How to Build Routines That Survive Real Life

[00:00:00] How do you create routines that work even on your worst days? This is a question I received during a recent private event Q&A while discussing the Lack of Consistency Overwhelm Culprit. And I realize it’s perfect to cover here, since routines are often the hardest to get right, especially if you’re busy or you’re overwhelmed.
But here’s the trick. It’s not about designing your routine for your best days, like most people do. You purposely wanna design it to get through your worst days and also make sure that you shift them as your needs shift.
If you’re a high achiever who’s been struggling to create consistent habits and routines, then you’re gonna wanna stick around, because by the end of today’s episode, you’ll know exactly how to create a system of routines that works for you and that finally sticks.

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 who helps high achievers transform overwhelm into confident [00:01:00] leadership action, even in times of crisis. So the problem with routines and building routines is that real life flexes in seasons.
You have slow seasons, you got busy seasons, you’ve got stressful seasons, you’ve got restful seasons. You get my gist.
So the first thing that you need to know is how you currently spend your time. So if you haven’t done it before, I highly recommend running a time tracking audit. And if you would like resources on how to do that, we’ll link to them below. I’ve got a free time tracking spreadsheet as well as a seven-day time tracking challenge that you could take advantage of. But know that that’s the starting point because everything else that I talk about in today’s episode is all assuming that you already know what’s a priority and where you need to spend your time.
It’s just how you actually need to stay consistent with it. I’m not gonna be able to through the course of this episode show you what’s a priority, ’cause that’s an entirely different process. So make sure you get that done first and then come [00:02:00] back here if you haven’t yet.
I tend to approach routines as a series of non-negotiables that I could fit in anywhere throughout my day, and I do this more so than a series of tasks that has to be done at the same time, like rigidly every single day. I think a lot of folks, they think of routines and they’re like, “I get up at 5:00 AM every day and I do this, this, this, and this.”
It doesn’t need to be that way. Your routines can flex with you. It doesn’t have to always be at the same time or be the same way that everybody else does it. Now, there’s two tools and strategies that I’m gonna recommend that we’re gonna talk about a lot today.
The first one is called task or appointment batching.
So that’s when you’re doing like tasks at the same time or all together on a regular cadence. And there’s a reason that you wanna do this, because when you contact switch, it actually takes… And I forget the exact number, it’s like 10 or 15 minutes to get back and focused on task. So the longer that you’re able to do a similar task in a longer timeframe, you’re actually gonna get more done from [00:03:00] a productivity standpoint.
So task and appointment batching are excellent. In fact, this video is an example of batching. I have done six videos today or something like that. I’ve been doing them over the last two days, and it’s much easier to knock them out when I’m doing them all in the same amount of time.
The next tool that’s helpful, which comes from more the productivity side, is something called time boxing, and It’s what you do on your calendar.
And I’m gonna show you examples of time boxing, but It’s where you block out specific times within your calendar to take care of certain tasks. And the reason that I love it for this is because as long as you are creating the time and the space for it, and you’re creating enough capacity surrounding it that you have buffer for it, you can move that routine or whatever that task is anywhere else throughout the course of the day and still stay consistent. So probably one of the easiest ways to explain the best way to design routines that survive real life is to share how my own is actually [00:04:00] shifting within the next week, in a couple of days, actually.
So here’s my situation. I run a speaking and coaching advisory business that serves Fortune 500 clients, and I have a team of three team members. So that’s my work life in terms of what I got going on. I also am a mom of four kids in two different school districts, and two of those children are with me full-time.
If you’re new here, I’m in a blended family. My husband and I were both previously divorced. We got remarried together. I had one kid, he had two. We had a baby together. So we got four in two different school districts because my stepsons live with their mom. So there’s a lot of logistics and coordination that goes around that because we are very hands-on for all four kids’ lives.
My husband also has a leadership career, similar to my own. He works in corporate, and it’s very flexible for him, though I often become the default parent since mine is more flexible because I own my own business. Now, during the summer months, I am the full-time [00:05:00] caregiver for my kids when they are not in school.
