all of a sudden this weekend it was august 1, and the trip i kept meaning to plan, the beach trip i kept meaning to plan, the weekend getaway with my husband i kept meaning to plan, just never happened.
there’s a beach town we love to visit every single summer and we’ve done it the last six years, and this is the first summer we didn’t.
and i started feeling really bad about all the ideas i had and didn’t get a chance to knock off, a lot of those memories with my kids that i really wanted.
in case you’re new here, I’m erin. I’m a working mom of two. i have a full time 9-5 job in corporate sales that i’ve been in for over 15 years, and my plan has always been to be a working mom and not to quit my job. i have two kids that will be two and four this fall and they’re both in full time daycare. I’m constantly trying to find the balance of working the 9-5 and then being at daycare pickup at 5:15, getting dinner on the table by 5:47, and still having flexibility to show up to the school parade and take them to activities.
so that’s why i created this newsletter, it’s called the mental load memo and it’s where i put together the systems that i truly actually run in my home to make this working mom life more feasible, for me and for all of us. i share the things that have worked for me and hopefully can work for you.
what we did instead was camp, and swim lessons on thursday nights i forgot i signed us up for until the afternoon they started, and a stretch of weeks between daycares where it was two drop offs and two pick ups and nut free lunches every single day, and we do not own five athletic outfits, so i was running laundry at 9pm for clothes that had to exist by 7am. i worked a full day through basically all of it.
so a lot happened this summer. almost none of it was the part i was actually looking forward to.
and the thing i finally put words to last week is that the start of summer comes with a countdown. there’s a last day of school, everybody posts about it, it gets talked about for two weeks. the end of summer gets none of that, it just turns into august while you’re still standing in june trying to get to the splash pad.
i also know the timing on this is all over the place. mine go back in about two weeks, my friend outside chicago doesn’t go back until after labor day, so some of you have twelve days left and some of you have six. all five of these work either way, you just have more room to run them.
talker research surveyed 2,000 parents for rula two weeks ago and 57% of the parents who admitted they felt relief about school starting also said they felt guilty about the relief, and 78% said they’re their own harshest critic. reading that made me feel so much better tbh, just bc it means the guilt isn’t a me thing, it’s a most-of-us thing.
1. build the list, if you never made one ← start here if you have no list 2. which of these actually happens, and what dies 3. the version that fits in the time you actually have 4. the summer log, before you forget it 5. what we actually did ← if you run one, run this one
pick one. do not sit down tonight and do all five, that’s how this turns into another thing on the list.
if you’re reading this on your phone at 8:40pm, save it, copying a prompt off a phone is miserable. #5 is the only one short enough to actually do from your phone right now.
every one of these lists online assumes you already sat down in june and made one. i did, and i still couldn’t tell you what’s actually doable in august in central texas with a 21 month old.
Build me a summer bucket list for the time I actually have left. Where we live: [CITY/AREA] Kids: [AGES] Time I actually have: [weekends only / weekday mornings / after 5pm on weeknights / whatever is true] Budget: [free only / under $25 / doesn't matter] Search for real, specific, currently-open places near me. Give me 12 options, each one line, sorted from lowest effort to highest. Rules: - Name actual places, not categories. "the splash pad at ___" not "a splash pad." - Mark which ones are free. - Skip anything that needs a reservation more than a week out. - Skip anything that falls apart in [YOUR WEATHER, mine is 100 degrees]. - At least 4 have to work with a kid who still naps. If you can't confirm a place is open right now, say so instead of listing it.
what it actually does: it searches for real named places near you instead of handing you a generic list, and it filters by your actual constraints, which is why the internet lists never work. a mom with weekday mornings and a mom with 5:15 to 7:30 need two completely different lists and this is the only thing that will make you both one.
hot tip 1: be honest in the “time I actually have” line. if you put “weekends” and you mean one weekend, you get a fantasy list and you’ll feel worse. hot tip 2: add “we’ve already done X, Y and Z” and it stops suggesting them. hot tip 3: works on every free plan, all four have search now.
if you want to skip the prompt entirely, here’s the low-effort list, works for roughly ages 1 to 10 and most of it is free: a splash pad you’ve never been to, sno cones after dinner, the library summer reading program before it ends, a farmers market saturday, feeding ducks, backyard camping with a real tent, homemade popsicles, a nature trail you can do in 30 minutes, a free museum day, breakfast for dinner outside, a bike or scooter ride at 7pm when it finally cools off, and a drive-in or a movie night in the living room with the couch cushions on the floor.
pick three. that’s a whole summer’s worth of “we did stuff.”
the list has twelve things on it and there are four weekends left, and looking at it does nothing except make me feel behind.
I have a summer list and only a few weekends left. Decide what actually happens and what I let go of. The list: [PASTE] Weekends left: [DATES] Already booked on those weekends: [WHAT'S ON THEM] Assign ONE anchor thing per weekend and kill the rest out loud. Do not spread things evenly to be fair to the list. For everything you kill, tell me plainly whether it's a "next summer" or a "we were never actually going to do this." End with the one item worth protecting if only a single thing happens.
what it actually does: it caps you at one thing per weekend, which is the part i could never do myself, and then it says out loud which items are dead so they stop sitting on the list. it also separates “next year” from “we were lying to ourselves,” and those are two very different feelings to be carrying around.
hot tip 1: put the boring stuff on the weekends too. a birthday party and a costco run count as booked. hot tip 2: the “protect one thing” line at the end is the whole prompt. that’s the one you actually put on the calendar.
this one’s for anybody whose summer isn’t happening on weekends.
