Ever feel like no matter how hard you try, even your best routines just seem to unravel?

You're not alone.
 

I used to live in a constant state of randomness, tackling tasks scattershot and leaving things half-finished. Even a routine as simple as making my bed every morning felt like an impossible habit to keep going. 🛏️ I tried all the apps, checklists, and hacks, but once the novelty of a new routine wore off, I would slip back into my old patterns.

But mastering my time-management and productivity was deeply important to me. I wanted to do my part keep the dream my husband and I had alive of earning our income from home as a team, home educating the children together, and pursuing projects family projects that we knew mattered for the Kingdom.

Unwilling to let a lack of self-discipline be the reason we gave up on our most life-giving goals, I’d push myself into frantic bursts of productivity and sacrifice sleep to get caught up. But these sprints always left me completely drained. In 2016, after a 5-week sprint of trying to hold everything together, I nearly ended up in the hospital with an adrenal crash.

(That’s when I knew something seriously needed to change.)

As intentional women inspired by the incredible vision cast by Proverbs 31, we all want to stay consistent and productive as we seek first the Kingdom in our very full lives. But it's the little foxes that spoil the vines. 🍇

When we can't stay consistent with good habits, we face exhausting cycles of resorting to desperate measures to get everything on back track. The answer is not to embrace the hot-mess-express, but to get to the root of the issues that are causing us to get derailed.

Here are 6 common culprits can cause even the most beautiful routines to fall apart. 🦊 By the end of this email, you’ll see that there is a way to fix them.

Sneaky Culprit #1: Trying to copy-and-paste your favorite YouTuber's routines into your very different life. 🎥🧺

God has given you a particular and distinct set of circumstances, relationships, and responsibilities to steward that no one else has. (Think: your unique season of life, your unique family and work team, your unique health considerations, your unique heart-deep goals, etc.)

Stretching to conform your life to the mold of someone else’s productivity ideals is destined to leave you feeling strangely empty and burned out.

🦊 Sneaky Culprit: You haven’t embraced a customized approach that works for you.

🍇 Solution: In Week 1 of the Renew Challenge, you’ll discover how to design a time-management approach tailored to your God-given calling, productivity personality, and season of life. Stop fighting against the life God has given you—build frameworks to support it!

Sneaky Culprit #2: Expecting yourself to have endless motivation and clarity despite rarely checking in with your actual priorities for each new day. ☕

God will also give you a new and distinct set of circumstances, relationships, and responsibilities to steward each day.

Trying to adhere to a rigid routine that every single day is supposed to magically fit will only lead to frustration. When “Divine interruptions”—those Providential opportunities to pursue what matters most—inevitably come up, you’ll feel confused and unsure of your real priorities because your routine doesn’t allow for flexibility.

🦊 Sneaky Culprit: You don't have a central hub for your brain where you can plan out what you know needs to happen at the beginning of each day AND where you can come back and make intentional adjustments to your plans when Providence makes pivoting necessary. 

🍇 Solution: Renew | Week 2 teaches you how to build a daily habit of planning deeply, removing distractions, and setting yourself up for success—every single day. Your future self will thank you!

Sneaky Culprit #3: Your twelve page running to-do list is still tracking the cookies you wanted to bring to your great aunt's Christmas party last year. 🍪

When your task-management system is a partially outdated stack of patched together todo lists, your most important and urgent priorities will get lost in a sea of minutia. That means they won't happen when they need to—leaving you scrambling at the last minute and pitching any rhythms you care about right out the window so you can get the things done.

🌪️ Sneaky Culprit: Your untamed todo list is constantly pushing you into un-prioritized action, scattering your focus with irrelevant details, and distracting you from the rhythms you care about with the siren song of "actually, you could just turn on a movie and knock out a few quick things on your monster list instead of sitting down to play that game with your kids..."

🍇 Solution: Renew | Week 3 teaches you how declutter your mind of all the details its trying to juggle, tame your todo list with essentialism, and sort all of your tasks into categories that promote focus instead of scattering it. Best of all, it'll teach you exactly where and how to plug your tasks into your planner—so those important and urgent things stop falling through the cracks! Say hello to feeling present in your rhythms.

Sneaky Culprit #4: The weekly schedule that vaguely assumes you have a clone who gets more sleep. 🗓️

Our routines fall apart when they're actually completely unrealistic to begin with. The problem is that we often don't realize just how impossible our "ideal schedule" is until we sit down with a piece of paper, chart things out, and really count the cost of everything we're trying to do. 

🦊 Sneaky Culprit: You plan every day to the max, allow yourself to strap your week with a flurry of commitments, and then wonder why there's never enough time to breathe!

🍇 Solution: Renew | Week 4 teaches you how to craft a flexible weekly rhythm that accounts for everything you're trying to do without simply canceling sleep—while also giving you a chance to really evaluate what matters most in this season of your life. 

Sneaky Culprit #5: Thinking that today will be that magical day when you will be able to accomplish 72,649 things before bedtime. 🌙

Ah... your new habits are actually going well today! You read your Bible. You managed to drink your coffee while it was still hot. You made it through lessons unscathed. You even exercised! The kids' afternoon quiet time is here, and you're ready to roll up your sleeves and make some major progress on some things.

Four hours later, and you suddenly remember that friends will be arriving for the new weekly joint dinner and game night in just half an hour. You're sticky with sweat from removing all of the contents of your kitchen cabinets to deep clean them. None of said contents have been put away. The chicken you were supposed to bake is still frozen solid, and you didn't even sit down to finish those files that were due for review in the morning. So now you're staring down your phone, wondering if the stress headache you're now getting is a good enough excuse to text your friends and let them know you need to skip this week due to "not feeling too hot."

🌪️ Sneaky Culprit: You set up rhythms that look amazing on paper, but you don't have a habit of arranging your productive exploits in a such a way that they actually support your rhythms. 

🍇 Solution: Renew | Week 5 teaches you how to identify your priorities for each day and then timeblock them into a flexible, repeatable structure. (Our approach works well for creatives, too, who need to take advantage of their flow states while still making sure that they don't forget about upcoming responsibilities!)

Sneaky Culprit #6: Setting unsustainable "dream big, hustle hard" goals that are completely untethered to your real life & daily responsibilities. 🌠

God has given you incredibly important work to do in His world. It's so important, it takes long-range strategizing.

Unfortunately, most goal-setting systems out there sub out magical thinking for nuts-and-bolts strategy, tricking you into believing that if you haven't accomplished your goals yet, it's just because you must not really care that much. Feeling guilty for your lack of progress, you waver between hyperfocus and threatening to give up on your goal when the need for more balance becomes evident.

🦊 Sneaky Culprit: You don't have a holistic approach to goal-setting that takes into account everything you are called to steward. Instead, you set goals in a vacuum, which causes your most important goals to live in tension with your most life-giving rhythms.

🍇 Solution: Renew | Week 6 introduces you to the ROOTED Goal Setting System. This approach will help you set goals that actually support the development of the rhythmic lifestyle you crave, whilst also showing you how to design rhythms that in turn support even your most extensive goals. Learning this system will give you the clarity you need to strategically hone your goals each quarter so you can make even more progress on the things that matter most in the long run.