006: Business & Babies - My 5 Hacks for the Daily Juggle (Draft)

October 10, 2021 Meredith Paige

Taking Back Joy Podcast • Episode #006:

Business & Babies - My 5 Hacks for the Daily Juggle

I know you're probably juggling marketing and running a business (and all the other things that come with both of those). I know many of you are also running a business while raising babies. So, if you feel like your day to day is getting a little bit chaotic and you're not getting very much of either productivity or quality time done, I'll share with you my five hacks for running a business while raising babies.

This can not only give you little pockets of productivity in your daily routine, but over the course of the week, give you opportunities to create really special moments with your children and partner to alleviate that awful feeling of parental guilt as well.

In this episode, I want to share with you how I helped establish a rock solid daily and weekly routine that whilst it didn't always work, because it never always works. For the most part. It made me feel good about the work I was getting done, and the time I was spending with the people that mattered most.

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Episode Transcript

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Synopsis

Meredith Paige 00:00

I know you're probably juggling marketing and running a business (and all the other things that come with both of those). I know many of you are also running a business while raising babies. So if you feel like your day to day is getting a little bit chaotic and you're not getting very much of either productivity or quality time done, I'll share with you my five hacks for running a business while raising babies.

Meredith Paige 00:24

Hopefully this can not only give you little pockets of productivity in your daily routine, but over the course of the week give you opportunities to create really special moments with your children and partner to alleviate that awful feeling of parental guilt as well.

Meredith Paige 00:42

Episode Content

Meredith Paige 00:00

I wanted to take this podcast from a slightly different angle today, because if I know you, my small business peeps, you may be building a small business in a small town whilst also raising small humans. Yep, the juggle is real, people! The idea of building a business and a family simultaneously, is tricky most days, and can be downright disastrous other days; but we do it anyway, because this is the hole we've dug. And we wouldn't dig it any other way. Really. I mean, as much as some times we probably like to take it back on the hard days, we know we wouldn't.

Meredith Paige 00:35

In this episode, I wanted to actually share with you some of the hacks (for lack of a better term) I came up with whilst building and running a business with babies. Because sometimes I think we come up with some really clever workarounds in the messy middle when we're trying to juggle the baby in the business. And then once our babies grow out of these niggling sort of sleep, eat, repeat cycles and things settle down a bit, we kind of also grow out of the workarounds that we've created. Sometimes we can forget them, when really, we've created some really good systems that we should leave for the next generation of business running parents. So before I forget them, I want to share with you my five hacks for businesses and babies. Running a business while you're also trying to raise a baby and keep your sanity intact, relatively speaking at the same time.

Meredith Paige 01:28

Now some of you might have built the business first, and now you're trying to reverse engineer some time for a baby. Maybe you've had the baby and then that's brought you to a place where you've decided that you want to work for yourself, because you need that greater lifestyle flexibility. I was lucky in that my babies and my businesses kind of happened at the same time. Being a graphic designer-turned-web-designer-turned marketer, I've been working freelance for about 10 years. It's pretty typical for most people that start out as graphic designers to work for someone, and then freelance on the side for little sort of infrequent cash injections along the way. And then for some of us, that gradually opens up into working for ourselves full time. So for about 10 years there, I was working for someone and freelancing. Then babies came along. And so all the bits kind of got juggled and shuffled along the way. I always consider myself fortunate that my business grew around my family, because that's exactly what it had to do - grow around my family. I was really lucky that I didn't build a big monolith of a business and then have to find a way to make the family work around it. I was fortunate in that respect; your timeline might have looked a little or a lot different to mine. But either way, I want to share with you some of the things that I came up with that just kind of made the day to day a little bit easier.

Meredith Paige 02:48

I suppose no matter which way the timeline worked for you, I think we can all agree that the toughest part of this business and babies thing is the parental guilt. And sometimes I feel like that comes more from us, then from any kind of feedback our kids would actually give us sometimes we often think we're a lot harder on ourselves and what we need to be but hey, when you're overachieving small business owner, we being hard on yourself is pretty much part of the territory. So we've just got to get better at dialling it down a bit. But the parental guilt thing is tough. And it's constantly feeling like you're half there, whether it's on the business side of things, or on the parental side of things. It's constantly feeling that you're not doing enough or not doing a good enough job of either of them.

