Cara Harvey 00:00:03 Welcome to the Purpose Driven Moms show here at A Purpose Driven Mom, we believe that it’s possible to manage your home, work on your personal goals, and grow and scale an online business. Most productivity tips out there tell you to hustle more and make you feel shame about not being motivated enough. And we’re here to dispel this myth. I’m Kara Harvey and I am on a mission to help work at home. Moms realize that they have the power to go after their dreams, take care of themselves, and manage their home without perfectionism, guilt, or having to sacrifice their sleep. If you’re ready to shift your thinking around productivity and get some practical tips to help you manage your mom life. Toss your earbuds in while you fold the laundry. And let’s do this! Welcome to the purpose for Mom Show episode 439. As we close out 2024, I am going to give you behind the scenes in a lesson that I did in the Purpose Driven Mom Club with some really cool calls that we do in the club.

Cara Harvey 00:00:54 One is called a think tank, where people can bring in issues and struggles they’re having, so we can collaborate in mastermind to help them come up with a the solution. One is an accountability call where they can come in and check out what they’re doing, get support for the week, some encouragement, some coaching and practical tips. And our final is called a saw call. Saw is the program I teach and the purpose of her mom club, which won’t be opening up again till the spring. So I want to give you a little sneak peek on these Fridays for calls I get on. I do a mini lesson about 15 minutes from something from the framework itself, and then I answer questions live, do coaching, set up goal plans. It’s a lot of fun and I wanted to share with you the one call that I did today, which was on weekend prep. Things that you can do to systematize your weekend. We talk about how you can use I. This was not planned to be a podcast episode, but I thought the content was so good I wanted to drop it.

Cara Harvey 00:01:38 So if this sounds a little off, if I’m talking about things and you can’t see them, just roll with it because they are really going to help you set up your systems for the weekend. You can check out show notes at A Purpose Driven RomComs with podcasts for 39, and I will see you in 2025. All right. So this is our your first Friday. So recall let me tell you how the new format goes. I’m going to teach ten minutes ish. I just talked to you guys to hang out but we’ll spend about ten minutes. I’m going to talk about a topic. Today’s topic is weekend prep activities. So I’m very excited to go through these. The video for that is an R, but we’ll take this video and put the bonus video in R too. And then I’m going to open it up for coaching. If you want help with your weekend prep activities. If you want help breaking down a goal, if you want help, time blocking. If you just want to ask questions, we’ve got the hour for absolute open coaching.

Cara Harvey 00:02:21 So I’m going to share my screen first and we’ll just jump in here. So this video is in R. You can watch it. But I want to talk a little bit more in depth about it. I’m going to make this just a smidge smaller so we can really talk about the the concept behind weekend prep activities and how, you know, we talked about this. I feel like was it Tuesday or maybe it was even last week? Tara, I remember we had talked about this on how you want to create systems for things you do around your home as well, right? Like I have tons of systems for my business, but as the home CEO you want to have system for this. So I actually have a weekend prep kind of checklist that we use in our home that allows it to not just be me. So let’s talk about why it matters when you spend time over the weekend getting the week set up. You can start Monday feeling a lot better. And while, you know, I always say it’s just the calendar, it’s just Monday.

Cara Harvey 00:03:10 Mentally, a lot of us really need that. That Monday start, right? A lot of us have really good momentum because we’re coming off the weekend. And if we don’t have planning, I hear from lots of people. I miss Sunday planning. I wasn’t able to do it right. If we don’t do those things over the weekend, we start the week feeling behind. So I like to use the weekend to get my week prepared as a form of self-care. My weeks are super busy Monday through Thursday, right? Fridays tend to be a little chill or whatever. And then now that most you know football is done like Saturday is a little lighter for us. But we’re about to go into cheer comp season, so I’m about to lose all my weekends, right? So I need to use time over the weekend to get the week ready so that I can be less stressed out so that I can have more time for the things I want to do so that I can tackle the last minute things that pop up on my list, and I can just be more patient with my family.

Cara Harvey 00:04:00 I feel like when I do things over the weekend to prepare for the week. I am more equipped to handle hiccups, and I think that’s really the heart behind it. Is asking yourself the question, what can I spend time doing over the weekend that will help set me up for success over the week to decrease my stress? Because when your stress is decreased over the week, you’re then able to work on other things. If you’re not spending time in the weekend doing things that can help you for the week, you’re going to take that time during the week, and that is the time that you want to be spending on your goals. That is the time you want to. If I have 15 minutes and I could go watch a video, that’s part of my learning goal, I would rather spend time doing that then, oh, I forgot to prep the, you know, the food that I need for the week. I need to do that instead. Right? Part of the 15 minute formula, part of the whole process, is spending the 15 minutes getting the things done so that you can then spend your other 15 minutes on the things that actually matter.

