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 of our Moms Show episode 458. And today we’re going to talk about a topic that gets brought up a lot in my community. And I think it is time that we talk about it here. And that is reentry time.

Cara Harvey 00:00:54 This is how do you get back on track after traveling, illness, etc. it is my number. It’s about to be the summer We’re traveling a lot. We’ve got a lot of things going on, and one of the things that I really had to work on was a system because, you know, I love a good system, but it was a system for what do we do to get back on track now this year, if you’re new here, my daughter, I have three kids, seven, nine, 18. My daughter does competitive cheer. We’ve traveled a lot this year that we hadn’t previously done. This was new to us, so I learned a lot of lessons about what worked and what didn’t. And one of the things I realized was we were struggling with was that re-entry time back in. Okay, a lot of the moms that I work with in the mom club, they also talk to me a lot about illnesses this year. Really, the kids were really sick, stomach bugs. It was thrown people off and they were struggling to get back on track.

Cara Harvey 00:01:41 That’s what we’re going to talk about today, is a proactive and a reactive plan to get you back on track. I’m going to put all the show notes at a Purpose Driven mom.com/podcast for 58. So if you want to check out any links or anything we talk about, just swipe up on your player or head over there. Okay, before we jump in, I want to just give you a little encouragement that things don’t have to always look perfect and things are going to be variable. One of the things I realized was my kids have more non five day school weeks than they have full five day school weeks. When you add in breaks and days off and teacher and service and holidays all of it. Yeah, the summer in. We’re always waiting for this normal week. Have you found yourself saying it? Because I mean I do to rate like I’m just waiting for the normal week. When is it going to be a normal week? It’s not. So what if instead we make a system to help you get back on track again? This was our year.

Cara Harvey 00:02:30 The returning home had stressed me out a lot in the beginning when we were traveling. Now we didn’t even travel as much as some other cheer companies. My daughter’s performance wreck, which is not as serious as like all star cheer, but it’s still pretty serious. But we were still away most weekends, January, February and March, and in cookie season, things like that. When I’m recording this now, I think when this airs will be in Florida for cheer. So we’ll be coming home from a trip and I found myself really stressed out. Suitcases everywhere, right? Laundry was piled up. It’s Sunday, We have to come home. I work Sunday nights in the Vermont club. We do a Sunday evening call, so thankfully my team is really flexible with me. Like, for example, this upcoming Sunday we have a comp and I was like, I might need coverage because with competitive cheer, we don’t know the schedule until like the Wednesday before we leave, which is not fun to plan for.

Cara Harvey 00:03:18 So I said we could perform at eight, right? The church could perform at 8 a.m. or 7 p.m., and I have no idea when I’m going to be back. So the unpredictability was kind of stressing me out a little bit, because I would come home and I would lose my Sunday. Now I teach a method, plan, push, rest and fun, and I use Sundays as my plan day. Typically, this is where I’m planning my week and I’m meal prepping and we’re doing laundry and we’re picking out clothes and we’re just kind of getting everything back together. I lost my Sunday almost all year, and I would lose many Saturdays and things like that. And it was feeling like that feeling of being behind before the week even started. You know, that feeling where you start Monday and you’re like, what are we doing, right? If you had illnesses, if your kids were sick and you were trying to get back on, like, I know what it feels like, and I know that there are challenges of, again, travel.

Cara Harvey 00:04:05 You’re sick. They’re sick. Just unpredictability. Your routines are thrown off so your kids are thrown off. You’re throw off. You already feel behind. The exhaustion is just creeping in. When we came back from our last weekend, it was really fun. We had a really fun time. I was very tired, right? We were in the car for a long time. It was very challenging so I know the feeling. Okay. You also have this pressure because you have to get back to normal. If your kids are like mine and they go to traditional school, you know, if you’ve been here for a while, I’ve been like tiptoeing with the idea of homeschooling. And after this season I’m like, I kind of don’t hate it, right? Because it’s like, now you have to get back and they have to get back on track. So then they’re exhausted. You’re exhausted coming back from illness. Everything’s thrown off. And I just want to remind you, it’s okay to take your time to transition back in.