Meredith Paige 03:31

As much as I want what I'm about to share with you to be kind of day-to-day hacks that you can put into place, I also want to couple them with giving you an opportunity to create that quality time within your routine each day. Because for me, that's what actually alleviated some of the parental guilt. If I'd created a daily routine that allowed me to have really good (even if it was an hour or two of focused work time) and a slice of time that was just one-on-one or one-on-two with my kids where it was uninterrupted by work, it made me feel so much better at the end of the day, because I knew that if everything else in that day had gone to pot, at least I had that 20 minutes/half an hour in my routine and that had been my quality time. It was not wanting to boil quality down to a box-ticking exercise. I knew that each day if nothing else happened, I'd take the quality time box purely because it was built into my daily routine.

Meredith Paige 04:27

So I want to try and make your day to day a little bit easier, but also want to sort of overall overall alleviate that parental guilt with this as well. So hopefully you can build a daily routine that facilitates both. So you've got less reasons to beat yourself up at the end of the day. Because if I know you as much as I know my clients and my other small business people, you're doing a bloody good job, then you probably don't hear that often enough because you're now at the top of your own pyramid. You don't have a boss, giving you positive feedback in your compliment sandwich every now and then. You are your own boss and so there is no-one there watching what you do, seeing how hard it is and telling you you're doing a good job. So I'm going to tell you right now you're doing a bloody good job. Okay? Replay that bit as many times as you need to, my soundbite is my gift to you.

Meredith Paige 05:11

Without further ado, let's get cracking on my five top hacks for running a business with babies. In another episode, I'd love to dive into the idea of building a business with babies. So that's a bit deeper and bigger and broader. But this is a good day-to-day episode. So the first one, you may have guessed it by all the traffic noise as you can probably hear: Working in the car. The motion puts them to sleep and that, my friend, opens up opportunities to actually get stuff done. This one was actually introduced to be my my long suffering and hugely patient husband. When I was struggling with my youngest while he was still at the breastfeeding, kind of patchy sleep stage (he has always been a shocking sleeper, sorry to anyone out there who's got their first one). So my husband suggested that I put him in the car. Once I've had given him a feed, I'd take him for a drive and take my laptop with me. Then, once he gone to sleep on a full tummy, I would find a nice shady spot to pull up in, hotspot off my phone and do some work in my car. Ususally, it would get me an hour or so for the length of the nap. When he woke up, we could have another feed, we could get out of the car and stretch our legs, he could play on the grass. And then we just sort of eat, sleep, drive, repeat, basically.

Meredith Paige 06:32

And that did work. And I found some really nice spots to pull up into work. One of which I'm in now is just overlooking the ocean and a whales going past sorry, not sorry! This side note, this is one of the reasons why I bloody love living and working in the country. Because you normally five minutes away from something absolutely spectacular, like a while just floating past. So yes, working in the car has been a really, really good one for me and I think it's only been improved by the fact that regional and rural mobile networks have gotten a lot better. So hot spotting makes things a lot easier and mobile plans have gotten really affordable too, for that matter. Also, pack snacks because this may be what you know, a large chunk of your day looks like. Stay hydrated, make sure you take some healthy snacks with you. If they're at an eating age, make sure you pack snacks for them. Some of the things I suggest you probably have in the cars, obviously make sure you got a nappy bag packed always had duplicate nappy bags. So I just had them squirrelled in all the vehicles. Make sure you have even a picnic blanket if you want to sort of get them to stretch their legs and wear themselves out in transit, you can always pull up at a park and sort of get let them run around and then feed, sleep and repeat.

