About six months before our youngest child was born, I had a horrifying realisation. I would need to stop working five days a week and cut down to just three, as I would need to take on some childcare duties during the week.
Our four year old had been looked after during the week by his nan. This allowed me and my other half to work Monday to Friday.
I was really keen to have another child but honestly, I hadn’t fully considered how difficult adding an extra little one to the house would be.
I was recently listening to a podcast where the guy being interviewed had nine children. The interviewer was amazed at the number because he had six children himself and couldn’t understand how anyone could cope with nine. The interviewee responded with what I thought was a great insight – he said that having one child is relatively easy if there are two parents, it means that one of you can always be doing something else and of course when the baby sleeps, both of you are free. After that, whether you have two children or 10, it doesn’t matter because as soon as you have two, you are always busy with them. They never sleep at the same time, one of them always needs something, then the other and round and round you go, barely getting five minutes to relax until bed time when, if you’re lucky, you may get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
I of course had not considered any of this and the plan, in my head, was that their nan would be able to cope with the extra tiny human. Then, at dinner one night the subject came up and of course I was the only one that hadn’t realised; of course a grandparent can’t cope with a baby and a three-year old on her own, even if the three-year old is at nursery three days a week. Someone (me!) would have to step up.
I started working on how I could free up some time so that I could go down from working five days a week, to just three. This meant that two days a week, when the three-year old wasn’t at nursery, both boys would be at home and I wouldn’t be able to work – I would have to help take care of the children.
After the initial panic, I started thinking of a plan. This consisted of three areas – automation, refocusing the business and just saying no.
Over the next few months I put extra hours into my work so that in the long term, I would be able to free up more of my time.
The first step was migrating by business over to a new finance system. I’d originally chosen QuickFile because it was free* but now the business had grown, I was willing to spend some money on some new software if it would save me some time. Most of my income is from web design and hosting businesses and as part of that, I have to renew a lot of domains names. QuickFile doesn’t integrate with any domain registrars so each time a customer paid their domain renewal fee, I would need to manually renew the domain. This it turned out was wasting a lot of my time each week, probably 2-3 hours a week. I put some effort into setting up a system which would automatically renew the domains for me as soon as the customer paid the invoice.
I also stopped creating new projects. One thing that most entrepreneurs are guilty of is that we constantly think of new businesses to create and try to get them off the ground. Starting a new business takes up a huge amount of time so this just wasn’t something that I was able to do for the next few years. I had to constantly remind myself that if the idea was that good, it would still be good in two years’ time. Once I had a bit more free time I could work on them so now I just keep a list of ideas and if they are still something that I want to pursue later on, I can.
It’s now 18 months since our youngest son was born and only a few months until his older brother starts school. That means that in September, I will be free to work five days a week again. I’ve almost made it!
It has been a long, hard struggle to balance everything over the last 18 months. The constant task switching each day between being a parent, running a business and trying to keep everything else in our lives going has been exhausting. We also moved house a few months ago – to say we are tired is an understatement however there is light at the end of the tunnel.
In September I need to consider what the best option for me is. Do I ramp back up to working five days a week? Do I stay at three and enjoy some free time? Do I spend the extra time doing other things like volunteering or doing up our house? Do I start working through my list of new business ideas and trying to get some of those going?
Right now I’m not sure. I’ve been working towards working as few hours as possible for years now, that was one of the founding principals for me when I set up my business but I only achieved that when I was forced into it.
Now that I have finally achieved working as little as possible, I don’t think it will last for long. I need to sit down and see how things go but my guess is that once I’m no longer forced to only work 18 hours a week, I will find a new project to start working on. It’s a wonderful problem to have – stay working 18 hours a week or choose to work more if I want to. The sensible thing to do would be to sit back and relax. It’s been 10 years since I started my business and that has been a lot of hard work, stress and late nights. Now I’m finally in a position to enjoy the position I’m in, I should but the restless entrepreneur in me will probably decide that I can’t sit still for too long.
