Stop Waiting for the Perfect Monday
Monica Packer is currently managing a gas leak in her house. Her car will not start. She has five kids. She has three-hour play rehearsals five nights a week, for a community musical she just got cast in.
Monica is a recovering perfectionist, certified habits and identity coach, and host of the top-rated podcast About Progress. Her book, Sticky Habits, comes out this fall of 2026. She joined me for part two of our conversation. Part one was the inner work of recognizing perfectionism. This one is about what to actually do.
The quick win, before you pick a habit
This is the question Monica asks before any habit conversation:
“Identify the time of day where you need the most support. Then ask yourself how you want to feel during that time.”
The feeling is the compass. It will point you to a whole list of habits - and because the habit is anchored to a feeling you actually want, it has a reason to stick.
For ADHD moms, this is a great reframe. Most of us start the other way. We pick the habit first, “I want to journal every morning,” and we hope motivation shows up. It usually does not.
Feeling first works because your brain already knows how it wants the day to feel. It just needs you to ask.
21 days to perfect consistency? Meh.
The standard self-help habit framework, the one built on 21 days or 28 days or 30 days, perfect consistency, was designed around a kind of consistency that does not actually exist in most women’s lives.
“Consistency means doing your best, most of the time, over time. Your best is allowed to change day to day or season to season.”
A postpartum season looks different from a regular season (my postpartum seasons beat me up and left me out to dry). Summer with kids at home looks different from January (Lord help us all). A week with a gas leak and a broken car looks different from a quiet week. That’s life. And a habit system that cannot flex to meet your actual life is not a habit system you can keep.
The baseline habit
Here is the tool Monica uses. Every habit she maintains has two versions. An ideal version, for normal days. And a baseline version, for the hard ones.
Postpartum with her fifth baby, her baseline for movement was ten minutes of stretching. That was it. Now her baseline is twenty minutes of strength training. The baseline shifts as life shifts. The point is to keep it doable. Not impressive. Doable.
This is huge for ADHD brains because the all-or-nothing pattern is exactly what kills habits.
If the only option is the ideal version, any day that is not ideal becomes a day off. Days off become weeks off. The habit is gone.
The baseline keeps the identity intact. Even on a hard day, you still showed up. You still did the thing. You are still the person who does this. That identity is what makes habits actually sticky.
The Do Something List
Before we got to habits, Monica told me about something she has done every year for over a decade. She calls it her Do Something List.
It’s not a task list. It is not a bucket list. It is a list of things that help her explore who she is. Things she used to love. Things she has always been curious about. Things that make her feel like herself.
Try ten new recipes. Read twenty books. Take a quilting class. Audition for the community musical.
The rule is that completion is not the point. In over ten years of making the list, Monica has never finished one. That is fine.
The point is to create small moments throughout the year when she does something just for herself, with no outcome attached. (no outcome attached!? what!? That’s hard to hear for us high-achievers!)
She put “audition for the community musical” on her list this year. The deadline was that same night. She prepped for five minutes. She got called back. She is singing solo onstage for the first time in twenty-two years.
She did not plan that. She had built the muscle of trying things.
“We pour everything into our kids becoming themselves. Sports, lessons, exposure, experiences. We believe completely in that process for them. When did we decide that the process had ended for us?”
Bad habits are not the enemy
The reframe:
“Habits are not metrics to be a good person. They are helpers.”
Their only job is to help you feel like yourself and meet your life. Even bad habits are trying to help! They just help us learn what is not working, so we can try other paths forward (or around, or under, or over, or through…). So instead of shaming yourself, recognize that this is where real change starts.
What to try this week
Pick the part of your day that feels the hardest right now. Morning. Afternoon. Evening.
Don’t pick a habit yet. Just ask: how do I want to feel during that part of the day?
Calm. Connected. Awake. Yourself. Whatever the word is, write it down.
Then ask: What is the smallest thing I could do that would point me toward that feeling? Not the ideal version. The baseline.
Then do that, today. Once. Just to see what shifts.
That is the start.
Monica’s book, Sticky Habits: A Woman’s Guide to Reclaim Happiness, Ditch Perfectionism, and Create Habits That Last, is being published this fall.
Pre-order at stickyhabitsbook.com. Find Monica at aboutprogress.com.
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Listen to my conversation with Monica - both podcast episodes are below!