Meredith Paige 07:47

Have a good sort of working from the car kit organised and have it ready to go along with your to do list. So the second one I used for big patches at a time was the creche at my local gym where the kids would have swimming lessons. So what I would do is (and it depends on which gym you go to, so have a look around in your local area and see if any of these offer this) but rather than committing to a full day of daycare, which, and I've covered this in previous episodes, but one of my non-negotiables was to make sure as much as possible, my kids did not go to daycare full time. To offset that, on the day that we would have swimming lessons, after I would be putting him in the creche for a three hour block. And then that would be a three hour block of work I would do from the cafe. This idea was actually given to me by a lovely old gentleman who was watching his grandkids at the place that was inside the gym that I go to. He mentioned to me that the family membership at my local YMCA actually included creche time, for a certain amount of time. I'm not quite sure what the rule is now because I don't use it anymore as my kids are a bit older. But the family membership included going to the gym and it also included a creche. And he said he'd seen so many mums just take advantage of that creche time not to go to the gym, but just to sit in the cafe for an hour or so of peace and he said if you use it for nothing else, but that surely that's worth it for your peace of mind. And it was so lovely getting that advice shared with me from a granddad, who obviously had a couple of daughters go through the mill with their children.

Meredith Paige 09:33

It was the best advice I'd gotten from a random at the gym. So that's exactly what I did. I signed up for the family membership. So on the swimming lessons day, which typically was my one-on-one designated day with my kids, after swimming lessons, they would go to creche just for a couple of hours. Normally that would coincide with a nap anyway because at that age after swimming lessons that was normally enough to wear them out for their first day sleep (when they're at the age with having multiple sleeps). So I didn't feel bad because they were pretty much sleeping off swimming lessons the entire time they're in the creche, it just meant that they were supervised by someone else. And I was free to work for a couple of hours. The cafe staff were really lovely, I'd grab a coffee, I'd sit in the corner, I put my headphones on, and I get to work. And then when the creche session was over, I had a couple of hours worth of work done. I felt like I was staying on top of things.

Meredith Paige 10:27

Then I could dive into the rest of the day, with one-on-one time with my son. So that's something I would 100% recommend is looking at your local gyms and seeing which ones offer creches and deals like that. It's another way of working in a bit of you time, or a bit of work time into your week without eating into too much quality time.

Meredith Paige 10:46

Now the third tip I want to share with you is going to be one that I'm still using, and I will probably keep using it till my kids move out. And it's the idea of 20 to 30 minutes of quality time at night. So this, this one feeds into the other end of the spectrum. This one isn't this, this one isn't about getting work done during the day. This one is about making sure we're hitting that quality time box every day, and factoring it into our routine. And this is one that I introduced not with my youngest baby with but with my oldest, who was feeling a bit of the pain of having to share the attention with a new baby. So what I did with him is I cut him a deal. I said, 'Look, your little brother goes to bed about half an hour before before you do because you're older. So that half an hour after he goes to bed, it's you and me, you pick the activity. If it's pretending to make cakes in your kitchen, if it's trains, if it's a puzzle, it could be anything you want. You call the shots for that 20 minutes. And that's 20 minutes of you and me time.'

Meredith Paige 11:47

And we still do that we've been doing that for years now his youngest brothers three now. And it's become this really nice ritual for just him and me. Sometimes it's reading, sometimes it is doing a puzzle. Sometimes it's just sitting down on a switch and me getting him through the next level of the game. He's playing whatever he wants to do, he calls the shots. Sometimes he asked me for ideas when he's out of ideas. But it's been this amazing ritual that factored into our day where I know that if the rest of the day is crazy with schools and drop offs, and before school care and activities, and training and sport, if the rest of the day is a write off of a blur of activity, I know that we've got that 20 minutes that we keep sacred. And that fills both of us up every day, you might be sort of thinking, oh god, I don't have 20 minutes to scratch my butt every day on and how to factor that in. But I want you to have a really good look at your routine and a really good look of what's actually important to you. There are 24 hours in the day, surely, we can set aside 20 minutes because Don't forget that 20 minutes isn't just for them, that 20 minutes is for you as well.

