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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Good morning.
This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's episode is going to be a longer one part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us.
So today I am delighted to welcome Chelsea Jo to the show.
Chelsea is the host of the Systemize Your Life podcast.
So Chelsea, welcome to Before Breakfast.
Thanks for having me.
It's going to be a great conversation.
Absolutely.
So why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Yeah, I'm a wife and a mom.
I've got two girls that are 13 and about, well, just actually eight.
It's her birthday today.
Happy birthday!
Yeah, I am the CEO of ChelseaJo.co.
I've been running this company for the past six years.
I retired myself out of my profession, which was I was a sign language interpreter for many years, and I also ran an event-based business for quite some time with my mom, and so this is my full-time work now.
My husband was a firefighter for many years and so we juggled a really crazy hectic schedule and we now are using systems on a regular basis for me to be able to juggle all of the demands that we have on a regular basis.
Yeah.
Well, what got you interested in the productivity world?
I mean, was this always something that you were interested in and just decided to transition into it, or anything?
What happened?
I mean, essentially, I was...
When I first got married, I had a two-year-old daughter that I brought with me to that marriage.
And so we had a family immediately.
My husband was trying to get on with a better fire department than the one he was in.
He went through a couple of fire academies.
I was running that event-based business and doing sign language.
And then we had another baby. while I was interpreting.
And I was doing that for about 20 hours a week.
And then we had another baby and things just got really chaotic.
And so I just knew that I didn't want to live that way.
And I knew by looking around that other people were accomplishing a lot of things.
And so I essentially gravitate towards doing things the way that other people are doing them, that are doing the things that I want to be doing.
And so I
And it's just more so, I think, the way that I wanted to live.
And so I started testing things, found something that really worked, started sharing with my friends, started a blog, started a podcast.
As you do.
As you do, yeah.
Because both of you were working then in jobs that are not really known for being nine to five sort of jobs, right.
I mean between the firefighting and event planning.
I mean, things are happening at all different times, right?
I mean, it seems like that might be challenging to build systems into there.
Yeah, and that was really.
I think that's the one like kickback that I get from everybody is oh, my life is too chaotic to have a system.
Like I can't do the same thing every day.
And that is literally why I built them in order to be able to still be highly productive and not have that chaos during all of the highs and lows.
Because for sign language interpreting, I was an independent contractor.
So I would just wait.
Anytime we got an email, anybody that was licensed and felt qualified could pick up the job.
So like, at any moment, I would have to say yes, I could do that gig.
And then I'm scrambling for sitters and okay, what's for dinner and my husband have to take over.
But if he wasn't available because he was at the fire department, then we'd have to hand over to the sitters, like it was just so many pieces, and then obviously for him he would work.
He has he's had a lot of crazy schedules, but the one that we lived with the most was he would work two days and then off four, and then work two days and then off four, and which is only six out of seven days.
So there was always a rotation.
So like he would work Saturday, Sunday, then Friday, Saturday, then Thursday, Friday.
And it just kept going around the week like that.
So I could never have consistent babysitters or there's no consistency.
And that's why I created these systems, because any given day, I could actually have a rhythm based on the things that I knew needed to be in a certain order in order for us to get to school on time.
And then we homeschooled for one of the kids still is.
And there's just a lot of moving pieces in all of that.
And the systems allowed me to not be overwhelmed and not run around like a crazy person, like a chicken with its head cut off is what I say all the time.
Absolutely.
So then you know, would you plan in weeks or plan by day, or sort of look ahead?
For you know, how was the timeline then of figuring out how systems might work?
Yeah, my method is based on a seven day or a week long home management system.
And so I have all seven days mapped out and depending on what the week looks like, right?
We have some days that have lots of extracurriculars.
We have some days that don't.
We have some days where there's a lot of variables, but you can essentially look through all of those things that are happening in your week and you can really decide just by seeing everything at a glance how you can group things together.
So you're not constantly multitasking all day long.
So I really ended up just building my whole life is what I call it.
Basically it was a week of time, right?
And I chunked that down and every seven days we repeat it.
So on Sundays we have a very specific event on the calendar that says Sunday reset and we sit down and we reset all of our systems and that need to be reset.
And they're pretty much all automated.
We just make sure that we update them like today's Bailey's birthday.
So it's not a normal Tuesday night, right?
We're doing something very different this Tuesday night.
So we just update and tweak those small pieces.
Yeah.
And so, I mean, when people are feeling like their life is chaotic.
And they are feeling overwhelmed.
I mean, what do you think they're generally getting wrong?
Like what leads to that sense of overwhelm and chaos?
Yeah, the biggest part is just using too rigid of a schedule or having like 100 fly by the seat of your pants.
So I try and bring people to the middle of that pendulum.
There's a really good mix in between those two that I have dialed in and live in on a regular basis.