Cara Harvey 00:04:48 Now we’re going to talk today about proactive things you can do before traveling, before you know something’s going to be unpredictable. Now, you won’t know if your kid’s going to get sick. So these ones are more for travel. And then we’re gonna talk about reactive things, things you do afterwards to just help it be smooth. But I just want to say reentry feels hard. There are studies that show that it takes the average person 3 to 5 days to fully transition back into routines after disruptions like illnesses or travels, and that came from the American Psychological Association. Right, 3 to 5 days. So imagine you’re like, not only losing the time because you’re away, but now you’re losing the time to get back in. And then again, for us, it was like by the time we got back into our routines in January, we were leaving again. And so it took me this whole season to really figure out, like, what is it? What is missing? And it was it was the system, right? Then there’s that mental fatigue as well.

Cara Harvey 00:05:40 Right? We get there and you’re like, I’m exhausted. I am very, very tired. And on top of it I feel behind. So it’s not just reentering after illness or travel because you’ve got tasks like, yes, we have the laundry and the grocery shopping, but you’re just also just mentally not there. And then we start to feel guilty, right? You start to feel bad because you’re like, I need to rest a little bit. But I’m also struggling to catch up. So I want to shift your mindset from I’m behind to I’m transitioning. This is a transition period, okay? And give yourself grace. If you had a friend who is going through this, would you say to her, well, you’re failing. I don’t care that you got home 8:00 on a Sunday night and your kids have to go to school, and you need a rest in the morning, right? You would encourage her to give herself some grace. So just do the same for you. Now, I know you know the feeling.

Cara Harvey 00:06:28 And as we go into, like I said, May and the summer, you probably have some trips planned. You probably have some things that you want to to get together. So let’s talk about what you can do now to prepare. If you are a mom who wants to start a business and you need help, and you want to go from chaos to clarity, I want you to go over to a Purpose Driven Mom business planner and get my new Ultimate Digital planner for business owners. I’ve got client profile pages, business breakdowns, promo planners, goal setting, social media, and more. You can take that overwhelm that is planning your business and get all of it in one place. You can make a binder, get your things together, and get on track with your business. I’ve got 13 different planning worksheets you can choose from. Goal setting sheets, project planning, product planning, client profiles, financial templates, and more. Go to a Supermom Planner and you can also get this bonus social media content pages, where there are over 20 different options for you to lay out your social media and get it done.

Cara Harvey 00:07:32 Go to a purpose driven Rom-com planner and grab yours today. Again, you can use many of these same things if the kids get sick or you get sick. But because we’re going into the summer, I want to hit travel. Because when, you know trips are coming, right, when you know these things are happening, you can be proactive instead of reactive. Let’s start with your proactive things, the things you can do before you leave to set yourself up for success. So I have a couple things. It’s like a little system, a little checklist that I follow that we all are on board with. Okay, so one thing that we always do before we leave is we do a 15 minute pickup or longer to make sure the house is put together. There is no worse feeling for me than coming home and the house is already behind. So inside that time I always load my dishes. Now it depends how long I’m away because I don’t love my dishes sitting in there in case they don’t dry all the way.

Cara Harvey 00:08:22 But I will always make sure the dishes are loaded, the garbage is taken out, the floors are swept and stuff is picked up. That way you’re not also coming home and having to clean all that up. I also will kind of go through the fridge to make sure that we’re utilizing any of the foods we need that week. The week before we go on a bigger trip is a leftovers week. I will buy produce only and we will eat from our pantry. So if you know you have a trip coming up, plan the week before to be eat from the Pantry challenge one that’ll help save you some money that you can use on your trip, but it will also kind of clear out things so things aren’t going bad. What this also will help with is when you come back, you’ll have your grocery list made. So the other thing that I will do before I leave is I will go and make my grocery list for the week we come back so that that’s one less thing. The goal of proactive systems is to give your brain one less thing to think about.

