It is often useful to stop and think about whether things are going the way that you would like them to go for your home-based business. Today I realized that for months, I have been doing something that has been causing me a lot of stress. I am not sure why today was the day that I realized what I had been doing – it sure would have been useful to realize it and correct it earlier, but I guess it’s better late than never.
What was I doing to stress myself out? I was scheduling myself to work during my son’s naps. A common piece of advice for work-at-home moms is to do your work when your child is napping or sleeping. While this may work for some moms, it does not work well for me. All it does for me is stresses me out. My son is fifteen months old, and he naps once a day – most days. Some days, he does not nap at all. There is a fairly wide range of time during which nap time begins – anywhere between eleven in the morning if we got up early, to four in the afternoon. I can not really make him nap if he is not tired, it just results in a lot of screaming on his part and physical and mental exhaustion on my part. When he is ready for his nap, he naps well, often for an hour and a half to two hours or more.
My son’s nap schedule (or the unpredictability thereof) is not the problem, though. The problem is that I plan to do certain tasks during nap time and then I end up frantically trying to make sure that we are at home where I can do my work when nap time actually comes around. Today, for example, I went out for a walk with my son early in the afternoon. I figured that we had plenty of time to take a nice walk and get home before he would want to nap. Maybe it was the cozy snowsuit that I had bundled him in or the peaceful calm of a winter afternoon in the country, but after a bit of walking I noticed that he was rather quiet. I turned around to look at him (I was wearing him in a back pack carrier) and sure enough, he was asleep. I turned around and hurried towards home, thinking the whole way about whether I would be able to transfer him from backpack to bed without waking him so that he could keep napping while I got some work done.
As I hurried up my driveway, a strange dog rushed out of my garage and started barking at us. Needless to say, someone woke up and was excited to see the dog. I was not so excited. My hopes of productivity were dashed. As we headed in to the house, I knew that nap time was over, and I was going to have to accept it. Perhaps this was when I caught a glimpse of just how silly I was being about the whole thing, attempting to live each day so that The Nap did not get “wasted” during such things as taking a walk (which is so good for both of us) or riding in the car. I promised myself right then and there that there will be no more scheduled work during nap time.
I can schedule my work for other times, and then if I get some work done during nap time some days, it’s a bonus. Otherwise I give myself permission to do whatever I want during my son’s nap, like reading a book or eating a nice snack – or when I want a real treat I can enjoy snuggling in and taking a nap with him. It is amazing how much less stress I felt at the very moment that I decided to let go of a way of doing things that was not working for me. I still have the same amount of work to do, but I am rearranging my schedule so that I will be doing all of my work at night because that works better for me and for my family. Have any other work-at-home parents found that working during nap time does not work for them? Has anyone found that it does work for them? I would love to know.