Work + Life Harmony | Time Management, Organization and Planning for Overwhelmed Women
You wake up with a plan. By 10 AM, it's completely off the rails. By bedtime, you're mentally running through everything you didn't get to and wondering how tomorrow will be any different.
Work + Life Harmony is the weekly podcast that teaches women a completely different approach to time management, weekly planning, and productivity.
Hosted by Megan Sumrell, a time management expert with 20+ years in systems and planning, this show will change the way you think about your calendar, your to-do list, and how you spend your time.
Megan covers everything from weekly planning strategies and daily routines to goal setting, organization, and how to handle the curveballs that throw your whole week off. Her approach was built specifically for women managing work, family, and the million things in between, not recycled advice from productivity systems designed for someone else's life.
If you've been stuck in the cycle of overwhelm, guilt, and never-ending to-do lists, start here. New episodes every week.
Work + Life Harmony | Time Management, Organization and Planning for Overwhelmed Women
Three Systems for a Calmer Back to School
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It's back to school season, and if you're the one in your house tracking every form, portal, email, and schedule change, you already know what's coming. All that information lands at once, and it turns into chaos fast.
That first week or two back is overwhelming for two reasons: a huge amount of change hits all at once, and it's a total shift from your summer atmosphere to your school year atmosphere. In this episode, I'm sharing three systems I put into place every single year to get ahead of that overwhelm, not to prevent the chaos, but to make sure I'm not the one carrying it all by myself for the rest of the year.
In This Episode, I'll Cover:
Where I tell every piece of incoming information to go so it stops living in five different places at once.
The one weekly appointment with myself that keeps me from reacting to every email and notification the moment it lands.
Why I intentionally leave a window of my calendar blank the first week and weekend of school, and what that protects me from.
The tool at the center of our house that means my family stops asking me what day it is.
Overwhelmed? Frazzled? Tired of your calendar controlling you? You’re in the right place. Sign up for my free, on-demand training and learn how to take control of your time—no matter what life throws at you. 👉 www.megansumrell.com/freetraining
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It is back to school season here in North Carolina, and I'm here to tell you those first two weeks when forms, emails, emails, emails, portals, texts, et cetera, and all these schedule changes land at once, it can be chaotic. And today I'm going to be giving you three systems that I set up every year to make that back-to-school transition so much easier. Welcome to the Work Life Harmony Podcast. Guess what? You don't have to feel constantly overwhelmed, exhausted, and stressed out. There is another way. When you have the right systems and tools to plan and manage your time, you can live a life of harmony. If you're ready to stop feeling overwhelmed, this is the show for you. Hey there, and welcome back to the Work Life Harmony Podcast. Now, it is back to school season for us here in North Carolina. And for some of you listening, you know, it may be coming in another week or two as well. But if you've been through it before, you know what this pressure feels like, right? The back to school pressure is significant, especially if you are what I call the COO or chief operating officer in your house, like I am. There's a lot of forms and signups and emails and maybe like physical paperwork and new portals and all of that that are coming in at us all at once. And the reason why back to school feels so overwhelming is actually two reasons why, right? Number one is it's a lot of change all at once. And anytime we have a lot of change all at once when it comes to schedules and all of that, it's it is daunting. Now, another reason why it's so overwhelming is this is probably a massive shift in kind of your home atmosphere as well, right? Summer vibes here in our home are very different than school vibes. There's a lot more flexibility, there's more sleep and rest, there's more downtime, right? So it's a lot to absorb all at once. Now, I have given some back to school tips on previous episodes. I'm not going to be repeating the ones that I have shared there. All right. Today I really want to talk about three new things that I put into play every single year that helps support me during these first couple weeks of back to school. Now, does it prevent all this change and everything from coming at me? Of course not, right? It's going to come. But where the real win is is having systems set up to accommodate the influx and then most importantly, make sure that you are not the owner of it for the remainder of the school year. Now, before I dive into these three tips, if you or a friend of yours, anyone that you know, has a student that is navigating middle school through high school, and especially if maybe this is their first year transitioning from single teacher classroom to multiple different teachers, multiple different classes, I want to give you a quick reminder that here at the Pink B, we have just introduced our brand newly updated top four students digital course. This really is geared for that middle school to early college ages where you are navigating a lot of different competing schedules, homework, extracurriculars, et cetera. We newly updated it for this year. We've got some new planners that we recommend. We're teaching digital as well. You can go check it out at MeganSumerle.com forward slash student. This is, I believe, a must-have in all homes because time management and planning is a life skill that we all deserve to be taught. All right, so let's come back here to kind of three tips or systems, if you will, that I highly recommend that you think about implementing during these first couple weeks navigating back to school to help reduce overwhelm. So, tip number one is to ahead of time determine where the different categories of information are going to be centralized as they're coming in. You