Cara Harvey 00:09:12 We keep a notepad on my phone. I share it with my husband. Just very simple in our iPhones, and it has our template for our groceries. If you don’t have this, I highly recommend it. I tried to do Trello. My husband was like no, so this is fine. It’s organized by section at the Aldi. I’ve talked about this a few times because I really think it is so helpful. It’s organized by section. I use the little checkboxes and it’s basically all the things we typically buy. What I do is I will go through and put an asterisk if we don’t need it. That way, if I go to the store, my husband goes to the store, or if we utilize like Instacart, which we haven’t done in a while, but I used to use it a lot, maybe use a meal delivery service. The list is already made. I want to encourage you to do this before you leave. This way you already have eight from your pantry for the whole week.

Cara Harvey 00:09:56 You know what it is and it’s done. And you know exactly what you need. So when you come home, all you have to do is the actual grocery shopping. Then I want you to make sure your laundry is done. So this is another one that we do. We make sure all the laundry is done, which I tend to do before a trip anyway, just because we use the clothes like we don’t have a ton of clothes, they have enough clothes. But if we’re going away for a longer period of time, they might take every pair of underwear they have or every pair of pajamas. So I make sure the laundry is done, folded and put away, because I know that I’m going to want to start laundry when I get home, and I don’t want anything waiting or queued up. A couple other things that I do is I will make my plan to have the day after be a light day. So if I come home on a Sunday, I might have Monday be a bare minimum.

Cara Harvey 00:10:38 We call them when the poop hits the fan. Lighter days so that I can use that day intentionally as a catch back up day. I tried my best to like, look at my calendar and make sure it’s not a super full day. When we’re going to Florida, we’re driving, and we planned the day after. When I put in my kid’s vacation request, we put it in for the day after as well, because we might just all need a day off to just what is it? Take a vacation from your vacation, right? So I will do the same for me so that I can rest. And I’m not jumping right back in. You might not be able to do that, but you can try to do that. A couple other things I like to do before going besides the pickup and the planning, is sit and do my plan for that week in my calendar. I will look and I will do my weekly planning system. It has five core areas where you put your appointments 15 minutes for your goals, 15 minutes for your habits, 15 minutes for your learning, and any last minute tasks.

Cara Harvey 00:11:29 I will make my plan to the best of my ability so that it’s done. While I’m doing that, what’s also happening is my brain is going through like, oh, this is next week, this is next week, this is next week. And then I ask myself, what are the things I can do this week to make next week easier? So if I have a Girl Scout meeting that next week, I don’t want to be coming back. And then also having to do my Girl Scout lesson plan. I want to get that Girl Scout lesson plan done before I go. So this way I’ve kind of made my list. Now I can leave on my trip and I can feel really good instead of feeling stressed out about reentry. Now let’s talk about some reactive things. And these are things you can use when you have illness or you’re coming back from travel okay. And this is the reminder that you can do anything but not everything. And it is okay. So what I tend to do on the way back, my husband drives mostly.

Cara Harvey 00:12:16 We have a longer drive to Florida. We’ll split up the driving, but when I’m not driving, that is when I will do a brain dump of everything that’s on my mind, and I’ll get it into the notepad on my phone. If I’m on an airplane, I would use pen and paper to just get that done before I enter back into my house. Again, if you’re coming back from illness, do the same thing. Brain dump everything that’s running through your head, and then you’re going to use a priority filter. We at the club, we love the Eisenhower Matrix. So what you’ll do is you’ll split your paper into fours. First things first is you’ll brain dump your list. Don’t put it in a quadrant yet. Just brain dump it, get it out. You can do it by category, or you can just get it all out. If my brain is super squirrely, I might just do every task all over the place. Most of the time I’ll go by category Girl Scouts, cheer, home school, work, right? I’ll do it by category because that’s a little more organized for my brain.