Meredith Paige 12:56

It's filling your cup up with your children and reconnecting with maybe to your oldest, maybe you do 20 minutes and alternating not if you have more than one that you're struggling to make quality time for with. You might have two older ones and a baby. The two older ones take it in turns to have their 20 minutes with you. But 20 minutes is enough time to have had a really good conversation with them to have given them your undivided attention for even just to for that 20 minutes worth of time. It's at the end of the day, when they're calmed down, you've calmed down, everyone's wanting up. And it's a really good way to leave the day on a high note. Whereas because you then sending them to bed, having had this really nice point of connection with you where you've been their sole focus, there's been no, you've turned your phone off, or you've put it on Do Not Disturb. And they don't have to compete with you for anything, not work not activities or the schedule, not a sibling, I really encourage you to try and factor this one in because it has made a massive difference to me in terms of the parental guilt that I feel. I am so much easier on myself now when it comes to how much time I spend with my kids. Because this 20 minutes has become a ritual and it makes everything feel so much more balanced. Even though we're never going to get things 100% balanced. It feels like it's tipping everything back in the right direction. The full thing I do is along a similar vein to the third thing between and it's a quality time.

Meredith Paige 14:20

The fourth thing is these little rituals, which again just go towards alleviating parental guilt because we know we've got these really important touch points with our kids or with our partners as part of our daily routine. And if not daily, a weekly routine. If it's not something you can factor in every day, set aside a couple of days a week and it forms a really concrete part of your weekly routine. So this fourth one, for me, is I always do the bedtime stories with my youngest for exact same reason as I have the 20 minutes with my oldest. I do the bedtime routine with my youngest because that is our quality time because that whole process in and of itself probably takes about 20 minutes because if anyone else has got to three year old or similar age, you know how much they try to flop around and draw out the bedtime routine. And now it's a 10 step process. And I don't know where these other 10 steps came from. But there's like, they got to go to the toilet, we've got to talk to each other while we go to the toilet, then there's a story and the song and a wrestling match. And yeah, so it's, it's blind out to a 10 step process, which means he essentially gets his 20 minutes out of it anyway. But look, I don't mind because apart from that, the bedtime routine is really smooth. And it is, again, a really nice way for me to finish off his day, with 20 minutes of undivided attention where he gets to like, roll through his routine, and we get to do all these nice, warm, fuzzy things. So if we've done nothing else, that day, we're ending the day on a really solid note, if the rest of the day has been like, again, a blur of running around like a headless joke with end of the day on a high note. So and something, this is something I've only really just thought of based off that one. So this is like a 4B and a 4B.

Meredith Paige 16:01

We really can't neglect our partners in the midst of all this because often they can be the biggest facilitators of our business success. I know in my circumstances, my husband is hugely instrumental in the success of my business. So a little ritual, that can't really be daily, because there is only so much you can squeeze out of the day. But on a weekly basis, what we do is on Sundays, we typically just do a roast dinner, because it's easy, we just throw it in the oven sort of set-and-forget at least one of the days on the weekend, we make sure that he and I just sit. We've got a little sort of corner of the deck that we like to sit on at the front of the house. And we sit out there and we have a cheese platter. And then that is our lunchtime together, the boys ate before us. Normally we've sort of filled up their morning with a bike ride and activities and trip to the park, they've had lunch. So that is their cue and they understand that too. They know what we're doing and why it's important. That's their cue to go watch a movie or they can go play the switch, or what have you for about for an hour or so. Because that's mom and dad having their cheese platter together out on the front deck and that's mum and dad quality time.

