Making Space

A simple weekly practice for creating breathing room

If you’re anything like me, the weeks can disappear in a blur. You get to Friday and wonder… Wait, did we actually spend any time in nature this week? Or suddenly it’s Thursday morning and you’re scrambling to do the violin homework because… how did an entire week go by so quickly? I fully intended to remind my daughter to practise this week… More than once… And yet, here we are.

I think this is one of the hardest parts of motherhood when you’re juggling all the balls. Not necessarily that life is bad, often it’s full of really good things, but the days fill up before they even begin.

I’m a complete journal-it-out, longform kind of woman. Give me pages to reflect, write, process, dream, but, I also really love a good spreadsheet. I love seeing everything at once and I LOVE a one-page dashboard that helps me zoom out and ask:

What is actually happening here?

What matters most this week?

What are we missing?

That’s what inspired me to create this Weekly Rhythm Page template. And yes, I made the template using AI. I know a lot of us can have a physical reaction to something AI created. Much of what’s flooding the internet lately feels generic and hollow. However, I am not totally anti-AI. I think AI can be incredibly helpful for busy mothers and creators. It can save time, reduce mental load, and help us bring ideas to life faster.

Of course I don’t want it doing all our thinking for us. I certainly don’t want a world where everyone starts sounding identical. I want us to keep bringing our own weird and wonderful uniqueness to everything.

I’ll write more about this soon because I think it’s one of the biggest conversations of our time. But for now, back to rhythm…

Lately, something my sister and I have been talking about a lot is the idea of capacity. But what do we actually mean by that? I’m not talking about getting more done. You’ll quickly discover I’m a bit anti productivity hacks here. I’m talking about how much life we can hold without falling apart. The ability to move through a sibling argument, a work email, and a toddler meltdown without feeling completely fried.

We were exploring the idea that one of the most powerful ways to increase capacity is by creating more space. And I mean that in more than one sense. Yes, physical space – we all know how much a cluttered kitchen and overflowing laundry basket impacts us. But I also mean internal space… space in the body… in the nervous system.

When we are depleted our world gets smaller, tighter, everything gets harder. Even simple decisions can feel exhausting. I know I lose perspective. And I notice I lose access to creativity and stop seeing options. Everything starts to feel urgent and heavy and unnecessarily complicated.

But when I’m rested, nourished, and grounded… I can think clearly again, I can zoom out, I can see possibilities where I couldn’t before.

Capacity can often be increased through surprisingly simple things:

Movement.

Sunlight.

Nourishing food.

Decluttering.

Time outside in nature.

The simple things that remind us we are living, breathing creatures, not machines.

This can be one of the gifts of a simple weekly rhythm. It creates space, not so you can do more but so you can do what matters with more presence. This idea comes from an exercise inside my 2026 By Design Planning Guide called Our Rhythm.

It’s a simple weekly map to help hold all the important things:

• work
• children
• home
• rest
• and you

The Weekly Rhythm Page includes space for:

Daily anchors

Morning and evening rhythms that help everyone feel more grounded.

Work windows

Protected time for focused, meaningful work.

Child-led learning invitations

What your children are drawn to right now, and how you might support that.

Home rhythms

The practical things that keep the house running.

Nature reconnection

Simple ways to reconnect with the outdoors and get that daily dose of sunlight, movement and nature.

Weekly micro check-ins

A tiny win to celebrate.

A loving limit to give yourself.

One important moment you want to protect.

This week, one loving limit I’m giving myself is early bedtimes, before 9pm!

The point of this page isn’t to follow it perfectly, of course, it never is. It’s simply to pause long enough to ask:

What do we need more of right now?

What can we let go of?

Maybe this page inspires you to create your own weekly rhythm. If you’d like to use my template, download it here. Maybe it simply inspires you to start getting into the sun every day. Either way, I’d love to hear from you.

With love,