Cara Harvey 00:04:58 I would rather spend time cuddled up with my kid on the couch, watching a Christmas movie, then chopping vegetables, right? But if I do it in batches, what I’ll talk about in a second. I then have that time to do so. So I want to be clear about this too. And I feel like we just one of my calls, we’ve been having this discussion about starting planning earlier. I can’t remember which one. Just because I say weekend doesn’t mean Sunday. I think a lot of people think I need to use my Sunday to prepare. Now. I do most of my weekend prep on Sunday, but I started on Fridays. I start some of my planning on Fridays. I do some of my tasks on Saturday and some of it on Sunday. I think this is also really important when you’re trying to jam all your tasks into Sunday. It’s it’s really going against the framework, right? You’re going to be trying to fit so much into such little time. I spread my stuff out.

Cara Harvey 00:05:43 And if you don’t have a master list, we’ll talk about that today. It can be hard to do this, but because I have a master list of what I want to get done on the weekends, I can look at Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Now I typically work Fridays till three and then it’s Friday night. For me, weekend is like Friday after 3 p.m. till Sunday at eight because I work doing the Sunday call, right. And so I want you to think about that. It doesn’t have to be. I do a three hour meal prep on Sundays. And now as we go into the holiday season, I also want you to think about this principle. What sort of things can you do to help better prepare yourself so it’s not all jammed into one day. It’s the backwards planning, right? So I’m going to give you these are my tasks. You can screenshot. You can write them down, get them into Trello. But these are the things I do to prep my weekend. I want you to come up with things in batches of your life.

Cara Harvey 00:06:31 The first one is home. Okay. I do these things again from Friday to Sunday so that the week feels better. My meal planning and prep I’ve created a checklist of the basic meal prep that I need to be doing now. I don’t do it all on Sundays. On Fridays I make my meal plan for the week okay. We do a very simple buffet style meal plan. I make one meal like one full dinner meal a week and the rest is like we ground some ground turkey air fry, some chicken roast, some veg, some potatoes, some rice and then we just kind of piece meals together. Okay, that works for our family, but it might be different for you. But Friday I make my meal plan. Saturday I grocery shop and Sunday I prep. So you see how I’ve taken that. And I’ve split it up into three things. So it’s not so overwhelming if I don’t do my planning on Friday and I’m like, oh crud, I’m just going to go to the store Saturday, I’m not best equipped to be most efficient with my finances and my time, right? I’m at the store just buying whatever.

Cara Harvey 00:07:21 It helps. Okay, I do a house reset over the weekend. This is where everybody helps. We take the rooms and we just put things away. This is like we have a bin where we put our shoes right. The shoe bin gets emptied at the bottom of our stairs. Everyone’s crap gets thrown at the bottom of the stairs. We put all that stuff away. All the coats that have been flung all over get hung up. We pick everything up. It’s not a deep clean. It is a house reset so we can start the week better. We clear off the table, things like that. This one tends for me. I’m just going to tell you when I do it in the weekend, but I want you to think about your week. That one happens on Sundays for me because, you know, we’ve existed all weekend. I want to chat with you now and invite you to grab one of my top free resources that have been downloaded almost 4000 times, and this is my ultimate weekly planning checklist.

Cara Harvey 00:08:07 If you are ready to go into your week feeling less frazzled and more in control, this checklist is for you. It’s going to help you set up your week, save time running around, and plan out all the time you need for you, your goals, your family, your business, the whole thing. It’s the exact same checklist that we use in the Purpose Driven Mom Club every Sunday. And not only do I give you the checklist of what to follow to plan your week, but I will give you a Trello board if you want to use Trello with it. Absolutely free with a video tutorial, it is going to take you less than 30 minutes a week to plan the week and save you hours. If you want to go and snag this checklist, you can go to a purpose driven romcom slash podcast checklist and it’ll be there absolutely free for you. Again, go to a purpose driven romcom checklist and get your copy. Laundry. So I do laundry two days during the week, and then I do laundry one day during the weekend.

