The Day I Realized My Toddler's Nap Schedule Was My Business Strategy

It was year two of my business.

I was headed straight for burnout.

ANd I didn't even know it.

I had a newborn, a supportive husband, a bad case of postpartum depression and a nasty voice in my head yelling at me to do more, more, more, more.

Instead of getting baby cuddles, I'd forsake my new son to go put more hours into my business.

For a measly $25/hour, that would diminish into $15/hour because of the extra work I put in, trying to create perfection from normal, imperfect materials that this world gives us.

Alas, perfection doesn't exist.

Only "done" and "good" and "better than good because I did good and now I iterated" exist.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Because Laura in year two of her business hadn't figured that out yet.

So the inevitable happened:

I burned out.

Took time off. Sat with the thought of What if I just stopped building this business? What if this is as far as I take it?

And I realized:

That didn't feel right to me. I wanted to take this business thing further.

Just to see if I could.

But this time around, the rules had to change.

For one, work fit into a certain number of hours per week. Because of baby's nap schedule, I had roughly 2 hours/day to myself.

So I had 2 hours for work a day.

I won't lie.

It was hard to shrink work to that container.

As Parkinson's Law states, "work expands to fit the container given it." I was doing the inverse and stripping away the unnecessary because I shrunk the container for work.

Easy to add more and let the container ever expand.

Much harder to take a small container and make the difficult decisions on what to leave behind. A bit like packing for a three-week trip inside a carryon. Doable, but with hard decisions at the start.

My decision muscle was weak and flabby.

I started working it out daily. Setting down to-dos and tasks I thought I had to do, or that "everyone says you gotta do."

Slowly, I got stronger. I got better at cutting things out.

Fast foward to year three of my business, and my son is now two years old.

Work now fits more neatly inside his nap schedule, which is now down to 60-90 minutes/day.

I've cut away more of the fat from my work and started focusing on finding the answer to the question:

"If I did just one thing this year that made reaching my goals inevitable, what would that one thing be?"

People inside my sphere started noticing the quality of work I was doing. At this time, I was the editor for Copyhacker's blog, and had a few private clients on the side.

When my work time hit, I ran as hard and as fast as I could for one hour.

I hadn't been this productive in years. Something about having a hard stop -- coupled with the knowledge that my toddler could wake at any moment and poof, my working time was done -- had me sprinting.

And, now that I think about that time from my vantage point of 8 years in the future, I realize I was thinking about work often while I was away from the laptop. I was plotting, strategizing, thinking things out. So when I got to my laptop, it was LFG.

One year later, I was pregnant with son #2 and I realized that my kids' nap schedule was my business strategy.

It forced me to prioritize, identify and pinpoint those 2-3 things that I'm damn good at, then double down on them.

And that time constraint of having 60-90 minutes/day for work helped me be more productive, along with being more efficient.

Priority is a Greek word that means "focusing on one thing."

Not 2, not 3. But one.

I took that to heart and then stripped away the extras, the distractions, the fluff. Partly from tracking my time in a Google spreadsheet (I still do), and partly from the necessity of having a strict "shut it down" time for work every day.

The nap schedule taught me that constraint is not the enemy of growth.

It’s the container that forces consistent focused success.