Why a little upfront effort makes daily life with little kids so much easier
It’s 5:30 p.m.
My daughter is hungry, I’m hungry, and the kitchen looks like it already hosted a family holiday meal and a craft project.
I open the fridge, standing there longer than I need to, half-hoping dinner would assemble itself if I stared at the shelves long enough.
It never does.
I’m staring at ingredients – half a zucchini, eggs, something in a glass container that may or may not still be good. But there’s no plan — which means I have to decide what to cook, and that takes too much brain power today. .
That moment is such a good illustration of why I keep coming back to something I once heard from Avital Schreiber-Levy:
You have to take time to make time.
It’s an annoying little sentence. When you’re already overwhelmed, the last thing you want to hear is that you need to invest effort upfront.
But I’ve learned: if I don’t step out of the daily grind long enough to set something up more thoughtfully, I’ll keep paying for that gap every single day.
Why You Keep Landing Back in Survival Mode
When you’re deep in overwhelmed mom life, you operate in reaction mode. You solve whatever is in front of you. You put out the small fires, negotiate hand washing after potty, improvise dinner, and text your partner at 4:15 to ask who’s picking up tomorrow — because you suddenly realize neither of you confirmed it.
The day gets handled but it’s exhausting and you’re always reactive.
Every time you make a decision from scratch, your brain spends energy it might not have to spare. Every time you renegotiate a routine that was never quite settled it takes cognitive effort. Over time you find yourself feeling constantly tense and overwhelmed even on days when nothing is wrong.
And then your toddler melts down because the toast was cut into rectangles instead of triangles, and your reaction is way bigger than the moment calls for. Because you were already carrying too many open loops before breakfast.
This is why I care so much about rhythm and simple family routines. They reduce exhausting friction.
Invest a Little Time Upfront
When I skip meal planning, I think about food every single afternoon. I stand in front of the fridge trying to generate ideas while someone is tugging on my leg, mentally scanning what we have, what’s missing, and whether the thing in the back is still edible.
In contrast, when I take half an hour on Sunday to roughly plan the week’s meals and order groceries, the week feels different. I still cook and chop the vegetables. But I’m not making decisions in the middle of hunger and noise because that decision was already made by a calmer, better-fed version of me a few days earlier.
The same shift happened when my husband and I started having a short weekly planning session. Before that, we coordinated logistics in fragments throughout the week — a quick question in the hallway, a message between meetings, a last-minute scramble when someone remembered a thing they’d forgotten to mention.
Now we sit down once a week, look at the calendar together, and talk through logistics, childcare, and anything coming up. It prevents the many small miscommunications that used to make us both feel scatter-brained and out of sync.
During my weekly planning session I also block time in my calendar for things I want to do — a run, a phone call with a friend, even just a slow morning. Without that, those things keep getting bumped. Putting in time up front and blocking time off is what makes them happen.
I’ve seen this play out with smaller things too.
Teaching my daughter to dress herself required more patience than I always felt like offering — and honestly, it would have been faster to just do it for her. But slowing down and letting her figure out the buttons means I’m no longer responsible for every sock and I have time for other things while she gets dressed.
Setting up the bathroom so she can reach the sink and wash her hands on her own took effort upfront. Now I don’t have to heave her to the sink every time.
Taking time to find a good cleaning service, or finally locking in a reliable babysitter, is the same idea. It feels like a lot of effort at the moment. But once it’s done, it’s done — and you stop solving that problem every single week.
I’ve applied it to different areas of my life:
- Decluttered my wardrobe and set up a capsule wardrobe so getting dressed is faster, everything fits me and all colors and patterns work together no matter what I pull out of the closet
- Batch-ordered kids’ clothing in multiple sizes at once, so future me isn’t scrambling when something no longer fits
- Created shared standards with my husband for things like the evening tidy-up, so I’m not coming out of the kids’ bedroom at 9pm to redo what he didn’t realize needed doing
- Sat down with family early to plan which weekends we’d visit over the coming months, booked train tickets in advance — cheaper, and way less mentally taxing than last-minute coordination
- I invested time in reading and courses that help me with parenting skills. It’s an upfront investment that pays off. We have fewer tantrums and power struggles and I can often get out of them more quickly when they do happen.
One Thing. That’s All.
I want you to consider just one thing.
What is one area of your current family life that creates repeated friction? Where could you put in time upfront to make life easier for future you?
Look at your week and notice where you keep hitting the same snag. Maybe you need to invest some time in planning a weekly flow to make sure the things you want to get done do get done and there’s time for you to recharge. Maybe you need to free time to find a reliable babysitter so you and your partner can go out and re-connect once a month. You might want to block of time in your calendar to declutter your and your kid’s wardrobe so you save time getting dressed in the morning. Or you take time now to find a grocery delivery service you like so you’ll save time on your weekly shopping.
Pick one thing. Then find a specific time in the next few days — put it in your calendar right now — where you can sit down without multitasking and think it through for twenty or thirty minutes. That’s often enough to create something simple that takes a real load off and set something up that future-you will thank you for.
And whether you join or not — I really do hope you take the core idea seriously. Sometimes the shift that makes the biggest difference isn’t doing more. It’s carving out a little time to build something that makes tomorrow easier.
