Predictable weekly rhythms overall will make time management as a mom easier, and that all ties into time management with your kids. 

Alex Hormozi says “your calendar either builds your wealth or blocks it” and my spin on that is your calendar either supports you being a fit, happy, and healthy mom or it blocks you from being a fit, happy, and healthy mom

Kids thrive on predictable rhythms, and so will you.

When the week is predictable, you stop feeling like you are managing chaos and start actually managing your time. 

And I want you to know that predictability isn’t boring. It’s what frees you up to be present with your kids because the necessary parts of your week are run on autopilot which allows the more fun and life-giving parts of your week to have more margin. 

Psalm 90:12: “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

The “Numbering” part of that verse means to pay attention

It is an encouragement to not lose time in the little unplanned gaps: scrolling, scrambling, rushing everyone out the door.

The “wisdom” part of that verse comes from predictable rhythms, not white knuckling you way and willpowering through your day

A predictable weekly rhythm is just a practical way of numbering your days.

You decide ahead of time where your time goes instead of wondering where it went.

My weekly rhythms change with the seasons, and all of that revolves around my husband’s schedule since I am both a SAHM and business owner – my schedule can be flexible so we simply work around his schedule. 

Keep in mind that yes you should have weekly rhythms, but don’t feel chained to them if you enter a different season and need to audit the schedule. My weeks look different right now in the fall because I am solo parenting 6 days per week. In the spring, my husband leaves the house by 5:15 am, so my he’s gone even earlier then, but he gets home sooner than he does during the fall. Then in the summer he is home more, so my schedule looks different then. 

The predictability in your week does not have to be copy + paste for 365 days. 

Even if you are a SAHM and have the luxury of entering the day with zero plans, I would still argue that having some structure to your week will do both you and your kids wonders. 

Even as someone who’s default is to have structure and planning, I do have part of my week where we intentionally don’t have plans and are just staying at home and living and existing. Tuesdays are like that for us. We will occasionally go to a neighboring town’s library story time on Tuesdays, but for the most part we are just existing, going on a walk that morning, then I work during the kids nap, and that afternoon we have no plans other than to just play around at the house. 

But even me saying that – that we don’t have plans those days, we still have a repeatable structure and it brings me so much peace. 

THERE IS PEACE IN PREDICTABILITY. 

You are too young and too hot to feel like a hot mess. 

You are too on top of every other area of your life to not feel on top of being a healthy and happy mom. 

If you are struggling to find peace in your week. If you feel like you are running around like a chicken with your head cut off. If you feel like a hot mess.

You probably enter your week with no weekly rhythms, no structure, and no predictability. 

But today we are going to change that. 

These are 5 predictable rhythms in my week for you to copy or draw inspiration from so that you can create your own weekly rhythms.

On Saturday or Sunday, sit down with your planner and write out your week:

ONE – Write down any upcoming events.

• Games
• Practices
• Events at school or themes they need to dress up for
• Church events
• Extended family gatherings
• Date nights
• Dr. appts
• Workouts – if you take classes or alternate between gym / home

TWO – Grocery / meal planning

• Scan your fridge for any items you already have that you can plan a meal around so that you are eliminating food waste and saving money by utilizing the groceries you already have.
• Start your grocery list – add your essentials that you get every week – for us a few examples of milk, bread, eggs,
• Based on what you already have, write those meals down in your planner first – when you plan to make them (night of the week).
• Any remaining ingredients needed for those meals, add that to your grocery list as well.
• Then plan out meals to fill out the rest of your week. Keep in mind that planning nights for leftovers and for freezer-friendly meals absolutely counts towards planning out your week. Those items don’t only have to be used when you are in a pinch. They can be intentionally scheduled into the week to simply give you more bandwidth.
• Add those remaining items to create those meals to your grocery list.
• Actually go and buy the groceries.

I love my current weekly rhythm of grocery buying / meal prepping so I’ll share that with you – 

My husband Erik is a high school football coach, so on Friday nights we generally get home around 11 pm. 

Saturday I sleep in until 6, and sometimes I sleep in until 7 and hope the boys will sleep in. Sometimes they do, but most of the time they don’t. 

I make breakfast for the boys while my husband sleeps in,  and then we turn on college gameday at 8 am. I cannot tell you how much joy it brings me to have that slow start to my mornings. It’s the one day of the week that I am okay with sometimes just waking up when the boys do, because I know we have just a relaxing and lazy day ahead. 