A lot of people would play or peg me as a type A personality, but You know, I mean, I guess by definition somebody could label me that if they wanted to.
But I hate being told what to do.
I don't like doing the same thing over and over again.
I hated working a nine to five.
I want to do my own thing.
And having the framework and like an actual home management system did allow me to have that freedom, to be able to do that.
Excellent.
All right.
Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from Chelsea Jo.
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Well, I am back talking with Chelsea Jo, who is the host of the Systemize Your Life podcast.
We're talking about ways to systemize your life.
So Chelsea, let's talk about some of those systems.
Like what are some of your favorite?
Like, if somebody is living in chaos and Chelsea comes to them and the first thing she has them do, what's one of the easy systems that somebody could start putting into place?
Well, I think the easiest and most impactful to start with.
The student wouldn't necessarily be where I would have you start foundationally, but still part of my huge system is my meal planning system, like the home management system.
That whole thing definitely is the meal planning system.
That's super straightforward.
I teach that in depth on my blog and on the podcast all the time.
It is part of the program as well, but essentially it's just a really straightforward, old-fashioned way of making sure that you're not skimming through Pinterest meals all the time and that you use your family's favorites as a bank that you can repeat over and, over and over again, and you create a menu board for your family so they can always see what's on the menu every week, and from there you get into a really great rhythm of just making sure that you're meal planning every single weekend.
And then you no longer have to hear what's for dinner.
You're not going through drive-through multiple times a week.
You're not over buying at the grocery store and not utilizing the food and throwing out a ton.
So you end up saving a ton of money doing that.
Um, it's probably one of the first systems that I ever set up truly.
Cause I remember very vividly in my mind when I like threw my hands up in the air and I was like I'm done with this.
And I had been on Pinterest for like two hours trying to figure out what to make for food that week.
And I was still trying to wildly impress my husband with these, you know, over the top meals.
And I was like this is I'm done with this, because I had two hours.
By the time the baby woke up from the nap and like I was like this is ridiculous.
I can't do this.
So I ended up setting up this system and we literally still use it like nine years later.
So how many crowd-pleasing meals should I have like in my docket that I can then pull up for my weekly plan?
Listen, I tell families with the pickiest eaters to start with five.
And you're going to want to ask your family.
I think we have 10 that we rotate still to this day.
And then they switch because, you know, kids get tired of it.
We get tired of it.
We find a new one.
An old one phases out.
And we have like a huge stack at this point that we've you know, been building.
We don't use all of those, but it's fun to go back and look and be like oh yeah, I remember that season when we had, like chicken legs, corn on the cob and watermelon, like every week over the summer, you know.
That's awesome.
Yeah, we have a couple of true crowd placers in my family too.
So around here, Monday is always pasta night, because Monday is like the day when I least want to think about what is for dinner.
So that's something that's wound up working for us.
Yeah.
Yeah, I love that.
I have had a lot of families that will end up making like like, theme nights, like Monday's always pasta and Tuesday's always tacos of some sort.
And like, or they'll, they'll put like a specific culture.
It's like Mexican Italian American, traditional and whatever you know and however you want to go about, creating a system for yourself is always a good place to start.
Yeah.
Well, what's the other major housework thing, that or house management thing that tends to get people feeling like they're behind?
I mean, I don't know.
Is it cleaning?
Is it laundry?
Is it, you know, administration or bill paying or what?
What is it that's sort of next, you know, contributing to the chaos?
Yeah, I think for me it's the biggest thing.
For me is time management, and people have never been taught how to manage their time.
And even if we were taught by our parents, what they had to juggle in a daily basis is nothing in comparison to what we are juggling now.
Our kids, the pressure for our kids to be in a thousand things and just like everybody is running at the speed of light.
And so Time management is really important.
And so I have a very specific method that's hybrid between a paper planner and a Google calendar of putting in a lot of automation in there.
So it takes the bandwidth and like the complexity of managing a schedule out of it.
But then we also use five really specific core time blocks to get your entire life from being scattered all over the place into really digestible groups of time.
After we get your time management down Pat, then everything else literally that's driving people crazy is keeping up with the cooking, cleaning dishes, laundry.
It's the dishes, toilets, laundry, et cetera, those things.
Keeping up with housework is really complex for a lot of people because they never set time aside to do it.
And when they do, they're like, that sounds really boring.
I would rather not.
Well, it is.
I mean, but it's true that tasks take time.
And I think people have in their mind that they don't.
I mean, I don't know where that that comes from.
But yes, of course, like if you are the one cleaning your house, you're going to have to devote time in your schedule to cleaning your house.
Yeah, for sure.
And yeah.
Even whenever they do devote time, they have no idea how long it actually takes, what they're going to do with that time.
They just look around and see a messy house and think, I need to get the house cleaned.
And so they wait for it to build up and build up and build up and build up.
And it's basically the same thing with all home management.
