Key takeaways

• Health is not the thing you get to after everything else. Stated plainly, by someone who tried the other order first.
• PCOS can travel with autoimmune issues. Which is part of why it takes so long to get a straight answer.
• Energy is a dietary problem before it is a discipline problem. The adjustments came before the willpower did.
• The morning routine is the lever. Get the first hour right and the rest of the day stops fighting you.
• Boundaries and delegation are health interventions. Not productivity tips.
• Rest has to be scheduled into the week. Recovery does not happen in the gaps.

On this page

• Getting to a diagnosis
• Managing energy rather than managing time
• The morning routine
• Boundaries, delegation and rest
• Why community is part of the treatment
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Getting to a diagnosis

PCOS, perimenopause and thyroid dysfunction overlap enough that each one can mask the others. Michelle walks through how she got to an answer and what she wishes she had asked for sooner. She also notes the link between PCOS and autoimmune issues, which is one of the reasons the picture stays muddy for so long.

If you are reading this while waiting on your own answers, the useful part is the sequencing. She stopped treating symptoms as separate problems and started treating them as one system.

Her own account of that journey, and the reading that helped, is linked in her notes on living with these conditions.

Managing energy rather than managing time

The shift she describes is from time management to energy management. When your body has a hard ceiling on what it can do in a day, an optimised calendar just schedules you into a wall faster.

Dietary adjustment did more for her energy than any productivity change. That is a boring answer and it is the honest one.

The morning routine

She is direct about how much the first hour sets. A morning that starts on somebody else’s terms tends to stay that way all day, and with a homeschool schedule there is no natural point later on to take it back.

Boundaries, delegation and rest

• Boundaries, framed as a mental-health requirement rather than an assertiveness exercise.
• Delegation, including inside the household. The list does not have to be hers.
• Rest periods, deliberately scheduled, because recovery does not fit in the leftovers.
• Adaptation in homeschooling, where changing the plan to fit the week produced better outcomes than defending the plan.

She also makes the case for actually going somewhere. For her that is Dale Hollow Lake, close enough to be realistic and far enough to count.

Why community is part of the treatment

The last point in the episode is the one people skip. Health journeys run on community. The isolation that comes with working from home, homeschooling and managing chronic conditions compounds all three.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• What are the early signs of PCOS?
• How are PCOS and autoimmune conditions connected?
• How do I manage energy when perimenopause and thyroid issues overlap?
• What does a realistic morning routine look like with chronic conditions?
• How do I set boundaries as a homeschooling mother?
• Is scheduling rest actually necessary or is that an excuse?
• How do I homeschool while managing my own health?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Jo Stone on burnout that presented as autoimmune disease, a close relative of this episode from the other direction.
• Kelly Schuknecht on eighteen years of working from home, for the systems side.
• Every conversation on the Women Who Work From Home podcast lives in one place. For weekly encouragement on faith, family and working from home, read the Mish Rivera blog, or get to know the heart behind Mish Rivera.

Find Michelle Rivera

This is her show. Start at the podcast home page.

Cite this episode

Rivera, Michelle. “Finding Balance: My Journey with PCOS, Perimenopause, and Thyroid Issues.” Women Who Work From Home, 2025. https://women-who-work-at-home.castos.com/episodes/finding-balance-my-journey-with-pcos-perimenopause-and-thyroid-issues

Key takeaways

• Burnout impersonates illness. Jo went looking for a diagnosis before she was willing to consider that the job was doing it.
• The Triple P Trifecta. Perfectionism, procrastination and people-pleasing, which she treats as three faces of the same self-sabotage rather than three separate habits.
• Diffuse awareness is not a productivity flaw. Women tend to track everything at once, which is why advice built around single-threaded focus keeps failing them at home.
• Working from home removes the boundary the commute used to enforce. Nobody replaces it unless you do it deliberately.
• Rest gets scheduled or it does not happen. Jo puts it on the same footing as achievement instead of treating it as the reward for achievement.

On this page

• The hospital bed that was not an autoimmune disease
• The Triple P Trifecta
• Why standard productivity advice misses women
• Boundaries when the office is the house
• Redefining success on your own terms
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

The hospital bed that was not an autoimmune disease

Jo had checked the traditional boxes. Executive title. The house. The family. Then her body stopped cooperating and she went hunting for a medical explanation, because a medical explanation is easier to accept than the idea that the life you built is the thing making you ill.

