☀️ why total freedom is exhausting

I finally got the empty calendar I'd been dreaming about. It nearly broke me. 😆

There was a time when my whole Google Calendar was back-to-back Zoom meetings, and I salivated over the idea of a spacious schedule with nothing on it.

This past summer, my dream came true. I declared it a "Zoom-free summer" with my kids.

Annnd, I nearly lost my mind.

Having the freedom to decide when you'll do everything sounds nice. But that's exactly what it is: a lot of deciding.

Decision fatigue is a big piece of my keynote, Everything Is a Habit: The Three Phases of Automating Your Entire Life. My decisions start strong in the morning and get extremely sloppy as the day goes on, like a decision-making battery that slowly drains. Without a schedule, and juggling four kids' preferences, my dreamy routine-less summer was more draining than freeing.

The conundrum: When my day is planned back-to-back with no breathing room, it feels soulless. When my day is wide open, I feel floaty. I start to spin out over priorities because everything feels equally non-urgent.

So what's the fix? Anchors. A few fixed points in your day that you can hook your other routines to.

For a long time, I only had five hours of childcare. 9 to 2 were my anchors. I had stakes. A running clock. I'm convinced I got a full eight-hour workday done in that window because I didn't have time to overthink. I just had to execute.

When everyone went to elementary school, my anchors spread to 8 to 3, and the stakes felt lighter. My output was probably still about five hours of work, but now there was room for a workout and the occasional lunch with a friend.

Now my oldest is 16 and can drive her siblings to school. My anchors have loosened again, and I don't think I like it. 😆

It's so bizarre to spend years envying other working moms' 10 hours of daily childcare, finally unlock it after 16 years, and then feel like the lack of anchors is suffocating me.

So we have to build our own. Here are some ideas:

A start-work ritual. Same drink, same playlist, same seat, same time.
A hard stop. Give your workday an end time, even if nobody's making you.
A standing date. A weekly class, coffee, or walk with a friend that happens whether you feel like it or not.
Meals at set times. Lunch at noon is an anchor you might already have.
Borrowed stakes. Book the class, schedule the call, tell your toughest friend your deadline or if you're an entrepreneur tell your clients.
A shutdown routine. Close the tabs and write down tomorrow's top three.

This week's Audit: The Anchor Audit

Grab a piece of paper and jot down yesterday from wake-up to bedtime. Circle anything that happened at a set time no matter what: drop-off, a meeting, dinner. Those are your anchors. Now look for the floaty stretches, the big blank blocks where you burned energy deciding what to do next. Pick one floaty stretch and give it one anchor this week.

The science

The science on decision fatigue is a bit messy. The popular idea that willpower is a tank that runs dry (called "ego depletion") has had trouble holding up when researchers tried to repeat the studies at scale. Nobody's fully sure what's happening in the brain yet.

What's much better supported: habits run on cues. In one diary study, psychologist Wendy Wood found that about 43% of what people did each day was habit, usually done in the same place or at the same time. And a review of nearly 100 studies on "if-then" planning found that tying a behavior to a specific when and where makes people noticeably more likely to follow through.

That's what an anchor does. It gives your brain the "when" so you don't have to decide it all over again every day.

Mindset script

"I need a few fixed points. When my anchors are in place, I don't have to decide everything, and that leaves my energy for the things that actually matter."

Bonus journal prompt

When have you been your most productive? What anchors, or stakes, were holding that season together?

xoxo, Katie Day, your habit hype girl (write back soon)

My youngest, Sadie, turned 9 on Sunday! Three daughters bdays in 3 weeks (and mine is on Thursday! That's alot of birthDAYS)

School Lunch Surprise! The teacher let me read to the class, my love language!

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