Cara Harvey 00:13:04 Once I’m done, I’m then going to split it into my quadrants. Okay. Now I like quadrants on paper because when I do them on Trello, when I do them on my computer, on a dock, I can just keep entering lines. Using a piece of paper is a boundary. I cannot go out of my my t right. So I make a little t. I cannot go out of those lines and I have to make decisions on what is important. So I will brain dump everything that needs to get done, and then I will filter them things that go in my first top quadrant. This is urgent things and important. These are things like the work deadlines or the kids scheduled, or the things you have to do. That came up because I’m on paper. I had to make a decision. Right. My second quadrant. These are things that are not urgent, but still important. Like maybe for the next few weeks. My third quadrant. These are things we call the delegate quadrant.

Cara Harvey 00:13:50 They’re urgent, but not important that you do them. Okay, so, like deep cleaning my car after a long car drive. It’s urgent because my car is probably a hot mess. But I’m gonna be real. My car is always a hot mess, but not my husband’s car. I said to my kids, I was like, y’all like, leave daddy’s car so nice, but mine has food everywhere. But you might want it cleaned out. Well, your kids can do that, right? You can delegate that. Okay. Things like that. Things like, oh, you want to get your photos organized from your trip before you forget? Cool. But you don’t have to do them right now. And then you drop it. Those are the things that you’re like. These are on my mind, but I can drop it. So I want you to think to yourself, imagine in that quadrant one, you only have like two hours to do something. What would make your biggest impact and make some priority based decisions? This is going to help you.

Cara Harvey 00:14:33 So when you actually physically reenter your home, it’s one less decision. Think about this reentry plan and system as let me make one less decision. So on your drive home, on your ride home, take some time to do it for cheer. I often traveled with just my daughter. My husband would do things with the boys because they had their own sports. We divide and conquer a lot, so I didn’t always have, like I didn’t always have someone driving, so I was the one who has to do it. So I would maybe sit at the chair comp with my notepad and do it at the comp while we’re waiting hours and hours for things to happen and the girls are running around. I might talk like do the talk to text into my phone, right? You can still do it. All right then, what I want you to do is tackle one thing at a time. Okay. Now, I didn’t say this, but I want to say this now, when you’re traveling. Easiest, simplest tip that helps me a lot is having a laundry bag.

Cara Harvey 00:15:24 We keep one laundry bag and then all the laundry goes in it. Most hotels have laundry bags. I always bring extra plastic bags for this. This way, as soon as I walk into my home. Right? So I already did my brain dump. I walk into my home. We bring all the suitcases in before I sit down. I take the laundry bags out of wherever they I had stored them, and I start the laundry. I do it right away, immediately. And I really believe that you like, if you unpack your suitcases early, you’re going to feel so much better. And so this is what we were all last weekend when we came home. I actually had a surge of energy. I did want to just sit down, I really did. So I got some water and I started the laundry and I was like, I’m gonna put on a 15 minute timer and some good songs, and I’m just gonna start unpacking some things. And again, my kids can help them pack their own things.

Cara Harvey 00:16:10 And I wound up taking about an hour, and I got everything unpacked and put away, and it felt so good because I could check that off my list. So I do believe unpacking as soon as you can helps. Now when you’re packing in the hotel, keeping things organized. My kids each have their own suitcase, so all their stuff goes into their suitcase, so it’s very easy to say, here is your suitcase. Take your suitcase upstairs. Not I don’t know where this is. I don’t know whose clothes these are, things like that. I also pack very minimally. we bring, like, one extra outfit. So I. My kids wear when we travel. They wear pretty much everything. So like, their suitcases last week were just their laundry bag. And like, one outfit, like they really wore everything. So it was great. So there wasn’t as much unpacking to have done, but have everything get unpacked as soon as you can. Okay. I also recommend like open up the windows of your house, light a candle.

Cara Harvey 00:16:58 Like really just refresh that area for yourself. And then when I’m coming home on travel day after I do that, I do just sit for a little bit and let myself, like, settle before I jump into things. But then I tackle one poor area at a time. Okay, so for me, laundry started. Then I go right to meals and groceries because I know that if we don’t have healthy foods prepped, we’re all more tempted to want to eat out or not eat the things that fuel our bodies. Great. And then that’s going to make us feel even worse. So then I go and I go to that grocery list that are already made, and I’ll run to the grocery store or depending on the day, the time, etc., I might take that grocery list I already have, jump onto my Instacart and I’ll order it so it gets to my house, like right after I get to my house and then the groceries are already there. Don’t forget you can delegate that way. Yes, it’ll cost a little bit of extra money, but it’ll save you that time and mental energy.