This is by design. It’s something I always wanted and I worked towards for several years to build out. We don’t do any kind of camps. We actually call it Camp Mommy and I hang out with my kids all summer and we design my business around that. So in general, I work around my kids’ school schedule. So since we’re currently shifting from the kids being in school, which is ending the end of this week, to being on summer break next week, I need to shift all of my routines from my school year routines to my summer routines.
So next, I’m gonna walk you through how I use both seasonally and how I utilize batching and time boxing to design the perfect routines for me and my family. Again, this is gonna look completely different for you and what your needs are, but this is gonna give you a really good idea of some strategies that you can use to help with it.
So before we dive into that, I would love to know, do you find it tough to shift from one routine to another based on the season that you’re in? Comment below. I’d love to hear what you’re struggling with [00:06:00] because I can either answer it here or potentially do other videos about it.
All right, so the very first step for all of this is you need to know your minimum viable plan, your MVP. I talk about the MVP process through multiple different, culprits. But in general, you wanna know what is your minimum viable plan when it comes to non-negotiable routines, things that you have to do every single day.
So when looking for me my self-care is a non-negotiable. I need to do it because otherwise I have a tendency to burn out. It happens one hour a day, Monday through Friday. It’s usually first thing in the morning for me. Then another non-negotiable for me is my work is all during school hours or when my kids are sleeping or very first thing in the morning before they wake up.
So my work is always around my kids, non-negotiable. From there, I have specific work tasks that I need to do as the CEO that needs to happen every single day. So this could be things like responding to sales messages. It could [00:07:00] be responding to emails that my team has pulled out for me to have to respond to. I have project-related tasks that happen as a CEO. I also have focused CEO work which I structure daily, weekly and monthly based on my recap ritual process, which I’ve also spoken about here on the channel. And I also need to make sure that I’m providing visibility to my team on what I’m working on, which we do through a process that we call the daily progress update, which we do in Slack.
So those are non-negotiables. They have to happen every day. Same thing, when my kids are in school, I have to do pick-up and drop-off. So has to happen. If I don’t go, no one’s gonna get them. Unless I coordinate with my husband on a day that he’s around, but in general, I’m responsible for it.
So what changes here is it’s gonna be different in how I structure this for my school year versus the summer. So let me explain. So for school year, my priorities are obviously my self-care hour. That happens all the time. I also need to have my CEO focus time. So those [00:08:00] will be things like projects writing when… You know, like I write books, or I write content, keynotes, things like that. Anything that’s creatively focused, that all needs to happen during my workday.
Also camera-facing time. So anytime I’m on Zoom, client delivery, sales calls, speaking events, that sort of thing. I also have time that I’m coordinating with my team. Usually, that happens asynchronously and then weekly on Fridays, where we have our team meetings.
I also need to handle communication time, so those are times that I’m doing, again, batching emails and responses to folks. And then I’m also doing my daily, weekly, and monthly CEO recaps through my recap ritual process. Now, where this shifts, and you’re gonna see it change, and I’m gonna show you some examples on my calendar.
Is going to be summer. So summer, I have less hours to work. Because my kids are out of school, obviously. So what are the things that I absolutely need to do during the summer that I don’t necessarily need to do during the school year? And again, this is a season. We’re looking at eight weeks total.
[00:09:00] So my self-care hour, absolutely mandatory. Still need to do that. I need to have my communication time. So what I actually do is I bundle my communication time with walking on my walking pad. So I have a standing desk, so I will do that to get extra steps in throughout the day, especially if I don’t always have time to do my standard workout during my self-care hour, which sometimes happens.
If I need to do camera-facing time, we try to avoid it during the summer hours, but if I do need to do anything that’s camera-facing, we batch those that I only do them on Mondays and Fridays during specific hours for the summer months. As opposed to during the school year, we do them every single day, that there’s a window for that.
Also, a non-negotiable is my team time. I do need to be communicating with my team as well as having the meetings, and I do still need to continue my daily, weekly and monthly CEO recaps. So you’ll notice the thing that’s really changed between my school year priorities and my summer is that summer I am purposely not choosing any kind of project focus work as a CEO, because it’s a season of rest and it’s a season [00:10:00] of when I’m interacting more with my kids.
