Simple Systems to Create Space: “Do it All” Without Burning Out

Simple Systems That Keep Me Balanced (Even When Life Is Full)
Are you trying to do it all—run a household, raise kids, grow your business, prioritize your health—and still feel like you in the process?

In this episode, I’m walking you through the exact systems and checklists I use to create more balance in a full season of life. From homeschooling rhythms to weekly resets and meal planning, these tools help me show up with intention (instead of just reacting to everything around me).

Whether you’re a working mom, an entrepreneur, or just feeling overwhelmed by daily life, this episode will give you practical ideas to build your own structure—so you can have more time, energy, and space for what matters most.

🎧 Tune in to hear:

• Why balance isn’t about perfection—it’s about support
• How I created consistent routines for workouts, homeschooling, finances, and more
• The kid checklist that changed our mornings and gave everyone more independence
• How checklists and systems reduce decision fatigue (so you can stop overthinking everything)
• The mindset shift that helped me stick with things long term—even when life is chaotic

Resources Mentioned:

• Join The Village: Click here to connect with our community.
• Sign up for the Momentum Challenge: Click here to get started.

Resources & Links

• Follow Christina @christinaslaback
• Email us at hello@christinaslaback.com
• www.christinaslaback.com

Transcript

Christina: [00:00:00] this showed me how to show up and how much clarity and structure that I need and how impactful it is to reduce the resistance that I have and inspired me to apply that same thinking to the rest of my life. So looking at how I can make things easy and make things just be able to get done, and it's just about showing up and doing them.Welcome to Clear and On Purpose, the podcast design to help you cut through the noise and get back to what matters most. If you're feeling stuck, but needs to take intentional action, you are in the right place. I'm Christina Slayback, homeschooling mom of two and life and business coach, helping you drop in and align with your values and create more space.

Each week I'll be sharing practical insights and simple. Actionable steps to help you find clarity, boost your energy, and design a life that balances ambition with mates. Let's dive in and get clear on [00:01:00] purpose.

We've all been there setting goals, making plans, and holding on to the best of intentions, and then nothing happens. Or worse, we end up more frustrated than when we started beating ourselves up because we just can't seem to stay consistent and disciplined. And honestly, it's often not a you problem, it's a systems problem.

I know when I've dropped the ball on my goals, my routines, or my personal intentions, it's usually not because I didn't care or I wasn't motivated, it's because I hadn't broken it down enough. I hadn't created the system to support the outcome that I wanted. And while perfect balance doesn't exist, I do believe that we can optimize the way we move through our days.

So there's more ease, efficiency, and space to enjoy our life, especially when we're juggling home [00:02:00] kids, work, health, and everything In between. This spring, I've really been leaning into how I can optimize. All of the background things that support my life so I can really lean in and enjoy this time of year.

It gets busy. There's spring, it gets really busy and I know that I'm just gonna want to do more things and there's gonna be more kids activities and all these things are gonna be happening, and I really wanna make sure that I have a good base on all the things that support my life, that I wanna keep momentum going on, even as I focus on these other things.

And what I've looked into or what I've realized is that for the things that are already working in my life, I've gotten curious on why they do work and why I have been able to be consistent in those, and then using that knowledge and that feedback to create more of that in my life. So let's start with the kids.

We have been really great about having the kids being able to get their school things done to be able to help out [00:03:00] with the house, and just kind of keeping them on schedule. And what I've been doing over the past year is really just like creating a checklist for them. And I put it on the board every day of all of their activities that they have to do, the schoolwork that they have to get done, their regular chores and routines that we have going on for the day, and anything that they need to do to get themselves prepared for that day.

That has been working so well to avoid the, what do I do next? Chaos or them constantly asking me or thinking that they're done with things when they're not. And it gives them the structure, independence, and clarity. So that means that I get more space to focus on my own priorities too. The other thing that I've been really consistent with over the past couple of years is my workouts.

I've worked out five times a week consistently for almost two years now, it's because I made it easy to show up. I found the YouTube program that offers six and 10 week workouts with everything already planned. They have different workouts each day, so I don't get bored.

There's really no decision making [00:04:00] that I have to do. All I have to do is press play and then check it off, and when I have to decide how long, how hard, or what I'm in the mood for, what work workout I wanna do today, do I wanna do lifting? Do I wanna go running? Do I wanna do yoga? I'll often choose either what's easy or I'll just get completely overwhelmed and choose nothing.