know, there's going to be emails. Oh my God, all the emails, right? There could be physical paperwork coming home. There could be notifications and new portals that need to be set up for either school or extracurricular activities. When we have this much coming at us, the mental load spikes, all the new schedules, all the new forms, all the new everything. And if they're scattered all over the place, some in your inbox, some in a notification, some in a stack of paper in the kitchen, one in a stack of paper in your kids' room, right? It just feels chaotic. So what we want to predetermine is where is the one central place that different categories are going to land, right? And then when is the one time you're going to sit down and handle it all? So let me give you some more specifics about what I mean here. Every year at the start of the school year, I create a new folder in my email that is labeled that academic school year. So I've already got a folder that is 26 hyphen, 27 school year. And so as emails come in, you know, I check my email every day. If it is just something that I don't need to remember or process or handle, or if it's something that, you know, it's like one and done. Oh, don't forget Friday's a half day. And I'm like, yeah, I already know that. I just delete it, right? I'm not saving all of those. But as emails come in that have information, I now need to absorb. Maybe it's a schedule that's going to take me a while to figure out. Maybe it's forms. Maybe it's something I need to answer. All of those get moved into the new folder I create for the new school year. And if it requires an action item from me, I flag it, right? So they're depending upon what email system you use, you can figure out whatever works for you to make some kind of notification that allows me to easily see I have to do something, right? This is essentially going to become a to-do for me. So I do that with email. Now I also have a everyone in my family knows there's a spot in my office that if there's paperwork I need to deal with, whether it's scanning, filling out, et cetera, there's one central place that all of that goes. Now, as far as all of the portals, right, usually that starts with some form of an email. So again, that's going to be captured in there. But as far as notifications go, again, there's a system I teach called pop-up tasks, where as notifications come in, if they need future time for me, right, I mark, I keep them as unread. Now, the reason this centralization works is number one, I'm getting it out of my head. But then the second part of it is I have time each weekend that's called my household COO time, where I know I sit down and go look at that folder, handle anything in there that I flagged as stuff that needed to be done. I look through the stack of paper and then I go back through any notifications that need to be handled. So instead of trying to react to them all day long every day for the first couple of weeks, I am setting aside time for myself at the end of every week to make sure I'm caught up on all the latest communication. And because it's not staying in my head and I have this system built, I don't have to feel overwhelmed every single day. Now, as part of that kind of giving a centralized place, one of the things I do very early, I actually do it mid-summer, is I take the school calendar and I make sure I have all of the important information relevant to our family loaded into my calendar and our family communication center. And I'm going to get to that when we get to tip number three. So for us, that means any, you know, days off from school, teacher workdays, holidays, half days, anything that is a out of the ordinary for our normal schedule. So all of that is already loaded into my calendar and it's already shared out to our family communication center. And I'll get to a little bit more detail on that here in tip three. Meaning I now, because it's on the family communication center, I don't have to be the person communicating this with my family. I can simply tell them it's on the calendar. It's their job to sync with the family communication center. Right. So our goal here is also to be like, what is it that I don't have to keep in my head? So my central place for emails goes into the new folder. I have a central spot to collect any paper. And the calendar now lives in the family communication center, one and done, right at the beginning of the school year, if it's not done already. Now, tip number two is all around building in and really prepping for what I call uncertainty time, especially the first week of back to school. All right. So uncertainty time in the way I teach it is protecting time on your calendar for stuff that you know is coming, but you don't know what it is, right? Because history has shown you that there's always going to be a couple more trips to the store for school supplies, or there is going to be maybe a really rough transition for some kids that first week back to school. And when they come home from school every afternoon, maybe there's just, you know, they need some time, they need some space, they need some support. So what I do is well in advance for that first week of school, I make sure that I protect my calendar, meaning I don't accept any commitments of my time anywhere, whether it's, you know, projects I'm working on, whether it's an appointment with someone else, et cetera. I really avoid taking any commitments that first week of school from that window from after school to dinner. And then I also absolutely make sure where possible that I'm not committing my child to any evening things for that first week. Now they may be in a club or an activity that has evening stuff. Of course, you're gonna need to do that, but I'm not gonna add any unnecessary evening commitments in. That's not the time to schedule, you know, dinner out with the grandparents or going to going to some event that we really don't need to be at because that first week transitioning back to school is exhausting. And the last thing I want to do is have to stay up late. And the last thing I want is for my child to have to stay up late unnecessarily. So I protect my calendar by saying stuff's gonna come up. I don't know what it is, I'm uncertain about what it is, but I want to make sure I am available to support whether it's errands, whether it's just time. And then tied in with that is that first