Family Work Life Balance

After a long day of longish longiness - what's left to say? How do you cope with being a dad, having a family, loving your loved ones and getting things done at the same time? Self-Management. Self-Discipline. Timetables. Tasklists. Sounds strict? Sounds like prison? Sounds like an escape plan to me. How do you manage your own projects, your freelance clients, your future business in preparation, your wife's various future business experiments - while having a 5 month old baby and sharing the household work with your wife? Timetable. My current timetable looks like this:

• 07:00 - 10:00 = Babywatch
• 10:00 - 12:30 = Worktime
• 12:30 - 13:30 = Family Lunch
• 13:30 - 15:30 = Babywatch
• 15:30 - 18:00 = Worktime
• 18:00 - 20:00 = Family Supper and Babybedtime
• 20:00 - 24:00 = Optional Bonus Worktime
• 24:00 - 07:00 = Sleep

This gives me 2 basic blocks of 2,5h focus time to work for clients or on my own projects. Optionally i can add 4h crunch'n'punch bonus hacktime until midnight (guess what i'm doing right now). This leaves me with 7 hours of sleep, which doesn't seem like a good idea on the long run, but is way better than 3, 4, 5 or 6 hours of sleep. Overall i can get 9 hours of focused work time out of each weekday. That adds up to 45 hours per week. That sounds a lot and looks like a normal full time job at first sight, but in reality i have to solve quite some non-focus-time routine-tasks during that time, depending on what happens during babywatch that might be as trivial as brushing my teeth or washing the dishes. One thing i'm trying to do is to stick to this schedule and then get better every day at doing more things in the same time, or simply cutting things off that don't matter enough - killing all attention killers. Hey - and that gives me 8 hours per day with my baby and my wife. Not bad. So, what am i getting done right now? How do i use my precious time? That changes daily, of course, but let's look at today and yesterday:

• Working for my friend and client Curro on his business development, tech setup and marketing hacktivities. That is consuming a lot of time right now as i'm administrating everything on his Shopify-Webshop and preparing the whole Marketing setup at the same time, from zero, like setting up Google Analytics including Conversion Tracking, setting up Google Adwords including Conversion Tracking, setting up Facebook Business Account with a Facebook Page and a Facebook Ad Account including Conversion Tracking, plus the according Facebook Campaigns, the UTM-Parameters with the according Naming Conventions, of course the Adwords Campaigns, tons of Emails back and forth about questions about all these subjects and more - like Payment Provider Integration, Mailchimp Setup, everything down to editing images for Ads - a lot of work, but exciting as well - we'll see where this business is heading for - but one thing is sure: i'm putting quite some work into this, learn a lot while running and keep my mind sharp and up to date on the newest buttons inside the Googleverse and the Facebookvana. Did you ever set up UTM-Parameters for Email-Signatures? We did :) We still have tons of things to do in all areas but it feels awesome when your Shopify Mobile App notifies you with the sound of ringing cash register that another order is in. Have a look at the status quo in case you are curious: www.healing-garden-tenerife.com And feel free to throw ideas on growing that business into the comments or into my inbox :)
• Outlining and discussing business opportunities with my wife, she's a restless mind like me and doesn't want to live life as a pure mommy-machine. I get that. And we are trying to hack a nice little business for her. This is still work in progress and will most probably some workshop business model, think yoga classes, singing classes and various DIY workshops. For that we still need one or several websites, or at least some sort of online signup solution - possibly one page sites with and eventbrite link for the beginning.
• I'd love to be learning even more and spending even more time on acquiring more skills, but that's not happening right now - i'm learning what i'm working on, and that's quite enough.

Time's up. That were 30 minutes of self-reflection. Not too bad for the beginning. I'll keep you posted :)