Cara Harvey 00:17:50 So once I get that done, I start my meal prep. Now I make a lot of our foods from scratch this year, which has been my goal. And so I will immediately kind of come home since we pretty much eat everything and I’m like, let me get my bread started right away. Right. Because that’ll take pretty much all day. So I’ll get some bread started. I have a list I keep on the side of the fridge of what I typically meal prep. I don’t do it all on Sundays, but every day I meal prep a little bit. So like today we’re like almost out of bread. It’s a Friday. It’s not Sunday, right? So I’ll still go. I’m making bread right now. It’s doing its thing. tomorrow I notice we’re almost out of cookies. I keep frozen like homemade cookies in the freezer, so I’ll make some of those. So I’ll start my meal prep and get that done. Once that’s done, I also recommend just kind of do like a little bit of a walkthrough for a home reset for things that just needed a little bit of love that maybe didn’t get it there.

Cara Harvey 00:18:37 Okay. And if the house feels chaotic, focus on one area at a time. Are you looking to spend intentional time with your kid and have no idea where it’s going to fit in? Let me help you out. I just made an activity book called draw with mom, and the purpose of this book is to give you intentional time with your kid. That doesn’t have to take hours. I’m going to be real. I don’t want to play for hours at all. I also don’t want to play dolls and have you tell me how I’m doing it wrong. I made this book to be an interactive journal so that you could be creative. Your kid can be creative and you can have fun together. There’s 50 prompts that are set up for you, where the child draws on one side and you add to it. Yesterday, my son and I did it and it was draw a house and then it said the parent to draw a rainbow and a sun. And we’re super creative. We make up stories, we draw outside the box.

Cara Harvey 00:19:26 We don’t have to stick to the prompts, but the goal is sometimes it’s always the start that stops us. I want to spend intentional time with my kid and I don’t know what to do. Well, I’ve made a plan for you. You can go to a purpose driven mom, draw with mom, or just search on Amazon to grab the book. Now it’s 1995. It’s a great way to be intentional about your one on one time and spend time with your kid. That’s a purpose driven mom. Draw with mom. I also think it’s so important that when you come back, you think about resetting routines with tinier winds, giving everyone a earlier bedtime. Okay. You know, coming back. It’s so easy to be like, well, we don’t have anything made. Let’s just order out. But restarting, especially for us when we travel, we just don’t eat as well, right? So everyone’s kind of sugared up, not feeling so great. We haven’t been as active. Whatever. Go get some sunshine.

Cara Harvey 00:20:20 Go outside. Go take a walk with your family. You know, everybody takes their showers. Get ready early or bedtime. Take care of your own needs as well, and then get to your planning for the week. A lot of times the moms I work with in my community, they’re like, well, I was away all weekend, so I didn’t do my planning for the week. Not doing my planning for the week throws me off so much. So do your planning no matter what, even if you’re just doing one day at a time, like we like I mentioned, we just came back last week. This is a week for me where I’m doing this reentry plan, and I didn’t do my typical weekly weekly planning. I just did one day at a time, one day at a time. I will also then put 15 minute timers on to answer any emails that I need to get to. Okay, according to habit research, it takes about 66 days to form a habit, I know that this 21 days, but it’s about 66, right? But only 1 to 2 weeks to regain a previous one.

Cara Harvey 00:21:07 So here’s what I want to recommend. And this is what we call habit stack express. Now habit stacking in the way that I teach it is taking one small habit and then adding another one, then adding another one, then adding another one takes time to get those under control. If you have a routine that you’ve been doing, what I want you to do is do it on Habit Stack Express. So I’m going to give you my morning routine. My morning routine flows. It’s I typically do it. I struggle if I don’t get up in time. I don’t always have enough time to do my reading. But it’s it’s very repetitive. It’s habitual. It is what it is. Right? I get up sometimes between 530 and 6. Again. If I get up closer to the 530, I have more time. Six I don’t. I go through and do my photo calling. I do my Duolingo. I read it ten minutes of my book. I work out while I’m working out. I listen to my Bible study, I unpack my dishwasher and I start my laundry.