So what I realized was that this showed me how to show up and how much clarity and structure that I need and how impactful it is to reduce the resistance that I have and inspired me to apply that same thinking to the rest of my life. So looking at how I can make things easy and make things just be able to get done, 

I've had morning and evening routines on and off for the past few years, and I used to block off time in my calendar and call it a morning routine, but. Without necessarily breaking down the actual tasks or having ones that were no longer in alignment with my goals, and I'd end up wasting that time to figure, trying to figure out what to do, or I just would put it off and [00:05:00] not do my morning routine.

But now that I have updated and created flexible morning and evening checklists, I don't always have to do them in the same order or complete every single thing on the list. Knowing exactly what I want to do in my ideal morning, I can anchor my day in that. I know that when I get up, I can just go through and start marking off the things that are important and the priorities that are impactful for that particular day.

And those bookends have made my mornings more productive and my evenings more grounded. So when I look at my evening routine, I used to have an evening routine and it had a few things on there. But what I really started to lean into is these opening and closing for not just me personally, but for the household, for getting us set up for the next day, for creating a really nice start for all of us in the morning.

For my evening routine now, instead of just things like skincare and giving myself some space before bed without, any [00:06:00] electronics, maybe doing a meditation, things like that, they're still part of my, and can be part of my evening routines. But it also includes things like Making sure that the kitchen is cleaned up and set for the next day.

It's getting my things out for the next morning. So I have my workout clothes already ready. I have my clothes for the day already ready, and out. I have looked at what the next day looks like and what are my most important priorities for it, and I've really just created that structure and that list to go through.

To be able to make sure that when I start that next day, it really is with intention. It's starting from a really clear and grounded space, and I'm not just kind of getting thrown into the chaos like I was before, and then expanding that into a weekly house reset. So I used to try to loosely treat Sunday as a reset day.

When I remembered when I had the energy, when I felt like it's, but now I have a set of really simple tasks for me, for the house that I run through weekly. And again, having it just [00:07:00] together and in a space where it's easy to look at and to check off what I wanna do, it really does help me mentally prepare for the week ahead 

Look forward to it and having that focus, because I do know the impact that it's made and it's reduced that feeling of resentment that used to creep in when everything would kind of bleed together. Because I have so much flexibility in the work that I do in our schedule, it's really wonderful and it also can create this sense that nothing is really super urgent.

And so then one thing would bleed into the next breakfast would take hours or schoolwork would just expand to all this time. And then we'd have kids activities and I would work out when I got to, and then I would just end the day feeling like I wasn't able to get the things that I wanted to get done because then I hadn't prioritized the time because there was always more time that I could do it.

By looking at the whole week ahead and all the things that we wanna do, and making sure that I am getting myself reset with that intention [00:08:00] weekly and daily, and having those check-in points very specifically on what that means for me. It makes it so that I have more time for my own priorities, and I'm actually working to get things done a certain amount of time.

So I had that space. Meal planning without the overwhelm. I used to have such a hard time with this. It was years of on again off again, and I would kind of come into it with this all or not the man mentality where I would plan out the entire week and I'd have to incorporate the recipes that I wanted to try everybody's individual preferences for food, the timing, what things we had going on, the nutrition, breakfast, lunch dinners.

Snacks and it ended up that often I would do none of that because it was too much and then it would kind of fly by the seat of our pants on trying to figure out what the meals are gonna be and when I could get them in. Lately I've really simplified, so I've learned and leaned [00:09:00] into having more of a gradual approach when it came to meal planning and just focusing on certain items and then figuring out how I specifically work.

So I've noticed that instead of doing weekly planning, I actually do a lot better. If I look at the whole month and just pull recipes that I want, when I was trying to do weekly planning, I'd often plan too many meals for the week, or I'd wanna try all these new recipes and then I just wouldn't have the energy for it.

And I'd go back to the same staple of, of favorites that we have just week after week after week. But when I look at it as a month at a whole and I just kind of like. just bring in certain items and know that I wanna do certain things. I can just put them in a random week, and then I still have that available.

So when I do go and do the weekly list and the weekly grocery order that I already have an idea of some things that I think might work, and then I can just move them around within the calendar. And it also helps when I do [00:10:00] over plan for the week that then I can just move some of those recipes that I still have all the ingredients for forward and just make adjustments to that.

Or if. All of a sudden we've gone through all of the meals that I had and we don't have enough, then I can start to plan for that weekend early because I know that I'm already looking at it earlier in the week, and I also have just been prepping one lunch meal for myself all week. So I've been really focusing on trying to get a lot more protein in my diet and.