We are currently not in a season of weekend sports, which is so nice. My son’s baseball games this entire season have been on Monday, Tuesday, or Thursday every week. 

I completely understand that when you have kids in sports and they are playing on the weekends that this kind of a morning might not exist right now, so maybe that could be Sunday morning for you and you go to a later church service if you and your family attend church. 

So I have college gameday on in the background and I am cleaning up the kitchen while the boys absolutely destroy the house. 

This is also when I scan my fridge / pantry, plan out my meals, and create my grocery list. 

My husband and I use the Google Keep app. It links to our Google Home, so we are adding groceries to our grocery list all throughout the week as well. 

Aldi opens at 9 am, so I load up the boys and go buy groceries. This is another predictable part of our week and they have become such great sports at the grocery store. It really is not even stressful for me and they don’t mind going either…but only because it’s become predictable for them. 

My husband stays at home and sleeps, and that’s because the average time he has gotten home on Friday’s in the fall has been 2 am. This actually used to be a huge point of contention for us. I would absolutely lose my ever-loving mind if he didn’t wake up when the boys did on Saturday morning’s, but this year has been very stressful for him being thrust into an interim head coaching position, so I really think God shifted something inside of me to create more of a happy, welcoming, and comforting home…and that just includes him sleeping in on Saturday. 

So me and the boys load up and go to Aldi, get groceries there, and some weeks we also go to Sam’s Club if we have enough items needed to justify the trip. 

We come home from buying groceries, unpack, and then I generally prep some kind of protein right then for lunch, or we have a simple leftover lunch and I double-batch a protein for dinner that night that will also last me a few lunches into the next few days. 

This is pretty much always ground beef for me – either straight up ground beef for like burger bowls or pasta, or I use taco seasoning for a few diff bowl options. 

I cannot stress how easy this is and how important it is to start your week with protein prepped, both for you and your kids. 

For instance, if I prep some ground beef, I might make myself a hamburger bowl, but I might use that same ground beef and make them two little hamburger patties instead. Idk what it is about kids but they care so much about presentation. So the Saturday morning that I prep my ground beef I can make them two little hamburger patties that I can warm up later in the week and slap a piece of cheese on for them. 

So as I am prepping for me I am thinking about a way for my kids to have the same thing and it’s one less dinner I’ll have to think about in the next day or two. 

If I prep myself taco meat – same thing, they for sure are not going to want a taco salad bowl, but they absoutely love quesadillas. So I’ll use that same taco meat I’ve prepped and put it inside a tortilla with cheese for them. 

Same protein, just a different presentation. 

This entire grocery planning / buying / meal prepping is such a predictable process for both me and my kids. They don’t fight the grocery trips, most of the time they don’t cause a scene in the grocery store, and we find ways for us to all eat the same things at dinner, but maybe just presented differently. 

Predictability fends off a lot of tantrums on their part, and it frees up a ton of mental bandwidth for me when it comes to when we do what each week. 

THREE – My morning routine

The only way I win is by my morning routine being a consistent pillar in my week. 

If you are going to listen to this podcast then you are going to hear about my obsession with early mornings and how they have changed my life. 

I do not mean that lightly. In 2018 I was forced into an early morning routine due to a schedule change, and I have never looked back. 

Back then I didn’t have kids but the feeling of having my workout done before I arrived at work each day was the absolute best feeling in the world. It gave me so much energy and my workout wasn’t this cloud lingering over my head at the end of the workday. Plus the early routine allowed me to not worry about unplanned things throwing off my evenings. 

Now I am a mom of 2, wife, and business owner so my mornings are even more sacred to me. 

I don’t have to worry about fitting in a workout during my kids nap and quiet time. My son comes out of his room atleast 10x during quiet time these days anyway, so a workout would feel super frustrating if I saved it for that time.

In the early morning hours I don’t have to worry about a baseball practice or a game. I don’t have to worry about running a last minute errand for school. I don’t have to worry about my husband getting home from work late or making dinner. 

I’ve carved out my morning time and it’s the first win of my day. 

I’ve been a morning person for 8 years now, and while my routine might look Pinterest-inspired to some, it wasn’t always this way. When I first started waking up early for workouts I was waking up 30-45 minutes before I needed to actually start my workout – and that included my drive to the gym. I would get up, throw on my gym clothes, grab a banana and cup of coffee, and head out the door. I showered at the gym, so all my toiletries, work clothes, and lunch had to be packed and ready the night before. 