The detail that matters is the order of events. The collapse came first. The reframe came after. Very few people get to do it the other way round.

The Triple P Trifecta

Her name for the self-sabotage pattern she sees most often in high-achieving women:

• Perfectionism, which sets a bar nobody asked for and then punishes you for not clearing it.
• Procrastination, which is usually perfectionism wearing a different coat. If it cannot be done perfectly, it does not get started.
• People-pleasing, which quietly hands your calendar to everybody else.

Treating them as one system rather than three bad habits is the useful move. Fix the standard you are holding yourself to and the other two lose most of their fuel.

Why standard productivity advice misses women

Jo talks about diffuse awareness: the tendency to hold the whole environment in view at once rather than narrowing onto one task. It is not a deficiency, but it does mean advice written around deep single-threaded focus tends to land badly.

If you work from home, the environment you are diffusely aware of includes the laundry, the school run and the fridge. The advice does not fail because you lack discipline. It fails because it assumes an environment you do not have.

Boundaries when the office is the house

The commute used to do the boundary work for you. Remove it and the workday quietly expands to fill every hour that is not actively defended.

What she actually recommends

• Decide when work ends before the day starts, not while you are in it.
• Give rest a slot on the calendar the same way a meeting gets one.
• Say no to the thing you would have said yes to out of habit, and watch what does not fall apart.
• Stop treating exhaustion as evidence of effort.

None of this is exotic. The reason it is worth an episode is that Jo tried the alternative first, at full speed, and it put her in hospital.

Redefining success on your own terms

The having-it-all treadmill has a design flaw: the definition of all was written by somebody else. Jo pushes listeners to write their own, then check the calendar against it.

She also makes a practical point about not staying home just because you work from home. In-person networking still builds the relationships that carry service businesses, whether that is a local meetup or the kind of event where somebody has gone to the trouble of renting a photobooth to get people talking to each other.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• How do I know if I am burnt out rather than ill?
• What is the Triple P Trifecta and why do the three behaviours travel together?
• Why does standard productivity advice not work for women working from home?
• How do I set boundaries when my office is my house?
• How do I stop people-pleasing without becoming difficult to work with?
• Is it possible to succeed without sacrificing rest?
• How do I define success on my own terms instead of inheriting somebody else’s?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Kelly Schuknecht on eighteen years of working from home, the long-run version of the boundaries question Jo raises here.
• The show on Instagram, where clips and guest announcements go up first.
• The show’s PodMatch profile, if you want to pitch yourself as a guest.
• Podcast home: women-who-work-at-home.castos.com.

Find Jo Stone

Book with her at balanceinstitute.com/book. She is on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Every conversation on the Women Who Work From Home podcast lives in one place. For weekly encouragement on faith, family and working from home, read the Mish Rivera blog, or get to know the heart behind Mish Rivera.

Cite this episode

Stone, Jo. Interviewed by Michelle Rivera. “Breaking Free From Burnout.” Women Who Work From Home, 2025. https://women-who-work-at-home.castos.com/episodes/jo-stone-breaking-free-from-burnout

Key takeaways

• Eighteen years is the useful part. Most work-from-home advice comes from people two years in. Kelly has watched the whole arc, from toddlers underfoot to a grown practice.
• Block scheduling plus a colour-coded calendar. Unglamorous, and the thing she actually still uses.
• Childcare gets solved creatively or not at all. Gym daycare as a focused work block is the example that sticks.
• Todoist run on Getting Things Done. The tool matters less than having one trusted place where everything lands.
• A dedicated workspace is a boundary, not a luxury. It tells the household and it tells you.
• Delegation is what makes professional growth possible from home. Otherwise the ceiling is your own hours.

On this page

• Eighteen years of evidence
• Block scheduling and the colour-coded calendar
• Working with small children in the house
• The tool stack that survived
• Growing professionally without an office
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

Eighteen years of evidence

Kelly started working from home when it was still something you had to explain to people. Over eighteen years she moved through publishing and marketing while raising three children, which means her advice has been tested against several different family stages rather than one.