And so they push everything off to the back burner and they don't prioritize it.
And these are foundational parts of living.
Also our health, and moms are notorious for this right of not taking care of themselves and putting themselves on the back burner.
The food that we eat, how often we work out, are we caring for ourselves and getting to bed on time.
That is a very big holistic approach to managing your life. but essentially to managing the home.
And my husband's very involved in the home management, but it's still like my brain and my baby behind this machine that I've built.
And then he just helps execute all of it.
He's got great feedback at times too.
And I always encourage the families that I work with to make sure that it is involving and we're soliciting information back from the other people that we live with to help us build a really sustainable home management system.
Well, I'm curious what those five times of the day are now.
I'm pondering what are my five blocks of the day?
Yeah.
So most people that hear time blocking, they've had some experience with it.
And I don't do it anything like anybody else that you will find on the Internet.
So essentially, there's three major things that we have to tackle in a day.
There's three major groups.
The first one is ourselves.
We have to give time to ourself.
We have to get ready.
We have to work out.
We need to feed ourselves.
Whether or not you know, I'm a very faith-based person, so having time to read and do Bible studies, or whatever that practice is for you, is really important.
And no one ever... really takes the time to do that.
And no matter what season of life you're in.
Like I nursed my babies around the clock.
Like I get it.
I've been in that season completely, but there's still an opportunity for at least 15 minutes for yourself, right?
The other big major group or category that we have to tackle and devote a lot of time to is everything else in the home.
So taking care of the kids, taking care of the home itself and the marriage, right?
That's a huge consumption of our life.
And then the third one is our work.
If you're, whether or not you're working to earn money, or you're giving of your time and your gifts to the PTO or to your local, whatever right.
It's very rare that a woman is not doing something outside of being a wife and a mom.
And so there needs to be time for that.
And so those three things, when I sat down, I was like, this is super easy.
We don't have to mix this all up.
We're just going to do these three things, right?
But essentially, you can't just... pour into the kids once a day.
You got to touch it before and after work.
It has to be touched, right?
So this is where my five time blocks come in place.
So the very first, first, first part of the day is your morning routine block.
You focus on yourself.
Then you bump into your AM block.
You focus on the home, the kids, marriage, whatever needs to be done there.
Then you focus on your work and then you do it backwards.
You go back to focusing on your home, your kids, your marriage, all the things.
And then you have that little, and that's your PM block.
And then you have your little little little block at the end of the day.
Your bookends of your day is your nighttime routine block.
And for me like couple nights.
A week that consists one night.
A week that consists of a date night with my husband.
And then the rest of the nights of the week, maybe once or twice, I'm watching something on YouTube, a podcast or something of some sort.
And then the other nights it's just me.
I'm in a bath, I'm unwinding, I'm reading and journaling, or whatever.
And so those are the five time blocks.
And the goal is to get your entire life out of every single nook and cranny and get them put into these very specific time blocks.
Yeah, I like that.
And just giving people the idea that, yes, you are a time block, right?
Like that.
There doesn't have to, because I think a lot of people feel that you know, all I'm ever doing is house kids, work.
You know, there's no time for me, but even if it's just a sliver at the beginning and at the end-
Yeah, it could be 15 minutes.
It doesn't have to be two hours.
But it's still there.
It's still there, and it's something I look forward to.
Yeah well, I'm curious.
I mean Chelsea, because obviously this is a show called Before Breakfast, so we're big on morning routines here.
What is your morning routine?
Well, oddly enough, mine just changed drastically.
Okay.
My morning routine for a real long time, for like the last – several years.
Um we, my husband and i, spend a lot of time separated in the morning.
We read and i kind of get ready for the day.
I do check in with my team.
I do a quick power like 15, 30 minutes to address, because i'm on the pacific time zone and everybody else is basically east.
So by the time i get to work they're all like checking out for the day.
So i have to like plug in with them early in the morning And then I would kind of open up the house.
A lot of people say that they wake up their house and put their house to bed, you know.
But I really do enjoy that.
And then getting ready for the day.
That's what I was doing for a really long time.
Obviously making the bed.
There's little nuances within that.
But now I am the 5 a.m. workout warrior.
And that's where we're at right now.
So I'm up at 445.
We're at the gym at like 515.
And I get back home.
And we eat immediately and get the kids to school.
And my husband and I are rotating every other day.
So the days that I take the kids and go straight to work, I get to take a shower while the kids are getting ready.
And then we flip flop that.
And that's been working out really well.
All right.
Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and I'll be back with more from Chelsea Jo.
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Before breakfast.
You know my goal is to help you make the most of your day without sacrificing work or family time.
That's why I'm so happy to introduce an institution that shares the same values.
If you are thinking about going back to school, you're probably wondering how to fit it all in.
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Well, I am back talking with Chelsea Jo, who is the host of the Systemize Your Life podcast.
