[PODCAST 253]: Teamwork and Consistency: How We Create Brand-New Routines That Stick!

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21d ago 35:17

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Today’s podcast is all about establishing new habits and staying consistent. I want to share a couple ways that my husband and I have created some really important routines in our brand-new stage of life.

And just a heads up! At the time of recording this podcast, our brand-new STEP Momentum accountability group is just a few days away! (Starting August 28th.) If you’d like to build your Command Central alongside Team LearnDoBecome and receive opportunities to check in and assess your progress with accountability, this is an amazing time to do so!

Click here for all the details!

We recently moved out of state for my husband to start medical school. He spends 9-hour days on campus and I take care of our son and work as a team member at LearnDoBecome. We both have very full days, but we have made time for some crucial routines in our lives.

I received a great question from a community member the other day: How do you determine what your routines should be and how to turn them into consistent routines that get completed on a regular basis?

Here was our process:

Do a mind sweep to get all the routine ideas out of our heads
Figure out which ones were day or time specific (like our weekly planning and budgeting routine)
Create a vision for how we wanted each day to feel/go overall
Put any new routine items into our calendar so there would be time blocked out for them
Pay attention to how these routines feel–are any getting pushed to the side or forgotten? Are we needing additional reminders or support materials to make them a reality?
Review our Routines Lists weekly together and do a personal check-in daily to ensure our own routines are being completed
Some of our example routines include: Exercising together, meal prepping on weekends, planning kids’ church music time, doing homework/work, resetting the house together each evening, and doing a budget and calendar review ever Sunday.

Starting any brand-new routine is truly a project, so if you are wanting to make some substantial change(s) in your life, please treat this as a project and give yourself the support materials and/or calendar reminders to make it a reality. Habits don’t form overnight and when we give ourselves the necessary tools to make these routines “stick,” we feel so much more confident that they won’t be forgotten!

Another community member asked, “I know that we should ‘reset the room’ when we’re done, but I’d love to listen to more about that. How can you remind yourself? How can we train our kids to do it? What if we’re coming back to the same task soon and don’t want to put it all away, but want things tidy? I need all the help!”

Such great questions! I’ll do my best to answer them based on what I personally grew up doing and how I do this now as an adult.

And as we dive into these questions, I want to note that we all have different baselines. What is our home looking like at the start? How “put away” do we want everything? How much time and energy do we have available? What does “consistent resetting” look like in my home?

What works best for me might need to be adapted by you. And that’s totally fine! The STEP principles we teach here at LearnDoBecome are meant to be adjusted to make the most sense in our individual circumstances.

How can you remind yourself?

My husband and I have a dedicated calendar task every evening from 9:30-10 PM called “Reset the Apartment.” It’s literally built into our day and we make sure everything is reset for the next day before we go to bed.

Some days we are able to reset super quick after our son goes to bed early and then that calendared block of time opens up and becomes free time.

I love having this planned time because this is when we do a lot of our talking one-on-one. I wash dishes, my husband picks up toys, and we find other ways to split up the final responsibilities to “close up” the house.

Of course, if one of us were sick or if something more pressing needed our attention, we could change this. But for now, it’s working!

Others might find that using a sticker chart or simple checklist could be helpful to motivate those living in the house to pitch in and help reset.

When it comes to smaller rooms that we’re resetting, you might simply make it a family/household routine: Whenever we are about to leave the room, we spend 2-5 minutes making it look better than we found it. That’s simple enough and leaves room for flexibility if every family member is still getting on board with routine resetting.

How can we train our kids to do it?

Practice, practice, practice! I can’t tell you how many evenings my mom spent training us to routinely clean up the kitchen, tidy up our toys, get our school supplies ready and lunches packed for the day, etc.

We had simple whiteboard charts growing up that had 3 sections: Morning, Afternoon, and Evening. We had to complete certain routines in each of these times of the day and we were responsible for checking them off every day. (These routines were connected to the way we received a small allowance, so it wasn’t really a matter of choice whether or not we got to do these routines. Either we did them happily and received our allowance, or we did them late/grumpily and didn’t receive an allowance. Up to us, but the routines had to be done!)

The biggest impact in my own routine-completing process was really the consistent example of my parents. They modeled how our family resetting-the-home routines went and they still do them to this day! Even when we have a family movie night now (with all kids 17-24), we still help do a room reset and make sure that blankets are folded, snacks are taken back downstairs, etc. It’s really just a part of our family culture and everyday lives at this point!

What if we’re coming back to the same task soon and don’t want to put it all away, but want things tidy?

I think this is task-dependent.

As an example, I LOVE doing paint by numbers. My materials usually include 20 ish colors of paints, a few paintbrushes, the canvas, and materials to clean the brushes. I keep all my materials in a little to-go takeout container (repurposing for the win!) and when I’m ready to paint, I just need to fill up my cup of water for the brushes and everything else is in the takeout container. I try to keep all my support materials in the smallest, most simple space possible so that I can get them out at a moment’s notice, but they aren’t hard to put away either.

For computer work/office work, I have 3 items that always stay out on my desk–the mouse, my headphones, and glasses. Those never get put away completely because I use them every time. However, the computer charger and all other tech accessories sit in a little basket on my desk (out of sight, but super easy to access).

I personally try to limit how many things I take out, or I try to keep them consolidated in one place so that the items don’t spread around.

This will look unique to you and the things you’re working on, but you could try following the same principles to see if that makes an impact/helps make the process of getting items out and putting them away just a little bit easier.

Hope these ideas helped you to see how you might be able to implement some new routines in your life! Any favorite routines that you’d like to share? I’d love to hear them in the comments!