just talked about, ’cause I know I covered a lot, work-life balance is not a scheduling problem. It is a capacity problem. So we gotta stop looking at it as, how do I make a more effective calendar? And start looking at it as how do I identify how much stuff I have on my plate that’s currently making me max capacity? And how do I effectively filter through all of that to reduce that capacity so that I can perform at a higher level and have more balance?
That’s the best way to look at it. And to find this requires you, number one, understanding what kind of a season that you’re in, because it’s a lot easier to function at a high, high, high capacity for a short season, similar to what I described earlier, what I went through with my book launch month. You also need to go through and leverage [00:12:00] energetics.
So making sure that you’re planning things, that you’re doing things in a way where you’re taking advantage of your highest points of energy throughout the day or the month. You also need to, no matter what, if this is a question for you, do a time audit. Like I mentioned before, I got a free resource.
Go ahead, do the time audit, and run what information you find through that audit, and you want a minimum of seven days of data. Run that through the capacity filter and see what capacity you could free up. And then from there, when you do free up that time, set boundaries to protect your 168 hours weekly.
So hopefully you found my sharing this helpful. If you wanna dive deeper on this topic and get step-by-step directions as well as resources for it. I invite you to check out my Capacity Clarity Hour Instant Access Workshop, where I walk you through this entire process that I just shared on here in less than 60 minutes.
It’s got worksheets, it’s got information, it’s got tools, resources to help you identify your capacity and build out a better schedule.
So we’ll make sure that we go ahead and link [00:13:00] that for you in the show notes. If you have a question that you would like for me to answer, feel free to leave it in the comments. I just may feature it on a future episode. And also for more ways to learn to work with me, whether that be one-on-one through coaching and advisory or with your organization or team through speaking, facilitation, keynotes, that kind of thing you can find that information in the show notes as well. So as always, thank you for being here, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. I’ll see you next time.
Thanks for checking out The Next Step with Corrie Lo. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a review. Together, we’ll transform overwhelm into action, and we’ll keep taking the next step towards confident leadership. See you next time