Meredith Paige 17:06

That's been a really nice component to factoring in my weight because it gives me an uninterrupted adult conversation with my husband. And it's a really nice way to end off our Sunday afternoon at the end of a big week, where it's just where we can sort of sit there and just talk about everything and nothing uninterrupted. So that's really important to and now that I'm doing it, I'm feeling how much of a benefit it's having on the overall family as well as him and myself in particular. So if you can find a way to factor that in as well, I would really encourage you to do something similar. And look, we're not date night people, going out for dinner doesn't work for us. As much as we have fabulous babysitters, we always feel a bit bad leaning on them. And we always feel like we're kind of on the clock to get out of the restaurant sooner. It just doesn't work for us, we don't really fully relax when we go to restaurants for dinner and stuff. But that hour, hour and a half out out the front of the sitting at the front of our house having achieved clutter on a Sunday afternoon. That's magic for us, because we know the boys are around. But they're self sufficient enough now to at least watch a cartoon or two by themselves. And that's been a really nice inclusion into our week.

Meredith Paige 18:16

So 4a and 4B, just little rituals that you can factor into your day or your week that alleviate that guilt and create space to reconnect because the businesses we build are meant to facilitate quality time and they're meant to enhance our family time. They're not meant to be to the detriment of quality time, or to the detriment of family connections. They're meant to give us the flexibility to enhance these relationships. So we need to make sure that don't get lost along the way.

Meredith Paige 18:41

The fifth one and this is one I feel like a soapbox that I pulled out way, way, way too often but I feel like it can't be talked about enough. Having strong phone boundaries is something that I did ages ago that was hugely beneficial was I turned off all my notifications. The only thing that makes my phone ring is my phone. Unless I get a phone call, I need to actively check my phone. And I do at fairly set interval throughout the day for Facebook messages, page messages, whatever the app is, I have set periods throughout the day where I will quickly check it to see if there's anything urgent or that needs responding to. But apart from that, if anyone wants to get in touch with me more immediately, they need to call me. And what this means is that I can go home and be 100% focused on what to do whatever it is I've scheduled for that point in the day, whether it's working in the morning, or whether it's my quality time patches in the afternoon, they don't get interrupted or they very rarely get interrupted by my phone now.

Meredith Paige 19:37

I think we need to be really conscious about how our phones are psychologically wiring us to make them a priority. So there's a lot of research around how like the vibration and the noise and the sound like there's a lot there's a lot of research around how all that triggers a response in our brain and it grabs our attention and demands us investigate whatever created that noise like We need to be very mindful of how our phones are designed to work and designed to make us interact with them. And we really need to look at them as a tool. They're not for, they're really not for connecting with people like it's a quasi connection at best. What I was finding more often than not was that my phone was breaking the connection with the person that was sitting in front of me, ie my husband or my kids. So we really need to take our phones and put them back into the 'this is a tool' basket.

Meredith Paige 20:32

There is no other tool that we use to build our businesses that we would allow to come into our family time, come into a quality time, and cut through it and demand our attention so much as we let our phones do. So we need to really be mindful about how our phones play a role in our lives and how they we need to be the ones calling the shots, not the pings and dings and notifications on our phone. So the sooner you can do this, the sooner you will also find that you can go all in on quality time or all in on work time, and not have guilt that you have in either or so it is such a game changer for my mindset around my work habits and my home habits. And I guarantee you that if if you turn off your notifications, and you make checking your phone more mindful action that you do rather than something you do as it goes off, almost out of habit, you'll never look back. And you'll be so thankful that you took back control of that relationship you have with that device.

Meredith Paige 21:26

So I really hope you've enjoyed my five tips for businesses and babies. And some of them you might take well into their toddler and young adult years, hopefully. This is about making sure we create routines that facilitate quality time and productive time, not just for the sake of practicality and having actually achieved both. But for also, like I said, alleviating that parental guilt. A lot of these go into both productivity and making ourselves feel better about what we've done each day. Because even if the day's crazy, a complete write off and all your best laid plans go out the window, at least you know that somewhere in your day, you carved out a special moment for what this is all about. And then if we can do that, that'll only feed back into the joy we bring to our work because we know we'll be jumping into our work knowing that we can do it wholeheartedly, and that we have quality time set aside right when it's all complete. And until next time. Remember, you are doing a bloody good job. Don't be so hard on yourself.