Now I wake up, enjoy a cup of coffee, pre workout carb, read my Bible, a few pages in my book, and go workout. 

My morning routine is more drawn out now and I absolutely love it, but when I just started out I was barely able to squeeze in a workout. 

A morning routine might feel so rigid, but it’s actually the most peaceful part of my day every day. 

It allows me to have zero dark clouds hanging over my head in the afternoons when my kids get home from school or on the days when they are home with me all day. 

A predictable morning routine is how you win, and I would argue it’s the most important thing on this list. 

If you are hearing me and you are thinking to yourself – Karlee, I hear you. I have listened to all 45 episodes of your podcast until this point and I have heard you talk about morning routines over and over and over and I WANT THIS. 

I WANT TO BECOME A MORNING PERSON SO BAD BUT I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START. 

Here’s where to start – set your phone an 8 pm bed time and don’t look at it again unless you are setting your alarm. 

Put your phone across the room so that you physically have to get out of bed to turn your alarm off in the morning. 

Go to bed reading a book – it will help you fall asleep more quickly. 

A predictable morning routine will help you feel like less of a hot mess, because a mom who feels like a hot mess more than likely isn’t as present of a mom as she could be. 

You want your kids to feel the safety and predictability that weekly rhythms can bring, and your morning routine is a pillar in that weekly rhythm. 

FOUR – My daily outdoor walks with my kids

On episode 38 of the podcast I talk about bookends and anchors, and I cover this daily outdoor walk a lot in that episode, so I won’t talk about it too much here. 

Basically, having a regular outdoor walk planned with your kids does SO MUCH good for everyone. 

My boys go to daycare M, W, F – on those days our walks are in the afternoon, immediately after we get home from daycare. Right now with football season we don’t do a Friday afternoon walk, so I just walk on my walking pad those days. 

This walk is the perfect buffer for all of us. Those days are workdays for me, so I have been on my computer a lot. I need a buffer between working and stepping right into motherhood, plus I haven’t really been outside much at all these days, so it’s fresh air that I need before we jump into dinner, bath, and bed time. 

During football season I am doing all of this solo 5 nights per week, so this outdoor walk decompresses me before all of that.  

Tuesday and Thursday they are both home with me all day, so we do a morning walk. If you have kids you know that 1. Getting outside helps get their crazies out and 2. Finding something to fill that morning block before naps / quiet time is so crucial. 

Our morning walk fills that time, gets us outside, and helps me hit my step goal. 

It truly is an anchor in my day that decompresses while simultaneously supports my goals of a fit and active lifestyle. 

This is so predictable to my kids that even if they don’t want to go on the walk, the complaints are minimal and they know we are going anyway. 

Once again – predictability is how you win and eventually they complain less. 

FIVE – Specific areas for spouse support

My husband leaves for work at 6:15 every morning and on average has been getting home between 8:30-8:45 Monday-Wednesday. Thursday he gets home earlier, around 5 pm, then Friday as I mentioned is game day and he doesn’t get home until around 2 am Saturday morning. Saturday he is home with us all day, and Sunday he leaves directly from church to go to football and is there until around 8-8:30. 

So in reality, the time he is home each week to help is minimal.

But we have found a lot of areas he helps in and these are predictable week after week. 

• On the days my kids go to daycare he gets them up at 6 am and I get home from the gym by 6:15 so he can leave for work. 
• Before he leaves he lets our dog outside and makes sure the water bowl is out there because our 1 year old makes a bee line for that water bowl every single morning. He also lets our dog back inside every night and feeds him then too. 
• Thursday and Saturday -the 2 nights that he is home, he does all the bath and bedtime routines for the boys while I clean the kitchen. When he is home for bath / bed time in the spring and summer months, he pretty much does that for me every single night which is amazing. 
• He makes sure that all Rafe’s baseball stuff is together and loaded in my car for the next day if Rafe has a game / practice. 
• Then of course – garbage day 

These are areas that I can just rely on him to complete the tasks for. It’s a few less mental tabs open in my brain. It’s a predictable part of my week. 

These 5 areas of predictability within my week really do run like a well-oiled machine at this point. Of course not every week goes exactly according to plan, but most weeks this is what it looks like for us. 

I will say this as a mom – you can go into your week with a plan, but you MUST lower expectations for the plan to go accordingly every single week. 

But the more predictability you can incorporate the more you can put on autopilot and the easier consistency in every area of life will become.