Cara Harvey 00:21:53 I do those seven things pretty much every single morning while my kids get up, get ready, and we do school. Okay, it works for me. But when I come back for a trip or illness and I’m trying to get back on track, this is the plan I use. Like post recovery for my surgery this year, I pick 1 to 2. So instead of saying I’m going to do all seven things in my morning routine Monday morning when I wake up, the one thing I’m going to focus on is I want to get I pick one, it doesn’t have to be in order. Okay, you pick the one that you think will have the most impact. For me, it’s my exercise. Maybe if I’m traveling, I haven’t gotten exercise. And so okay, I’m going to work out today if I do anything else in my morning routine. Bonus. But no pressure. Tuesday workout. Plus I’m going to add another one Wednesday workout. Plus now I’ve got three. So by the end of the week I’ve got all seven things in my routine back.

Cara Harvey 00:22:37 And it wasn’t that I put pressure on myself to do them all right away, it was that I slowly added them up. This way you don’t have to take forever to restart. It’s just tiny, tiny baby steps 1 to 2 daily habits at a time, instead of jumping into everything is going to make you feel better. So instead of thinking about how you have to catch up and get it all back on track, focus on just moving forward one step at a time. Was it sometimes take me a full week to get back on track and then next week? Yes, but it’s better than saying, oh, well, the week is completely thrown off. Before we close, I just want to remind you of some things that you might get stuck in when you’re doing re-entry from trips or illness. Right. And that’s perfectionism, and that’s wanting everything to be normal. Absolutely. Immediately. It’s not going to be right. So choosing the progress, like I said, choosing moving forward instead of catching up, setting micro goals, I’m going to do one load of laundry.

Cara Harvey 00:23:26 Those things are going to help you move forward. Again, moving forward is better than standing still. You will also hit this energy drain if you’re just trying to do too much at once, and you’re never going to reset and leave yourself a little bit to burn out. So again, I highly recommend if you know that you’ll be going away, even if you can’t schedule a full day off or a full day late, can you schedule the morning light? Can you can you schedule yourself a nap? Right? Like when you come back, can you schedule in just a little bit of time? I know that it’s easy to neglect your needs. Put yourself last, but reentry will be harder for you when you’re running on empty. So prioritizing hydration. Go drink your water friends, right? Sleep. Even some quiet time. Rest is not a reward. It is a responsibility. Right? And I want you to do those things. So when you’re coming back from trips, I want you to look at the ones you have going on in the next few months.

Cara Harvey 00:24:12 Ask yourself, what are some things I can do now to make this easier on future me? That’s the self-care. Then prioritize what is actually a priority, not the things you want to get done. Tackling one thing at a time. Small steps forward and slowly rebuild your rhythms. Give yourself some grace and say this is a transition. It’s not a test. I’m not. Oh, I gotta come back and do it great. Again. You’re not behind. You’re resetting. Okay. You will get back on track after your holiday, and you will enjoy it and take these tips into the summer. Our summer is variable. My kids do five weeks of camp, five weeks home. Some of those weeks home were on vacation. Some of these weeks we’re doing what we call mommy school or mommy camp, and it’s just me doing stuff when we go to the beach. Whatever. It’s always going to be different. It’s important that you create rhythms now in your day so that when you’re coming back, like my kids know our evening routine, they know their morning routine.

Cara Harvey 00:25:02 I don’t have to repeat it 800 times. They do it when they’re away on a trip. On the trip, right? So create these rhythms now to make it easier. I’m going to put the show notes at a purpose driven romcom podcast for 58. If you have questions, if you have tips I missed, come over to the community, find me at a Purpose Driven Mom on all the socials, and let’s talk about it more. 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. 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.

Cara Harvey 00:25:51 Thanks for listening. We appreciate you and I can’t wait to connect with you more outside of the podcast.