Fewer people have experienced a fantastic boss, but for those who have, it is often a transformative experience. Good managers make things run on time and on budget. Great managers are always thinking about how to develop their people. They’re thinking about what skills people should be learning, and who people should be meeting, and projects people should try to be at a certain level in, say, the next 12-24 months.

Needless to say, if you work for yourself, no one is doing that for you. But as I was babbling on about this topic during a webinar last week, I found myself suggesting that those of us who do work independently should spend some time functioning as that fantastic boss for ourselves.

Just for fun, we can do this exercise in the third person. Let’s think about what skills Laura should be developing. How can she get some training there? What should Laura be doing in 6-12 months? How about after that? What do we need to do to make her ready for those steps? Are there people Laura should be meeting? How can we make that happen? What does Laura need in order to perform at her best?

Just as a stellar manager would be spending some of their strategic thinking time pondering these things, those of us who manage ourselves should also spend some strategic thinking time on these questions. What do Laura and I want to be covering in her next performance review? How can I make sure that Laura is spending her time on the things that Laura is well-positioned to do?

All good questions…and good questions to ask ourselves. Sometimes the answers are interesting. My inner manager definitely wants me to work more hours right now (she’s a bit of a task master) but she has ideas on how to make that doable. She’s thinking we should just write with abandon during NaNoWriMo to flesh out some ideas for revising a previous novel. She’s also wondering why I haven’t replaced my phone that stops working randomly given that she’s already approved the expense.

Anyway, it could be an interesting exercise to try. If you work for yourself, why not try role-playing a fantastic manager, and see what he or she would have you be doing? Especially as we enter annual performance review season, it could reveal some important thinking about where things have been and where they should go.

In other news: Definitely sending hopes for safety to everyone in Florida. Some very scary photos coming out. My husband has gotten word from his relatives who live on the west coast of Florida and they are all OK. I am hoping that is the case for everyone else.

In particular, as I think about how I work, I’ve been studying hours devoted to my business during this time that, if I had a normal job, I’d presumably be on maternity leave. I decided not to take on any speaking engagements requiring travel during this time. So that part of my business has zoomed close to zero. But I can see that I logged 25 hours of work this past week (plus whatever I do today). I was originally presuming about a 25 percent schedule at this point. Since I generally worked 40 hours/week this past year — not 100 hours a week — this appears to be a 60 percent schedule.

Perhaps that sounds high for 3-4 weeks postpartum — like a lot of time to be gone. However, I work from home, and about half of this work is multi-tasked with feeding or holding the baby. I aim to do any deeper work around feedings between 9 a.m. and noon when I have childcare coverage and the 5-year-old is in preschool. Then I take the baby at noon and our nanny picks up the 5-year-old for various afternoon activities. They will stay home if I have something requiring silence or two hands, but I’ve generally felt like I shouldn’t change kid #4’s schedule. Becoming a big brother has been a big enough disruption.

So I play and gaze at the (very cute!) baby during the afternoon when he’s alert. If he’s sleepy, I tackle work projects. For instance, on three afternoons this week he took 60-90 minute naps on my lap or in the sling while I worked. Those were fairly productive work-naps. Other times I’ve been holding a pacifier in, and typing with one hand.

(The rest of the schedule: they come home 3/3:30 p.m. and I go for a run. The other kids come home 4-ish. I try to spend time with the other kids in between feedings. I’ve outsourced most activity-driving duties due to said feedings.)

A lot of the work is self-driven. I like what I do. Some is the reality of having a business that is based on my personal brand, plus timing with projects I started at various points last year (some before I even knew the baby was on the way!).

I don’t enjoy multi-tasking. It is frustrating and inefficient. But I am working toward accepting that this is the reality of having a newborn, and not shutting down my business. I am trying to do some more reading while nursing, as opposed to mindlessly scrolling the internet. But if I am going to just mindlessly scroll the internet, I don’t think pecking out answers to emails is a worse use of time.

There’s also the reality that it’s January and cold. If it was summer, I’d probably take the baby for walks during some of the sleepy time. But since I’m in the house with the baby sleeping in the sling, working seems more productive than the constant cleaning I could be doing given that I’m in the house, seeing the mess, for close to 100 percent of the time.

And as I consider things, I’m getting an OK amount done while spending a lot of time with the baby. I’ve learned some tricks over years of studying productivity that work even when time is extremely limited. Here’s what I find most helpful:

Plan my weeks on Fridays. What has to happen, and what would I like to see happen, personally and professionally? On Fridays I also make a firm plan for the upcoming weekend, and take a look at the next weekend to make a tentative plan.

Create short daily to-do lists. I generally create these daily lists — drawn from the weekly list — toward the end of the day prior. Stuff comes up, so the shorter the better. If I aim to do 3-5 things, they’ll probably happen. If I aim to do 20 things, they won’t.

