5 Strategies For Juggling Entrepreneurship And Parenthood

By Nick Andrews
culled from:forbes.com

We’ve all done it. If you own a small business, you might not admit it, but you’ve done it. You might have thought about an unpaid bill from a client while in mid-conversation with your wife, or tried to respond to an email while your daughter was tugging on your shirt, asking to play. Maybe taken a client phone call during dinner?

As entrepreneurs, we wear so many hats that the dynamic nature of our work often blurs the line between work and family time — but you can find balance.

Corporate Life Versus Entrepreneurship

Work/life balance was so much easier in the corporate world. You could put the phone away and pick things up in the morning with very little risk of pissing anyone off. Vacations were a breeze — just put an “out of office” message in your email and go enjoy the week.

Now that I own my own business, it has become a lot trickier. You might think, You can work and take vacation whenever you want — that’s a piece of cake. Well, it really isn’t. For example, my business is extremely busy on the first of every month when I reset many of my client’s promotions, so any vacation we take as a family can’t include the 1st of the month if I actually want to enjoy it.

To be honest, there never really is a perfect time to take vacation. I often have as many as 100 viral marketing campaigns live at the same time, and they always need tweaking. Feedback from clients and partners is constant, and given that I work with companies in nearly every global timezone, the business quite literally does not sleep.

The reality of owning a small business is that if you ignore a crucial phone call or email, it could cost you tens of thousands of dollars. Who knows when that CEO will have another 15 minutes to approve a new campaign — it could be months in some cases.

Still, even with this constant digital bombardment, I’ve found that you need to prioritize family time if you want to maintain your sanity.

5 Ways to Find Balance

Here are some strategies that I’ve learned along the way:

1. Understand what is truly urgent. I’ve made the mistake of taking a phone call from a client and jumping into the office during dinner, only to realize that it would have been perfectly okay to call back later in the evening. We all need to realize that not everything is an immediate crisis, and that most issues can wait an hour or two.
2. Trade sleep for family time. I’ve found it to be much more productive to wake up at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. and have an hour or two of time to focus 100 percent on the business, rather than sleeping until 6 a.m. and being distracted when everyone in the house is awake.
3. Make it fun. My daughter has a pink princess laptop and she loves it. She knows when I go into the office to work and often wants to join me. She’ll sit next to me and pretend to type away. It makes it a lot more enjoyable for me to have her at my side, and she definitely likes being involved.
4. Have a separate quiet space. We have a hybrid home office/playroom in my house, which really doesn’t cut it when I need to get serious work done and take important client calls. I realized this early on and found a small commercial office space just a few miles down the road from my house. This serves perfectly as a quite space to work and think. Sure, it’s $300 per month that I could spend otherwise, but the ability to focus completely on business is priceless.
5. Keep your wife in the loop. You and your wife are a team and need to be on the same page. Make sure you communicate when important calls, meetings and other commitments take place, so there is no confusion on who can cover the necessary events on the family calendar like school, ballet, etc. A shared Google Calendar has been priceless in my case!