Cara Harvey 00:08:59 This is a variable. It depends on when I feel like doing it. A lot of times it’s Saturdays, but it just depends on what laundry I need, putting it away, things like that. A weekly cleaning task. Often I will have like one cleaning task in my weeklies that didn’t get done during the week. I do that on Saturdays. I try not to do too much on Sundays because our Sundays are a little bit jam packed, so that’s my schedule. You might choose to do it on Sundays. Sundays we go to church. We’re home for like an hour to an hour and a half. Then my daughter is at cheer. During that time, I do my therapy appointment and then I work for a little bit. Or I do some of these tasks, and then I go pick her up. And then sometimes I have a meeting at 630 for Girl Scouts, and then I have our meeting. So like, my Sundays are not as free and as open as my Saturdays tend to be.

Cara Harvey 00:09:39 So that’s why I do that. Then and then a finance reconcile. I check my account and do that every day. But on the week, on the weekends, I sit with my husband. We look at the money for the week. We just check things out 15 minutes. All of these things can be done. Now. The meal planning isn’t done in 15 minutes for me, but it’s done in small chunks. So I’ve created a system of here are 15 minute tasks to get the meal planning done, and I do them throughout the day. All right. What are your home tasks? Write them down. Personal tasks I also have these things that I do as a reset to get myself ready. And again, not huge check in, okay. I mean, not much time things right? They don’t take hours. I chunk them out over the weekend, so I always give myself some sort of rest. This tends to be Friday nights for us. We don’t often have a lot of activities, except now of course going into the holidays.

Cara Harvey 00:10:22 We have tons of activities in the weekend, but we typically have Friday nights off, so I always give myself like a rest block during that time. I do like skincare mask and like teeth whitening strips. And I read my book and I just like relax. That tends to be what I do for that. I also do my weekly planning. I start on Fridays and I do my work planning Fridays, my personal planning Saturdays, and I finish it all up on Sundays where when we’re at our planning, that’s how I do it. Journaling. This one I tried to do, and I don’t always do very well, but I might do some sort of reflection on the week or some journaling movement. I try to get a walk in. I, you know, I’m one of those Apple Watch people, so I’m always got to hit my steps. I do some sort of movement. I typically work out Monday through Friday, but I like on Saturdays and Sundays to just try to walk or do something, to move my body, and then a goal and date check in like I want to see.

Cara Harvey 00:11:09 Like how am I at? Do I need to audit any goals? Where are things going again? All these things don’t take very long. If I break them down over the course of Friday, Saturday, Sunday and the last one are my family tasks. So these are the things we do over the weekend, right? We have like a little family meeting while we’re having dinner, one of the dinner days where we talk about the week. This is where we sit through and say, these are the things that have to happen. Okay, so this week, give me an example. The school store was there. So we talked about that. I forgot my kids with the school store mom. And I was like, all right, well let’s pick. I told them, you, I’ll give you money for one thing, at the school store, if you want to buy a second thing at the school store over the weekend, you can pick from the chore list. We have a finance list for them and you can do extra things.

Cara Harvey 00:11:48 Both my kids chose extra chores over the weekend, which took things off my plate, and then I paid them to buy a second thing at the school store. We’ll talk about who’s got what. Sports. Are these things clean? Pick out what you need for the week. Make sure that those things are where they need to go. So we typically do this not during dinner. We’ll look at the calendar and stuff. Always. For us, it’s like a reset, a family fun activity. Just something. Whether we are playing, we’re monopoly family, so maybe we play monopoly at home or we’ll try to go out and do something like next week we’re going to like a holiday bingo event. We try to do something together as a family with the 4 or 5 of us, especially if my stepson is with us. we go through our chore chart for the week. So I shared this, but I have a list my kids have. One is things you do because you live here and the other side says things you can earn extra money for.

Cara Harvey 00:12:32 And so they have their chores tasks. We don’t call them chores like they’re things that they do because they live here. We just call them their tasks. So they have their tasks they have to do. They know that, and then they have their things they can do for extra money. So I might look around my house and be like, Thanksgiving is coming right when I’m recording this. So I need to do a clean because we’re hosting. I hate cleaning my baseboards. I don’t want to do it. Kids are perfect clean baseboards. If you ever like thinking like, what can I have my kids do baseboards? So I might say, oh, right, we got to get the baseboards done. I’m going to write that on the list for the week, and I might add extra things. We’ve been really working on this routine of my kids, like learning the cost of things and how to earn money. And it’s been working great of like adding extra chores, and I pick chores for them that take something off my plate.

