Time Management with a Newborn Series (Part One The Math) – Transcription
Good morning lovelies,
How are you today? I hope you’re doing amazing this morning, wherever you are, whatever you’re up to.
So if you’ve been following along and listening to recent episodes of this podcast, you will know that I become a first-time mum in April this year. So I’m so lucky to say I now have a beautiful and healthy baby girl called Fern.
And in the last episode I recorded with Stacey Boehman, she was just three weeks old and I was sharing some of struggles and challenges I was having trying to still get stuff done. And effectively still run my business. And now my baby is 8 weeks – (crikey I can’t believe how fast they’ve flown) but those past 5 weeks, I have learned a ton – not necessarily how to be superwoman and do it all just as gracefully as before – believe me, I am still finding it hard to juggle. It IS hard to juggle. And sometimes impossible without help or some sacrifice.
But I, like you, and many of my clients, either can’t not keep the wheels turning on their business when they have a baby, or when they face another life circumstance that takes up a huge amount of time and energy, or; they don’t want to accept that they can’t juggle both, albeit with occasionally dropping a ball or two.
And so the last 8 weeks I have really been playing the game of figuring out what is possible, what can I physically juggle without killing myself in the process, what can I still achieve, and how – as in what tools and techniques and strategies work.
And I recognise that some of the time management principles that I teach and I, myself, would normally use in my day-to-day life, that give me time control, and freedom and the ability to run two businesses and still have time for me and my family and a life outside of them – don’t apply to this particular scenario.
For example, I teach a fairly methodical and thorough approach to planning your time on a weekly and daily basis – on a calendar with specific times and avoiding interruptions etc. And sadly I have not been able to do this with a newborn. She still has no set routine that I can plan for and follow each week or even each day. So this is one that doesn’t not apply.
But some of the principles I use do still work, and some of them just need to be tweaked slightly to apply.
And so I thought I would do a series of very short episodes sharing what principles apply here, what strategies work and tools – and what I am doing to apply them so that if you have a newborn, or are expecting, or you have a life circumstance that similarly applies – you can use what I’m sharing and teaching to help you.
So make sure you have subscribed so you get each next part of the series.
And if you want more help in applying them to your specific business, and time – then this is what my coaching program Time Masters is all about – so make sure you are on my email list if you want to find out more about it and how you can join.
Ok so let’s dive in.
So today I want to talk about the principle of what I call – the “math” of your time.
This simple principle that applies in every single scenario, no matter whether you are running 3 different businesses at the same time, you have a newborn to take care of in addition to running your business, you are trying to build a business part-time whilst you still carry on working your full-time job – no matter what your circumstances – The math has to add up. It has to work. It has to fit.
Meaning – that the number of hours all of those individual tasks and projects of each of the things you are attempting to do – fit into the time you have available each week.
It’s so simple. And so obvious, right. But unrealistic planning or no planning at all, just an unrealistic hope and expectation that everything you need to get done and want to get done will fit – is something that comes up again and again with my clients.
And it’s something I used to struggle with too – in my business. I used to put about 300 hours worth of work tasks and projects onto my calendar at the start of each week, squeezing each of those coloured time slots on there into the smallest possible slither so it would fit, but not really paying attention to the fact that those slithers represented 15 minutes on the calendar but were for a task or project that even the brightest fastest worker couldn’t get done in less than 3 hours.
And weirdly, even though I’ve done the work over the years to get really clear on how long things take me, and really realistic as to how many things actually fit with regard to my business, so I no longer do that, when it came to the idea of having my baby, part of me defaulted to thinking I could just slot caring for a baby into my life and still get a decent amount done. And I never stopped to consider the math of it all.
But the truth is we all have just 168 hours in a week total. And we are not robots. We have to eat and sleep and bathe and rest and have social interactions with other people, and we have homes to take care of and other commitments and other desires for how we spend our time.
So all of that comes out of those 168 hours. And even within work hours, we need times to recharge and rest. And even when we have had breaks, we still can’t work at 100% capacity of our brain 🧠, and we are also emotional beings who get affected by life and circumstances and fears and doubts and worries. Which all impacts how much we can do in a given time period.
