We cover lots of topics in this week’s episode — how the podcast itself gets made, how we get ideas for various things (podcasts, blog posts, newsletters, etc.), how we see childcare evolving long term, our dream travel destinations, advice on returning to work and how to answer loaded questions after maternity leave.

Please give the episode a listen! We also recorded an “ask me anything” video for our Patreon community members; you can learn more about joining here. We do mailbag episodes every few months so feel free to send more questions! laura@lauravanderkam.com is a good way to reach me.

As part of that, I’ve been packing up the infant clothes in bins — to go in the attic for now, though probably they’ll be donated at some point. I realized, going through the bins, that some of the cute baby stuff never got worn this time around.

I’ve been pondering why this is. For starters, we turn out to have a lot of baby clothes. Also, a big part of it is that we didn’t go many places. We wouldn’t have taken a newborn many places during flu season anyway, and then the pandemic began, and so there was much time at home. He wound up wearing pajamas frequently. Very practical — only one piece to deal with, comfy to nap in, and with footy pajamas, no socks to get lost. Making sure he was wearing all the cute outfits we had would have been a lot of bother, and in the midst of the newborn days, you tend to be tired enough that the easy way always seems like the best way.

And most likely it is. But then time passes and it turns out that there’s only really a 6 month window to wear those 6-12 month clothes.

In any case, things do get easier. I’m sleeping better. The little guy is old enough to assist with putting his arms through sleeves. He is going out and about. So the older kid clothes are getting worn. As are the older older kid clothes! My 6-year-old went to camp today in a T-shirt from that camp that an older child passed down. Good to see that get used.

In other news: I turn out to be flexible. Maybe not in terms of personality (though I like to think so…) but like a gymnast. A few children are working on doing splits and I mentioned that I had been able to do them at one point. They were curious if I still had this ability. I tried, and it turns out I do! Not bad for age 42. Also, when touching my toes I can put my hands flat on the floor. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this ability, other than brag about it here.

Photo: A single tiny baby Croc. Sadly, I cannot find the other half of the pair.

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.

Instead, we’ve been welcoming him into the family. We took some really sweet family photos last weekend. You can see Yana Shellman’s blog post about it (with many photos!) here. I’ll also be posting some on Instagram (@lvanderkam).

This week I survived my first solo overnight with five children. It could have been worse. The 5-year-old (feels funny to write that, but he had his birthday this week!) did not fight bed. The baby took a long time to settle, so I didn’t actually get to sleep until midnight, which was frustrating since I started trying at 10 p.m. But I did get a 3-hour stretch from 2:30 a.m. to 5:30 a.m., plus about 90 minutes prior to that and half an hour after. I took a 30-minute nap during the day as well. And last night, when I had the night nurse service, I rewarded myself with pumping the 1 a.m. bottle before I went to bed. So I pretty much slept 10:30 p.m. to 4:30 a.m., fed the baby, then went back to bed for an hour. Heavenly!

I ran most days this week but realized, yesterday when I woke up from my nap and the temperatures were dropping and the wind was howling, that I wasn’t doing my streak anymore. If I didn’t feel like running…I didn’t have to. Instead I played a rather aerobic game of modified indoor dodge ball* with the big kids and then took the 10-year-old for a 20-minute walk. He regaled me with some description of a video game the entire time. I can’t say I entirely followed but the walk was nice. And the world didn’t end when I didn’t run.

Last year for this upcoming long weekend I took my now-12-year-old to San Diego. He had asked for that as his big Christmas present, and I’m a fan of experiential gifts. It’s been a long year; that seems like a life time ago. But reflecting on it, it was a very good trip. I’d like to do some more one-on-one adventures like that with my kids.

This long weekend my plans are less ambitious. I’ve been trying to assign myself 1-2 little projects each weekend. If I have a short list, stuff gets done. A long list? Not so much. Last weekend I sorted the mail pile and cleaned off a shelf on the back porch so the porch looked more calm and inviting. This weekend I intend to go through my closet to put away the maternity clothes and move my normal clothes back into regular rotation. I’ll probably winnow down what’s in the closet, too, and hopefully end the weekend with a big enough donation pile to schedule a pick-up.

I’m trying not to take on too much work during my “maternity leave” (such as it is when self-employed), but I do have a few articles and projects coming up in the next month or two. For one, I would love to talk with some young people who’ve started businesses without enrolling in a 4-year-college. If you know some folks who are supporting themselves through their entrepreneurial ventures as their main post-high-school gig, and would like to talk about it, please let me know. You can always email me at lvanderkam at yahoo dot com. (The laura at lauravanderkam dot com address also works — I check them both). If you are (or know) a high school teacher teaching an entrepreneurial curriculum, that would be great too.

I also had an exciting conversation yesterday about how I might structure the time diary project that will become the basis of my next book. More to come on that!

*One reason to have a house with a basement

Photo: Yana Shellman photography

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.