Cara Harvey 00:13:12 So if it takes something off my plate and it’s not their typical, I’m more than happy to pay them for it, right? So we’ll go through the chore chart. Hey, these are your options this week. If you want to earn extra money. They have charts where they’re tracking. It works. Pack lunches right? I go through the school lunch menu on Sundays. My kids, we get free lunch in my district so they can have free lunch if they choose. So we just kind of go through the menu. What days do you want lunch? With? Days do you not? And then we pack lunch and prepare any things we need and then also prepping school supplies and outfits. You know, my daughter plays cello, so we have to make sure. Hey, is all the cello stuff together. My kids pick out their clothes on Sundays for the week so that they’re all on little hangers, and all they have to do is take them out of the closet and they already have their clothes.

Cara Harvey 00:13:51 And then I’m like, oh, crud, I need to do laundry because this Wednesday is Spirit Day and your Spirit Day shirt isn’t done. Like, you see all these things, they’re giving me peace of mind. What these things are doing is they’re helping me feel more equipped to go into the week, and they’re helping me not stress out during the week. If we’re going through our family meeting and my kid is like, I have a project to do, it’s due on this day. I have this test on this day. Dope. Let’s talk about it over the weekend. So we have minimal surprises because guess what? We’re going to have surprises during the week. Stuff is going to pop up. So I would much rather do as much of these things as I can over the course of the weekend. Now here’s the thing I want to talk about. Ready? So here we’ve got five to say. There’s 15, I don’t know, I think it’s 15 or something. Maybe a little more 15 tasks here.

Cara Harvey 00:14:34 You could turn this into a numerical goal for yourself. To make it easy, you could say, I have 15 tasks that I want to get done over the weekend to make my week easier. Easy math numerical goals. Remember we talked about this last week 15 tasks divided by the three days of the weekend. Tell me that I need to do five of these tasks a day to get it all done. That’s so much more doable than let me do all of this on Sundays right now. If you’re not sure what tasks you might want to use, this is where we can go into our good friend ChatGPT and we can do some AI. So I want to show you a little bit of that. Take a quick second, because I wanna invite you to join. One of my new favorite apps is called Brain Club. I am all about trying to get my side hustle on, right? And one of the things I hate doing is taking money out of my pre-planned budget for tiny things that pop up, like the snack stand during football season, or the $10 you have to Venmo somewhere else because you need it for school.

Cara Harvey 00:15:27 And I found Brand Club to literally fill that gap for me. Here’s what I do with it. Every single day I go in, I earn between a dollar and $1.50. It takes me two minutes and I just fill in some surveys. Super simple, very easy. I also will link it to my Amazon, buy Walmart and my target account. So when I buy things anyway, I get cash back. Takes me about ten days, but I earn $10 and when I get my $10, I cash it to my Venmo girl math. I’m using it all the places I want to share with you a $3 code to get started, because you need $10 to cash out. So let me give you $3. I’ll get $3 if you sign up. I really appreciate it. Go to a purpose driven romcoms brand club. Do it on your phone because it’s going to bring you up to the app so you can download it. It’s a really easy way to just get some side money going, so you don’t have to take it out of your regular budget and make some money for yourself.

Cara Harvey 00:16:10 That’s a purpose driven, romcom slash brand club. We can create systems for these tasks so that you can get help. This is what I did for my meal plan. I made a checklist so that my meal planning system is up there. It’s all broken down. I follow it, but if anyone is like sitting around and want like if my daughter wanted to help me, we have one of those like chopper things I think I share all the time. I love my little chopper. I allow her to use it safely. I’ve taught her how to use it. So if I’m sitting in the kitchen and I’m getting the meal prep done and she’s just kind of has nothing, isn’t doing anything at the moment, I’m like, hey, do you want to help me chop these vegetables? Because I know that there’s a system. I know that there’s a list. The more you can systematize, the easier it is. When someone, my husband says to me, how can I help? I don’t know, go look at the list, right? Like, not in a rude way, but in a I’ve already crafted it.

Cara Harvey 00:16:54 So if you don’t know how to make the system, let’s load up ChatGPT right quick and let’s let’s try to make a system ready. Okay. So this is our AI. We love it. It’s our virtual assistant. You can see I use it for all types of things all over my life. So let’s make a system for. Let’s see which one do we want to pick? I hadn’t thought this out. Family meeting. Okay, I am a mom of three, and I want to have a weekly family meeting to streamline the week. Let’s say a week, a weekend. We’ll say a weekend family meeting. To streamline the week, please create a checklist of tasks that I could use for this meeting. Let’s see what it gives us. Okay, again, you don’t have to think of everything. So it’s like, okay, I don’t need all of this. That’s the AI isn’t to solve it. It’s to help. So it’s like, okay, what I could do is I can open up a Google doc, I could easily let’s do it here.