And failing to recognise this, and accept it – and work your calendar and projects and tasks so that they actually fit – is setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment and frustration and failure. Because you inevitably will fail – because it’s simply not possible for you to do it all if the math doesn’t fit.
So this is why this is the very first part of the process I take my clients through when they are attempting to get back in control of their time. It’s simply looking at all of the things they are telling themselves they have to get done each week, all the things their business requires to run effectively, all the things they do at home and for their family and for themselves, and all the things they want to be spending their time doing – and then adding it all up – to see if it fits.
That is the first step to take.
And when it doesn’t – accepting that it doesn’t, adjusting their expectations, deciding what their priorities and focus are for now, what their ideal week actually is that they want to be working towards, and then forming a strategy of changes that need to be made, to their business, their home life, etc. to help make the math fit and take them closer to that ideal week.
The consequence of not applying this principle to your life and not working out of the math fits, is simply you repeating the same week over and over again – with the same things being neglected or not done because you simply don’t have time, the same frustration at yourself at not achieving what you want, the same feeling of constantly being behind, and never getting to the end of the week feeling proud and accomplished.
No matter what you do get done, if you are telling yourself you “should” be able to fit it in and get it done, because you simply haven’t taken the time to work out the math of it actually being “impossible”, you will always feel like it’s not good enough. Which is a pretty miserable way of going through each week.
For example, if you are expecting that you “should” be able to write and record, edit, publish and promote a podcast each week for your business, and those individual tasks typically take you 6 hours and you’re also trying to do 15 1:1 calls with your clients, plus extra delivery work outside of these plus a couple of sales calls each week and some extra social media marketing, your accounts, your emails, whilst also creating a new lead magnet and the landing pages for it – and yet you only have 20 hours max to be dedicating to your business each week – the math simply doesn’t add up. And so you will of course not be getting to certain things and falling behind with your timeline – simply because it’s impossible.
In my case, I seriously underestimated how many nappies would need changing each day, and how long that would take, and how many feeds my baby would need, and how challenging it was to do anything else at the same time, and I assumed I would be able to do some work whilst my baby was sleeping – and totally did not account for the fact that newborn babies are what people call “velcro babies”, who do not appreciate being put down on their own when sleeping, and who make it challenging for you to do the simplest of tasks when being held 🤣
And when you total up all the parts that are involved in just simply keeping a newborn alive – not even entertained…it is physically impossible to fit all those hours into a day alongside a full day of working. And of you sleeping, or attempting to, and cooking and eating and showering and doing all the other things you would normally do. Unless you have help. The math simply doesn’t add up. And I know this, because I’ve diligently been tracking on a very handy app – called Huckleberry – what I’m doing each day and how many hours that eats up.
So why is this useful? Well, rather than me just guessing how much time I’ve got to work on my business, and to get other stuff done and just hoping I’ll fit it in somehow, looking at the math means I can stop beating myself up for not fitting stuff in. It means I can give more realistic deadlines to other people, and not put pressure on myself to achieve the impossible. It means I can make adjustments to my expectations and to my strategy. Because if I want to still be getting certain things done right now and I can’t postpone them, I can start looking at employing different strategies to achieve this. Like getting in some temporary support. Or researching certain products that can save time. Or even changing my business systems, model or offerings to things that leverage my limited time better than they do currently. Knowing the math first – tells me if major changes are needed or minor changes are needed. If it’s a problem with actual number of hours or productivity within those hours.
So that’s why this principle matters and why you should apply it to your situation.
So if you currently feel overwhelmed by everything you’ve got going on, or you constantly feel behind, or parts of your life or business are seemingly just getting neglected or pushed forward all the time – I want you to remember this time management principle – and really investigate whether or not the math of your business fits into the hours you have available. The math of your projects and commitments and life – fits into your week.
If it doesn’t – this is where you have to start – if you want to have a different experience of your time.
That’s it for this week peeps. I’ll be back next time with the next thing to look at.
Have a good one.
Recent Comments