I would normally plan a bunch of different lunches. A bunch of different breakfasts. A bunch of different dinners. But what I realized is that I'm fine eating the same thing for the week. So if I make something that'll last throughout the week and just have my portions already ready, I'm good to go for that meal, so I only really have to plan one lunch, and then the kids can either grab leftovers or they can make their own items that they like and enjoy, and we keep a bunch of fruit and veggies on hand that are easy to grab and snack on.

And if I'm actually intentionally taking the time to prep out those [00:11:00] ingredients, and again, looking at that weekly. Overview. I would kind of sometimes plan on trying to do them on a Sunday and would often wind up doing it on Monday when I had hoped to do other things. So really looking at the whole intention and figuring out how those puzzle pieces fit together for me and just.

Optimizing every week. So it hasn't been that all of it just all of a sudden work together. It's been continuously looking over the past couple months and each week seeing what worked, what didn't, and learning and tweaking as I go. And that's really been what's helping me to stick with it. Finance Friday.

This is another area that I always have the best of intentions on, on trying to keep up with and would inevitably not. Do it regularly. So I had always had a block in my schedule for finance Friday, and I would have this on the calendar for months, but I rarely actually followed through on it. And when I did do it, it looked different every time, depending [00:12:00] on my energy, what I remember to look at what I hadn't done before, trying to play catch up.

Now I actually have little checklists again set up for each of it so I know what I wanna do and what I wanna get done with that. So I have things that I do weekly. I have things that I do monthly. And I don't have to think about what I have to do. I just open up the list and I work through it.

Now it's finally become part of a rhythm, and actually, because I have the intention behind it and I know that going into it, I don't have to try to figure out or determine what I need to do at that time. It makes all of these things so much easier. 

I want to make it so that I actually have these items that I can do, and that I make it so super easy for myself that it just happens much more consistently. And what all of this has taught me is that I feel more balanced, more creative, and more me when all of this background stuff is running on autopilot.

I am so much [00:13:00] more creative and energized, and I have the ability to be able to do the things that I want to. I feel more balanced. I feel like I can do more of the things that I want to when the systems that I have that are working in the backend when my house is not. Just coming a part of the seams because I haven't been keeping up on the household stuff when I don't have an idea of what's going on in our budget, because I haven't been looking at it.

All of these things that are those nagging to-dos in the background, have a place and have a time, and have a specific set of really easy, actionable things that I can do, and that allows me to free up that mental space and to let go of that stress that was accumulating. I know that they all is coming in and it's becoming part of this rhythm routine, and it doesn't take as much time either when I'm keeping up consistently on it versus when I'm trying to play catch up all the time 

I'm still working on adding and implementing more of it just because I have seen and noticed such a difference when I [00:14:00] do have it, Working on creating more checklists in other areas of my life for work, for my monthly resets that I do, for all of those other things that I have intentions or planning, I'm working on streamlining, creating, a set of SOPs for our household and for me personally.

There was a time when I thought that I just needed to get all of them set at one point in time, but by continuing to adapt and optimize and lean into what's working now, it also keeps them more flexible so that they'll hopefully last for a much longer time.

Because I'm not stringently strict on keeping up with all of these routines. They're not rigid and they evolve with me. So I can lean into them when I need that structure. And I can give myself grace and some space when I don't. I don't have to be checking the checklist every day, but I do know that when I am feeling a little bit like I'm not sure what to do or if I need to kind of get back in the routine, they're available for me and waiting for me.

So I can lean into the structure [00:15:00] when I need to, and I can just let go of it if I need to take a break from it. But just knowing that they're available makes it easier for me to get back on track when life does get chaotic. So these are some of the things that I've been doing for Spring and how I've been learning how to adapt for my own energy, and I'm curious if this resonates for you.

I hope that sharing how I've been looking at and adjusting and being able to balance more has helped you be able to look at your own systems and how you can make more, make it easier, and if you can adapt these checklists into your own life, and if you're interested in what I've been using and what's been working for me, I'll have those available as a download and you can look at them and be able to adjust them for yourselves too.

Thank you for tuning in and I look forward to speaking to you again.

Thank you for tuning in to clear and on purpose. If you're ready to take intentional steps toward a more fulfilling life and wanna customize the approach, I'd love to work with [00:16:00] you. Visit www.christinaslayback.com to schedule a free consultation or explore current offers designed to help you gain clarity.

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