@Ays – thanks for your note, and I’m so glad you found this post comforting! It is challenging to be distracted, and feeling inefficient, especially during this newborn phase.
One thing I would say: in life there are no points for martyrdom — I have tons of help. Even if you don’t want to do daycare I wonder if there might be a set up where you swap some child-watching hours with a neighbor or a fellow student or family member/partner to have a few more focused hours for studying or work. Knowing I have some time to focus makes me at least slightly more relaxed…

@Adria – thank you. I’m aiming for drive plus grace, though not always achieving it. I do know that eventually I will be back to a more focused schedule.

I’m a doer. I’m efficient and fast. I control my time. Ever since I’ve become a mom I have lost that efficient person who succeeded and got all the to-dos completed. I barely complete one task lately and that’s done poorly, at that. I, like you, have to work on accepting my new normal that I may have to multi-task but I can’t figure out which items go ok together to be multi-tasked. There’s always something that’s not done well or correctly.

I cannot slack on school work; I entered this competitive degree by choice. I also cannot slack on momming, I chose to be a scattered/remote hours working mom so I could also be a stay at home mom. This is hard! Reading your post was the first piece of comforting words I’ve read in a very long time.

Thank you for all you do and mostly, thank you for this post <3.

Although not self employed maternity leave, my leave from academia, beginning in a few weeks, shares some similarities. Now that I’ve gotten into such a groove with Friday planning and blocking time, I’m honestly intimidated to go back to juggling and multitasking. I very much appreciate reading how you’re handling it, and hope I can welcome #3 with the same drive plus grace.

That’s a good point–people who bring their dogs in get interrupted all day long!

Thank you, Laura!

Uhm… maybe not take the baby in the office, if you plan to work there. People will be more interested in her/him than in you and once you finished updating them, your babe will need attention 😉 You might not get the work done you came in for. Also, it’s nice to have a place dedicated for work. The office is quite suited for that.

I did intern year before the era of secure chat. We had pagers on surgery, but not on medicine, and I can tell you that being paged is not nearly as distracting as being called. We always had to answer and respond immediately, and it was essentially impossible to get work done in an efficient manner. It was horrible. It sounds like technology might be catching up to the workflow, which is really such good news.

@Abigail – those sound like smart ideas!