weekend after the first week of school, we keep our calendar clear, right? That is not a time for us to make travel or large commitments, knowing that there will likely be some errands that need to be run, as you know, maybe you don't need to do it during the week that first week. We know we may need to go run some errands that first weekend. And it's just acclimating to back to school life, right? I know I've got a teenager, so she will be exhausted. She will want time to sleep in and just kind of regroup and have some downtime that first weekend after school. So that is my second tip is really, you know, creating that uncertainty time, that first week and weekend back to school, so that any curveballs that come at you, any last-minute things that need to be handled can be absorbed so much easier, right? And then if you don't need all the space, that just means more downtime. Everybody wins with more downtime. Now, the third tip that I want to share here again is tying back to tip number one, which is this idea of a family communication center. I believe every household should have one, especially when you've got kids with lots of competing different schedules. Now, I am not going to use time on this episode to teach what a family communication center is. If you are new to this concept, I encourage you to go back and listen to episode 251. In there, I taught how to set up a family communication center using the tool we use. We use a skylight calendar here in our house. If you're interested in visually seeing that, feel free to head over to YouTube as well. I've got a video there. If you just search Megan Summerl Skylight, the video will pop right up for you. And I give some really good in-depth details on how we use the Skylight Calendar and our home as a family communication center. But if you don't have one, my third tip is to figure out what yours is going to be and have it established. And by established, I mean identify what the tool is, whether it's a skylight calendar, whether it is a whiteboard that shows a weekly or monthly view on your whiteboard. It might be a custom, you know, paper that you've drawn that that lives somewhere in your house. All right. There are other tools similar to the Skylight calendar that you might be using. It could be just a shared Google Calendar that lives on, you know, a tablet screen somewhere in your home that everybody can access. But I strongly encourage you to establish where what your communication center is and where it lives. A key to where it lives is it needs to be something that is easily accessible by everybody and not hidden. This is why ours is in our kitchen. And why I love the skylight calendar is if we have company over, it can just be showing photos. So that way, you know, outside company is not seeing the details of our family life as well, which is why I really like that. So when you establish your family communication center, right? What lives on it is the key information that is important for more than one person of your family to be on top of, right? Any schedules, pickups, drop-offs, after school activities, days off from school. We even include our dinner plans each night that live on it. And when you establish this family communication center, the second part to this that makes it super powerful is starting to do family meetings, a weekly family meeting. Ours is super informal. It usually happens Sunday evening when we're eating dinner, where we are kind of reviewing the upcoming week to make sure everybody's on the same page. Now, I did have an expert in family meetings here on the Work Life Harmony podcast not too long ago. If you missed it, go check out episode 312. It was amazing. All right, so that school calendar you already loaded in tip one lives on that family communications center, right? Along with any details about the upcoming week that is relevant for everybody to know. And what where that really will support you, not just in that back to school window, but those first, that first week or two of back to school is where you are establishing with your family, right? This is where the information lives, not in my head. So even though we've had this family communication center for years, my family members occasionally will still ask me, hey, Megan, what day is, or you know, is it this Friday that's a half day? My answer is always it's on the calendar. I don't give specific answers because I am constantly reminding my family I'm not the holder of this information, right? This is information everybody needs to have. And that's why it's on the Family Communications Center. So is it annoying sometimes to still have to say it's on the calendar? Yes, but I would much rather say it's on the calendar than be the default. It's kind of almost starts to feel like a personal executive assistant to everybody in my family. So this will really help you if you have not used a family communications center previously, establish one in this back to school season and let this be the year that you stop acting as an executive assistant or a chief information officer for every single person in your house. So as you navigate these back to school time, I know how stressful and overwhelming it can be, but remember centralizing information for everything coming in from school is a huge, huge game changer, right? Building in that uncertainty budget that first week is gonna protect that first week from getting out of control. And then third, establishing your family communication center at the start of the school year. All right, friends, happy back to school and as always, happy planning. Getting on top of all things, time management, organization, and productivity doesn't have to stop just because this episode is over. If you are feeling overwhelmed, your calendar's out of control, or you're just running in a race that will never end in terms of your to-do list, I have great news for you. I have an app in both the App Store and Google Play called the Pink Bee. And it is chock full of small but incredibly powerful trainings to help you get out of overwhelm. It includes my signature Ditch the Overwhelm training and introduction to my time management framework built specifically for women. So open up either your app store or Google Play, do a search on the word the Pink Bee, all one word, and download the app to get started today.
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