Rewrite this list for the window I actually have with my kids. The list: [PASTE] My real window: [pick one and be honest] - 5:15 to 7:30 on weeknights, after pickup, before bed - weekday mornings before it gets hot - nap time is 1 to 3 and I'm home - saturdays only Kids: [AGES] For each item: keep it, shrink it to fit the window, or move it to a weekend. Anything that stays has to be doable start to finish inside my window including drive time, and it can't wreck bedtime. Give me the shrunk version of each one, specifically. Not "a shorter version," tell me what we actually do.
what it actually does: it takes the ninety minutes between pickup and bath and finds what genuinely fits in it, including the drive. most of the good stuff shrinks. the splash pad at 5:30 on a wednesday is a completely different and much easier thing than the splash pad on a saturday at noon, and nobody tells you that.
hot tip 1: the “including drive time” line is the one that makes it real. without it you get a 90 minute activity that’s 40 minutes away. hot tip 2: if you’re home during the day, “nap time is 1 to 3” gets you a totally different and honestly better list.
in a few weeks somebody’s going to ask my kid what she did this summer and i’ll be reconstructing the answer from my camera roll at 7:40am.
Build me a dated log of our summer from a messy brain dump. Everything I can remember, in no order: [DUMP] Dates from my calendar and camera roll: [PASTE] Kids: [AGES] Give me two things: 1. A clean list, earliest to latest, one line each, plain language. 2. The same summer in 4 sentences my kid could actually say out loud when someone asks what they did, matched to how a [AGE] year old talks. Do not add anything I didn't tell you. If a date is unclear, leave it out rather than guessing at it.
what it actually does: it turns a pile of half-memories into a dated list and then rewrites it at your kid’s actual speaking level, so a 3 year old gets four short sentences and a 9 year old gets something she can write a paragraph from.
hot tip 1: scroll your photos june through august while you dump. you’ll remember four things you’d completely lost. hot tip 2: “do not add anything i didn’t tell you” matters. without it you get a lovely summer that did not happen.
this is the one. ninety seconds, works from your phone.
I'm going to dump my summer and I'm going to leave out most of what I actually did, because none of it feels like it counts. Here it is: [DUMP] Read it back to me as a list of what I pulled off, and put back in the parts I skipped: the registrations, the deposits, the forms, the sizes I kept track of, the sunscreen, the days I moved work around, the texts I sent to make one single thing happen. No pep talk, no "you're doing amazing." Just the list, flat.
what it actually does: it adds back the coordinating work you didn’t mention, because you don’t count that as doing something. then it hands it to you flat with no cheerleading, which is the only version that lands.
i put this one in as a throwaway and expected nothing from it. it gave me back the camp registration i did in february, the deposit, the swim signup that opened at 9am on a wednesday and was full by noon, the three calls i moved to cover a pickup. i sat in the car and read it twice.
hot tip 1: “no pep talk” is doing all the work. leave it off and you get a gratitude exercise, which is not the same thing. hot tip 2: dump it as one long run-on the way you’d text a friend. it reads that fine and you’ll include more.
all five work the same on all four. the wording doesn’t change.
best at thisClaudelongest lists without losing the thread, hands you a real downloadable file. memory’s on the free plan now so it keeps your kids’ ages.ChatGPTcanvas, so you edit the list in place instead of re-prompting. 3 uploads a day on free.Geminireads your google calendar directly, which makes #2 nearly effortless. exports straight to google docs.Copilotfine, but use the personal one, not your work one. read this next part.
i sell software and IT services to large organizations for a living, so i’ve been in the meetings where this gets configured, and somebody needs to say it out loud.
if you’re signed into Copilot with your work account, your prompts and the answers are logged. IT can search them. they fall under your company’s retention policy and they can be pulled in an eDiscovery request exactly like your email. microsoft documents all of this openly, it isn’t a rumor and it isn’t a bug, it’s the product working correctly for a business.
completely fine for work. not fine for typing your kids’ names and ages and your household budget into a box at 9pm bc Copilot was sitting right there in Outlook and you were already logged in.
go to copilot.microsoft.com signed in with a personal account, or use one of the other three. eleven seconds, and it means your 7 year old’s summer isn’t a business record at your job.
honestly i’d send this part to a friend before i’d send the prompts.
below the paywall, the september half: the calendar audit that finds the coverage gap before it’s a tuesday morning problem, the school supply run sorted by store and priced before your tax free weekend, and the setup that saves your kids’ sizes once, files itself, comes back on its own the thursday before school, and remembers what didn’t work so next august takes four minutes.
founding pricing closes thursday. $7 a month or $70 a year, locked at that price for as long as you stay, $9 and $90 on friday. founding members also get every Invisible Work File, the paid series starting august 27, first one being every school form, date and email in one place.
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