The past month has been the busiest of my life. Not busy in the “my calendar is full” way. Busy in the “I have no margin left anywhere” way.

Let me walk you through it, because the point of this does not land without the context.

The month that broke my schedule

Several weeks ago I started planning a free workshop – editing slide decks, gathering client testimonials, writing pre and post-workshop email sequences, practicing the presentation over and over. That work took over the last two weeks of July.

Then workshop week arrived and 317 women registered. I am still blown away by that number!!

The presentation itself went well – I really felt like I nailed it! Then everything behind the scenes started falling apart.

About 90 seconds into the call, a message popped up telling me I had hit max capacity. My Zoom was capped at 100 seats and I had no idea, because I had never had a reason for 100 people to join one of my calls before. I could have paused, upgraded, and come back, but I chose not to. Those women rearranged dinner and practice schedules to be there live at 6 pm, and I was not going to make them wait while I lost half the room.

At the end of the workshop I gave out a keyword for anyone who wanted to book an assessment call. Text the keyword, get an automated text back with a booking link. Twenty-seven women texted in, but zero automations went out. ZERO.

I could not figure out why, so I started manually texting the link to all 27. Every single one failed.

Then I saw it – a tiny red icon in the corner of each message. I hovered over it and learned I had hit my 24-hour text limit of 500 messages. That morning I had sent a workshop reminder to all 317 registrants, then a one-hour reminder, then a ten-minute reminder. The one-hour reminder only reached the first 200 people. The ten-minute reminder reached nobody. And I was locked out of sending booking links entirely.

So at 9 pm I started emailing the links manually instead. Within minutes, replies started coming in saying the link was broken. The URL was followed by a line starting with a number, and the internet read it as one continuous link. Every click returned a 404 error message.

Twenty-seven failed texts. Twenty-seven broken emails. Twenty-seven corrected emails. Screaming crying throwing up.

Then I went to grab the workshop recording, and there was no recording. A week earlier I had turned on auto-record in my Zoom settings so I would not forget to hit the button. Someone else had set up the call link, and when that happens, your personal settings do not carry over. I never heard the “this call is being recorded” alert, and with my nerves running high, it did not register.

I cried. LOL

Then I rescheduled the entire post-workshop email automation sequence, because those emails were supposed to include a recording that did not exist.

I refuse to tell you what time I went to bed. REFUSE.

The next day I hosted the whole workshop again. It went off flawlessly, and that became the recording I sent to everyone.

Between the two sessions, 57 women booked calls with me. I have completed 32 of them in the two weeks since, while working Monday, Wednesday, and Friday only, because my kids are home with me on Tuesdays and Thursdays. All of that on top of running my monthly membership and coaching my 1:1 clients.

My husband is a high school football coach. Fall camp started, then the season started. The last time he was home for bath and bedtime was the week of July 26th. Saturdays are it.

We also squeezed in a lake weekend with extended family and a trip to Georgia to see mine.

It was the most stressful month I have had. And it all got done.

What did not slip

Here is the part I want you to take with you.

Through the tech disasters, the solo parenting, the fully booked working hours, and the smallest amount of margin I have ever had in a day, three things stayed in place.

My bookends and my anchor.

Think about the bookends sitting on a shelf in your house. They mark the beginning and the end, and they hold everything in the middle together.

That is exactly what a morning habit and a night habit do for your day. You get one non-negotiable at the start and one non-negotiable at the finish, and the mess in between has something to lean against.

The anchor is the third piece. One habit that lives somewhere in the middle of your day, chosen because it steadies you when the day starts to get away from you. It supports your health goals and it gives you a break from the pressure at the same time.

Two bookends and one anchor.

Not a new routine, and not a full schedule overhaul. Three habits you commit to no matter what the day looks like.

Over the past month I did not miss a single morning bookend. I hit my anchor six to seven days a week. And I finished two books from my night bookend alone.

Your homework

This week, pick your two bookends and your one anchor.

Choose things you can execute on your hardest day, not your best one. That is the whole test. If it only works when the day goes smoothly, it is not a bookend.

And if you are sitting there thinking you can never stay consistent with something like this, I want you to remember that you can go to bed tonight having decided tomorrow is going to be different.

All you have to do is decide. It is that simple.

Go establish your bookends and your anchor.

HERE is a link to that workshop if you weren’t able to attend!