So I'm very curious what inspired the shift to being a 5'15 workout warrior person.
I mean, I am not.
Despite hosting a show called Before Breakfast, I am not a hardcore morning person.
So I'm always curious what makes that happen.
Yeah.
Well, we were trying to work out. in any other time of the day.
And it was essentially taking two hours.
It literally will take two hours of my day to, to go get there, warm up.
And then my four days.
So like warming up is like a thing that has to be done at this point.
You can't just like dive in.
Like I used to.
I just used to like show up to class and like just hammer out a hardcore workout and be fine.
But now like everything hurts and you know, whatever.
But um, it just was eating up into um work, essentially because we really want to be available for our kids when they get off of school.
And my husband recently retired from the fire department and we just had to make a hard decision of like can we get this done in the morning so that we can still both run our businesses and both, for the most part, be off work by 3, 30 or 4 30 every single day, and I he and I both are really wonderful morning people, but we also really like to stay up after the kids go to bed too.
So we're like what is the sleep thing?
Why do we have to do it so much?
So your two ends of the day are starting to spread bigger.
Yeah, they're starting to get bigger and bigger.
The two time blocks at the end.
Well, because what time do you need to go to bed then to wake up that early?
Yeah, we really want to be like in bed with lights out at nine o'clock.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's hard.
That's hard, especially if your kids are not going to bed until probably well then.
No, now we have my kids.
I sleep trained my second one because my first one I did not.
And I thought every woman that sleep trained her child was a terrible mother.
And then I learned that. that it was a very great idea to sleep train your children.
So my second one, we definitely did that.
And she has gone to bed like clockwork by like 7, 730.
And just as of late, it's been eight o'clock.
She just went into third grade.
But her older sister is a huge influence on that because she's 13 now.
And all she wants to do from nine o'clock on is talk for hours on end, the teenage life.
And Uh, so we are trying to navigate that and it's.
It has looked a little bit different for the 13 year old.
You know she now has her own nighttime routine that she navigates independently after we put her to bed.
Put her to bed because we're tired.
We're like, we gotta go to bed.
I can't stay up late every night.
Yeah, I have started to be among the earlier people in my household going to bed.
So yeah, it's one of those things.
So Chelsea, I always ask people on this show what is something you've done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
Hmm.
Wow, that's a really great question.
To take a day from great to awesome.
Well, workout that takes my day from great to awesome every single time, without a shadow of a doubt.
But I think the second thing is and the thing that I've been focused on the most lately is definitely the way that we speak to ourselves, and just constantly I call it flipping the script.
So There's a lot of people in my family that cycle really negative thoughts often.
Or maybe they aren't even negative, but they're definitely not encouraging or positive.
And what we think shapes the way that we make decisions and decisions.
My husband's grandfather always said, where our thoughts go, our feet go.
And so when we're trying to take a day from great to awesome, it's really important to care about the kinds of thoughts and words that we speak to ourselves.
So using positive thoughts in our minds to direct where we're going.
So Chelsea, what are you looking forward to right now?
I'm looking forward to San Diego this weekend.
We're taking the kids to a really lovely kind of last minute summer wrap up trip to the beach in San Diego.
Oh, that sounds fun.
Well, San Diego is gorgeous.
So I assume you've been there before, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I grew up in a neighboring state in Arizona.
So we went a lot as a kid and it's going to be a great time.
My youngest one's never been to the beach.
My oldest one has only been like once when she was, I don't know, like five or six.
So they're both going to have the time of their life.
That's great.
What a great hurrah before the end of the summer.
Chelsea, where can people find you?
Yeah, well, if you love listening to podcasts, you can come over.
I've had a podcast for the last six years.
We've got over 500 episodes that you can binge.
It's called Systemize Your Life.
Or you can head over to the website ChelseaJoco and you'll find free resources there, a time-blocking workbook, The meal planning system.
There's a quiz there that will tell you what system you need to start with first.
All of that's totally free and ready for you guys.
So head over.
Yeah, awesome.
Well, please do head over there.
And Chelsea, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you to everyone for listening.
If you have feedback about this or any other episode, you can always reach me at laura, at lauravandercamcom.
In the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening.
And here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeart Media.
For more podcasts from iHeart Media, please visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Today's tip is powered by National University.
As a listener of Before Breakfast, you know my goal is to help you make the most of your day without sacrificing work or family time.
That's why I'm so happy to introduce an institution that shares the same values.
If you are thinking about going back to school, you're probably wondering how to fit it all in.
National's flexible online formats, four- and eight-week courses and monthly class starts help you begin your degree sooner, finish faster and do it all on your own schedule.
So you have more options for managing work, family, and school.
With over 150 degrees, credentials and certificates to choose from, they have a program that fits your career goals.
Learn more today at nu.edu.
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This is an iHeart Podcast.