So the routine changes, my capacity changes, so I had to remove something from it. But the thing that’s beautiful about this process, and I’m gonna show you that in a second, is how it works on the calendar. So let me show you how I time box that.
All right, so here I’m showing you my calendar, and this is what my calendar looks like during the school year ’cause as you can see right here, it’s the last day of school.
Kids are out after. So you could see a lot of the things that I described before as being time boxed on here. So my daily self-care is a repeating, non-negotiable task that’s on here each and every day. Same thing, family logistics in terms of taking care of my kids and getting them off and on the bus.
You see the bus pickup, you see the school drop off. I have a transition time in here just as a buffer for me to grab a coffee or whatever before I go to work. But then from there, you could see how I actually batch stuff. So here I’m doing usually my visibility and content work on Mondays. I’ll have sales generating tasks the rest of the week on Wednesdays, which as you can see [00:11:00] right now, this is the time I’m doing right now. I’m doing deep work, which will be things like batching recordings or things that need my focused attention. If I can’t get it done, obviously, on visibility and content day, sometimes I will use this overflow time. I also have my CEO recap on there, which has to happen every single day, and then school pickup is the hard cutoff.
And then you can see too, my son’s bus comes later. But that said, everything else around this can flex. So usually, the times I don’t have anything time boxed is when I will book calls, whether it be client-facing calls or calls with other people or podcast or if I’m delivering for virtual keynotes and things like that, it will show up on there that way.
But as you can see, just even based on what’s on my calendar, all of my non-negotiables are on here for the school year. And if something happens, for example, So let’s just say I’m not feeling well and I sleep in a bit for my daily self-care. It’s very easy for me to grab this appointment and just move it to another time during the day because I have so much [00:12:00] other space to be able to move things for.
I’m not so overscheduled that there is flexibility within my schedule to still get the minimum viable plan done. So that makes it very easy to flex. But however, I can’t continue doing this during the summer when my kids are out of school. So this is how my schedule is changing. And you can see it’s very, very different, but not, because I’m still focusing on my minimum viable things.
So my daily self-care stays exactly the same. My Slack, email and response time, I have that boxed off very first thing in the morning before my kids wake up, and I also do walking on my walking pad. So I’m doing all of my communications needed for my business within that timeframe before my kids even wake up.
Then they wake up and we do whatever we gotta do. I also will usually have on here too not on the 29th ’cause I’m not taking any calls that day, but as you can see, I have a call block that this is where I do phone calls, and I get a babysitter if needed for any kind of [00:13:00] camera-facing time that I have to do.
And so what’s really changed when you look at my summer versus my school year, which is my school year, is to flex with the season, we’ve reduced the number of camera-facing time that I’m doing during the summer, which honestly it works out anyway because I don’t do a ton of speaking during the summer, and it’s by design.
And then also the other things would be no project work over the course of the eight weeks. But my routine and everything generally stays the same because we have planned for the minimum viable plan on what needs to happen in order to continue moving things forward, whether it be for me personally as well as professionally, both on the same calendar
And that about sums it up. So to recap everything that we covered today. The reason that many routines don’t work long term is because they don’t account for any kind of seasonality or flexibility that life brings us. The tools that I love to help with this are batching tasks as well as time boxing.
[00:14:00] And from there you wanna make sure that you’re designing a minimum viable routine plan, MVP, around your non-negotiable tasks and responsibilities daily, as well as during that season. So you’re gonna do it for both. And that way, you make it very, very easy for your routines to flex around the time that you have available for them based on the season that you’re in.
So hopefully you found my sharing this today helpful. If you have a question that you would like for me to answer, please feel free to leave it in the comments, and I just may feature it on a future episode. And if this episode really resonated for you and you wanna know whether or not the Lack of Consistency culprit is what’s stealing your time and sanity, I invite you to take the free quiz, and you can find that link in the show notes.
You can also learn more ways to work with me, whether that be one-on-one through coaching and advisory, where I can help you specifically dial into how to make your routines and schedules be more consistent. Or if you wanna bring me in to speak to your team or organization through my [00:15:00] keynote and workshop offers, all that information is in the show notes as well.
Thank you so much for being here, and I will see you on the next episode. I’ll see you then.
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.