The landscape changed underneath her too. Remote work went from an oddity to a default and back to a negotiation. She is one of the few people who can describe that shift from the inside without it being a pandemic story.

Block scheduling and the colour-coded calendar

Her core system is boring on purpose. Work goes in blocks. The calendar is colour-coded so family commitments and work deadlines are visible against each other rather than competing invisibly.

The point is not the colours. It is that a conflict shows up as a conflict before it becomes a crisis. She uses Google Calendar for it.

Working with small children in the house

The early years are the hard ones and Kelly does not pretend otherwise. Her answer was to find real, defended blocks wherever they existed. The example listeners remember is gym daycare: two hours of childcare that came with the membership, used for focused work rather than a workout.

The expectation problem

She is blunt that realistic expectations do more for you than any app. If you plan a full workday around a napping toddler, the system did not fail. The plan did.

The tool stack that survived

• Todoist, run on the Getting Things Done method. Kelly wrote up how she does it in her GTD with Todoist post.
• A colour-coded calendar, holding work and family in the same view.
• A reMarkable tablet for digital note-taking, her one genuine home-office indulgence.
• A dedicated workspace, which does more boundary work than any piece of software.

Note the shape of that list. One capture system, one calendar, one notebook, one room. Nothing about it requires a subscription stack.

Growing professionally without an office

The risk of working from home for a long time is drift: you stay employed and stop advancing. Kelly’s counter is delegation. Handing off the work that does not need her is what creates room for the work that does.

She also runs Beyond the Bestseller, which is its own answer to the question. The way to keep growing is to keep building things that are yours.

People, ideas and sources mentioned

Questions this episode answers

• How do I work from home with young children in the house?
• What is block scheduling and how do I start?
• How do I use Todoist with Getting Things Done?
• Do I really need a dedicated home office?
• How has remote work changed over the last eighteen years?
• How do I keep growing professionally while working from home?
• What should I delegate first?

Go deeper

Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.

• Jo Stone on burnout and the Triple P Trifecta, which is what happens when the boundaries Kelly describes never get built.
• Kelly on YouTube and Facebook, where the author-coaching side of her work lives.
• Every conversation on the Women Who Work From Home podcast lives in one place. For weekly encouragement on faith, family and working from home, read the Mish Rivera blog, or get to know the heart behind Mish Rivera.

Find Kelly Schuknecht

Her site is kellyschuknecht.com. She is on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Cite this episode

Schuknecht, Kelly. Interviewed by Michelle Rivera. “Empowering Women To Work.” Women Who Work From Home, 2025. https://women-who-work-at-home.castos.com/episodes/interview-empowering-women-to-work-with-kelly-schuknecht

Takeaways

• Women are increasingly questioning traditional roles and expectations.
• The podcast aims to support women who want to balance work and family.
• Michelle emphasizes the importance of authenticity in these conversations.
• There is a growing trend of women opting out of hustle culture.
• Motherhood and career can coexist without sacrificing one for the other.
• The podcast will feature interviews with women who are successfully managing both.
• Michelle's personal journey reflects the struggles many women face.
• The conversation is not about which choice is better, but about exploring options.
• Listeners are encouraged to share their stories and suggestions for guests.
• The podcast aims to create a supportive community for women working from home.
• Creating a home environment that supports both work and family life is essential, and brands like Willow Creek Outdoors offer great options for enhancing family-friendly spaces.

Loved this episode? There’s so much more here for you, sweet friend. Mish Rivera is where heaven invades the everyday — real encouragement for women building a faith-filled life, family, and work that all fit under one roof.

Hear every conversation and meet our guests on the Women Who Work From Home podcast. For weekly encouragement on faith, family, and working from home, settle in with the Mish Rivera blog. And if you’re new around here, I’d love for you to get to know the heart behind Mish Rivera.

Loved this episode? There’s so much more here for you, sweet friend. Mish Rivera is where heaven invades the everyday — real encouragement for women building a faith-filled life, family, and work that all fit under one roof.

Hear every conversation and meet our guests on the Women Who Work From Home podcast. For weekly encouragement on faith, family, and working from home, settle in with the Mish Rivera blog. And if you’re new around here, I’d love for you to get to know the heart behind Mish Rivera.