Starting up your own business is a huge endeavor. It takes innovation, dedication, hard work, and the motivation to see it through from a spark of an idea to a thriving company. In the early stages, your business will become your life. You will spend every waking hour working on it and making plans for growth, prioritizing it over many other aspects of your life. But when you throw young children in the mix, it makes things a lot more complicated. Your family is undoubtedly one of the few priorities more important to you than your business, and raising little ones can take even more work and energy. They have to be fed, taught, loved, and kept from harm at all times. It’s easy to see how balancing your business can quickly become a challenge.
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So how can you manage both your business and your childcare at the same time? At first glance, it might seem like you’d have to choose one or the other, but this is not the case. Plenty of mothers and fathers, even single parents, have managed to grow their own business from nothing even while having a young child to look after at the same time.
If you are struggling to balance the two aspects of your life, the solution comes down to time management and planning. By following these tips, you will learn some techniques and strategies for giving both your work and your family your undivided attention.
Be smart with your schedule
When you have a child and a business to think about, it can often seem like there isn’t enough time in the day. But by being smart with your time management, you’ll find plenty of extra minutes to squeeze in a bit more work. Create a daily and weekly plan for the work you need to accomplish, and prioritize the most urgent jobs. If there are times when your child is at daycare, asleep, or being looked after by another relative, use these moments of freedom to work on the big tasks that require the most concentration.
Enlist help
Even if you’re a single parent, you should be able to find someone to help you lighten the load of childcare. Ask your parents, siblings, and close friends if they’ll be willing to help you occupy your little one at times when you need to knuckle down and work.
Outsource business tasks
As an entrepreneur on a limited budget, it falls on you to be everything at once: owner, marketing team, salesperson, accountant, and human resources. But with a child in tow, this can be taking on too much at once. To ensure the quality of your work doesn’t suffer, consider outsourcing some of these elements to an external agency. Companies like unrulyagency.com can take care of your marketing needs, freeing up some of your time to care for your child.
Occupy your child
Young children can be notoriously needy at times. Finding activities to keep them busy when you need to get down to work will keep everyone happy. You don’t want to go down the route of giving them phones and iPads to rot their brains on, so try to come up with some more wholesome hobbies. Board games, books, and puzzles will help with their development, or you could get them active with some online home workouts.
P.S. This post is a partner collaboration.