Time block. I do not catch up on email during the morning shift stretches when I don’t have the baby. I can answer emails in small bits of time later. Calls have to happen in the morning. I think of the afternoon as baby time; my goal is no expectations other than caring for him during this window (though I often do other things when he naps, as mentioned above). I moved my run to the late afternoon, since that’s what seemed to work best. I might walk with a kid then instead, but in any case, it’s active time. Speaking of which…

Exercise (and sleep, as possible). In my speeches I use a line that “sleep and exercise don’t take time, they make time.” My sleep is interrupted, but I can do my best to make sure that I get 7 total hours in any 24. I can also exercise for 30 minutes a day.

Write it down. When stuff comes up, or I think of something that needs to happen, I write it down. Since I frequently stop what I’m doing to care for the baby, I can’t rely on remembering it. I’ll make lists in my planner, or email myself notes, like “register A for kindergarten.” And now that’s done.

In other news: I mentioned on a recent goals list that I wanted to watch a basketball game on TV. I finally managed to watch a Sixers game last night. They were playing the Lakers, featuring LeBron James, who started the game a few points away from Kobe Bryant’s all-time scoring record and passed it in the course of playing. I hadn’t thought too much about Bryant in a while, but with the announcers mentioning his name every time James scored, I decided to read his entire Wikipedia entry. I watched clips. I read about his family. So today’s news came as quite a shock. I know young lives are cut short all the time, but every time I read of one, I am reminded of the importance of using time well. We only get so much to do what we want to in this world. I wrote this essay after the death of a friend in a different helicopter accident two years ago trying to get at these thoughts.

There are many upsides to this. I have reasonable control over when and where I work, with the ability to scale up and down.

However, if I don’t work, I don’t get paid (to some degree; some stuff is passive). More importantly, since the business is basically my words/image/voice/presence, if I stop working there isn’t much of a business. Given how much time I’ve put into building this thing, and the commitments I’ve already made, and — not a small point — how much I enjoy it, I don’t want to go completely dormant.

All of this means that taking maternity leave as a self-employed person tends to look different from the corporate variety of leave. As I approach my fifth time through this experience, I’m keeping in mind a few lessons learned over the years.

I shouldn’t assume everyone knows I’m pregnant. If I was reporting to an office 40 hours a week, my gigantic belly would be absolutely obvious to my co-workers. But I was reminded again the other day that with virtual work, even people you work with quite closely (as in exchanging daily emails) aren’t seeing you. So why would they know? If there’s going to be a workflow change, best to bring it up a few months ahead of time. (Whoops).

I can ask for a pause. I’ve had various recurring gigs over the years. When I’ve asked to stop meeting regular deadlines for a while, people have generally been OK with it. There’s no guarantee I won’t be replaced, or that the client won’t leave, with the new person having no clue who I am, but that’s the freelance life anyway. An alternate solution is to…

Work ahead. This is what I’m doing with my podcasts. My goal with Before Breakfast is to have episodes in the hopper through March by the time the baby arrives. Best of Both Worlds will also be recorded well ahead, though since I have a co-host who can produce episodes on her own, this is less of an issue.

I can say no to some things. I decided that I would not travel from mid-December through mid-April. This has involved turning down work (primarily speaking opportunities), which is never easy. As a self-employed person, I often feel like a hunter-gatherer. If someone tells me, hey, there’s a mastodon right over there, my inclination is to go get it. You never know when other mastodons will appear! But the funny thing is…they do. In the past I’ve said yes to a few marginal things and this time, especially since I assume it’s the last time, probably best to take it easy for a bit. That said, I can…

Manage the pipeline. Proposals tend to take a while to wend their way through systems. That means that the month or so before giving birth can actually be a great time to put in bids for new work, or to turn in things that will eventually come back to you, but need a lot of other people’s input in the mean time. With any luck, people will be ready to have you start a few months later. If you scale down this marketing and speculative work since you want to take time off, you won’t have a ton of time to work on it in the first few months caring for the baby, and then the pipeline will feel empty right as you’re ready to scale back up.

I can accept that it’s OK to be not completely off. This is the biggest difference between self-employed “leave” and employed leave. If you employ people they are entitled to whatever time off is contractually theirs without you bugging them. As a business owner, though, you might make different decisions. I could stop working entirely, but why? My feeling has always been that since I’m not reporting to an office away from my baby and I’m setting my own hours and choosing my own tasks it’s OK to do a few things here and there. I like my work and enjoy it. In the past I’ve generally been operating at about 25 percent capacity for a few weeks, and then around 50 percent for the duration of what might be a normal maternity leave. I’m probably at about 75 percent for the next few months. So I’m guessing that’s what it will be this time around too. The interesting thing with this sort of work is that while there’s some correlation between hours and productivity, some is just random. I wrote what has turned out to be my most successful product (the What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast ebook) in the 6 weeks after kid #3 was born in fall 2011.

If you work for yourself, how have you handled births or other major care-taking/medical events? Please let me know your discoveries!

Photo: Look what showed up at my house! I forgot how tiny the newborn sizes were.