The school year has barely started… and mornings are chaos, afternoons are meltdowns, and bedtime is a war zone. If your family routine is already off the rails, you’re not alone — and you’re not failing. In this short, evidence-based episode, Justin & Kylie share two powerhouse strategies backed by world-class research that will instantly reduce friction, restore calm, and get your days flowing again.

KEY POINTS

• Most families don’t have ten problems — they have one bottleneck. Fix that, and everything downstream improves.
• Use three questions to identify your real bottleneck (not the symptoms).
• Mornings, after-school collapse, bedtime battles, and parent bottlenecks are the most common trouble spots.
• Decision fatigue breaks routines. Successful families minimise decisions by using defaults, patterns, and routines.
• One-time decisions beat daily debates: uniforms, breakfast rotation, meal rosters, after-school defaults, and bedtime rules.

QUOTE OF THE EPISODE

“Family routine falls apart because you’re burning willpower on low-value repetitive decisions instead of creating a system that lets you make the decision once — then keep it on repeat.”

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• Theory of Constraints — Eli Goldratt (bottlenecks & flow)
• Paradox of Choice — Barry Schwartz (decision overload)
• Decision Architecture — Chip Heath
• Skylight Calendar (not sponsored) — digital scheduling & defaults tool

ACTION STEPS FOR PARENTS

1. Identify the bottleneck: Ask: When does chaos peak? What task derails everything? What’s the domino? Fix that first.
2. Engineer it out of existence: Change the environment, not the child — uniforms ready, lunches packed, shoes found the night before.
3. Create defaults: Breakfast rotation, meal roster, after-school ritual, homework spot, bedtime time. Save willpower for what matters.