Maintain, Improve, Build
When I drafted my quarterly goals, something felt off. They addressed my biggest pain points as a mother of two toddlers (fitness, healthy eating, building home systems) but I couldn’t help feeling embarrassed by them. They lacked excitement. Something to reach for. Ambition.
I looked at my Daily Top Three tasks from Q1 — a system I’d started using to ruthlessly prioritize and get some control back amidst the chaos. The pattern was clear there too. I was prioritizing for maintenance. Keeping everything running. Losing myself in the process.
Adding time for building
I knew I had to make room for personal projects. Something that connects me to who I am outside of motherhood. I’d had personal projects on my goals before and never followed through. Reflecting on why, I noticed two patterns: I’d deprioritize ideas if they didn’t contribute financially, and urgent family stuff always took over.
So this time, I decided not to focus on making money. Just prioritize time for myself, for my sanity, just to have some fun.
To make room, I merged healthy eating into family systems — which in hindsight makes a lot of sense. (Another time, I’ll talk about my new philosophy of Good Enough, On Purpose.) That left me with three objectives: fitness, family systems, personal projects.
Maintain, Improve, Build
To make sure I wasn’t filling my daily top three with more maintenance tasks, I gave each slot a specific role:
- Maintain — keep the systems running
- Improve — make something work better
- Build — create something new
The first two, I was already doing. The third was the important one. I had to regain some of me, after months of ruthlessly working for my family.
To make sure I’d actually follow through on the Build slot, I made it absurdly simple. My default task became: “Work on my project for 15 minutes.”
15 minutes works because there’s almost no resistance to starting. I finally carved out space for building.
2-week sprints
After a few days, I saw the need for some structure around what I was building. I landed on 2-week sprints — long enough to finish something meaningful, short enough to cap the downside if an idea doesn’t work.
What’s happened so far
In my first sprint, I built a working prayer app. I spent a few days thinking about what to build, a few more designing the flow, and the coding itself didn’t take long. There are still improvements to make, but it’s usable. I was surprised — I’d tried building apps before and never finished them. There was something about daily consistent work within a capped duration that kept me focused.
In my second sprint, I went back and forth between too many ideas and ended up with a few half-baked things. Less focused, less satisfying. I’m adding a few more constraints: decide the idea by Day 3, set a clear completion goal for the sprint. I’m still working on this and hope to have it more solidified after a few more iterations.
Is it working?
Yes — but it’s creating a new problem. This framework has reconnected me to my old self before motherhood. I’m trying new things again, getting back online, feeling like a person with interests instead of just a person with responsibilities.
But maybe it’s working too well. I’ve been blowing past the 15-minute target, staying up too late, losing sleep — which is hurting my first objective (fitness). The system I built to reclaim part of my life is now encroaching on the rest of it.
I need to find the balance. That’s the next experiment.