Cara Harvey 00:17:52 I’m going to just make a new Google doc while we’re on here. So if this is me and I’m like, all right, I want to do this and this is me and I do want to do this. So perfect. Hold on. Let me move on my zoom boxes. All right. What I would do is since I decided this is this is not something I have a system like a printed checklist for okay, so what I’m going to do is make it today. So I’m going to say weekly family meeting. I’m going to copy over the ChatGPT stuff. And then I’m going to go through and customize for my family using checkboxes. And I’m just going to make the system now. Now do I need to do all these things. Let’s say all right, all right I’m going to make decisions based on my family. Begin with them. Positive moment for the week. I love that I would like to do that. And I’m going to use if you see at the top of the word doc the checkbox feature.

Cara Harvey 00:18:34 Okay, cool. I don’t need to do all this. I don’t really feel like doing wins and challenges. I feel like we can kind of cover that here, but maybe you want to. All right. Reviewing the next week okay. And see, I’m just going to delete the stuff that doesn’t serve me. This is something I want to do. I don’t need to write all this stuff down. We want to make it simple. Planning dinners for the next week. I could do that if I wanted to, but really, for me, what that would look like instead is review next week’s lunch order, right? To make that easier. Review and update chore chart I like that assign a specific responsibilities. I think that’s covered. I don’t think I need to write that twice, but I love this one. See, I wouldn’t have thought that. But I want to put it plain at least one family activity, one game night I like this. Have each member shared a goal that they have? We can talk about any challenges, schedule, individual time, blah blah blah blah blah.

Cara Harvey 00:19:25 I feel like we don’t need any of that stuff. Cool. All right. So what I would do then is go through this, ask myself and my family, do we have anything else we want to add to this list? If I do, if I don’t, I could judge it up. I could put it in Canva. I can make it look cute, or I could just print this or what I would. What I’m probably going to do is take a find a piece of scrap paper and write it out so we can, you know, save on paper. And then look, we have this. I could put it in a sheet protector every single week. We could pull it out or I don’t have a laminator, but if you do you could laminate it or a sheet protector works great. Use a dry erase marker, and then one of my kids can be in charge of making sure we run through the family meeting. See how it took me? Barely any time to craft a system around it, and now I know exactly how to do it.

Cara Harvey 00:20:04 This doesn’t that doesn’t have to take long. That could take 15 minutes and it’s less overwhelming. I said, all this I think already start preparing. Don’t have to just use Sunday. And what I want to encourage you this week is to pick one of these, a task from each category. So going into this weekend, I want to encourage you to pick, I don’t know, a task from your home list, a task from your personal and a task from your family. Don’t try to do them all at once. Now this goes into the habit based goals. Now this is where we use habit stacking. So do you see how we used numerical goals to get started. And now we’re going to use some habit stacking. So what if this month going for November you’re like I’m going to pick one thing from each list to do for my weekend prep. And then in December I’m going to add a second thing, and then I’m going to add a third and a fourth. That way it doesn’t have to feel so overwhelming, but you could start getting your family going and getting your own weekend prep stuff together.

Cara Harvey 00:20:55 So I’m going to stop there. I’m going to unshare my screen so we can kind of chat through if you have questions, if you have thoughts, if you want any additional help on your own weekend prep brainstorm, now is a great time to use it. You also can just ask open questions at this time. So when we do sewer calls, we use the raise hand feature which is on the bottom of your screen if you’re on the computer, I’m not sure where it’s on, on your phone and I’m open for coaching. So again, follow up questions. Thoughts. We got about 40 minutes so I can help you with whatever you need help with. Just use the raise hand feature and we can we can jump on in. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Purpose Driven Mom Show. If this episode served you in any way, we would really appreciate it if you headed over to wherever you listen to podcast, hit that five star and leave a review and a rating. That’s how more moms can find us and we can grow our community.

Cara Harvey 00:21:45 If you had a tip or an make sure you come over and tag me at a Purpose Driven Mom on Instagram and share it with your friends. The best way for us to get this message out there of less hustle and less shame and more intentionality, is for you to share it with people you know need to hear it. Thanks for listening. We appreciate you and I can’t wait to connect with you more outside of the podcast.