The power of do not disturb
This is the most common piece of advice/peek into my day to day life that I give to all my working mom friends. I leave work everyday between 4-4:15pm and I put my phone in do not disturb mode for the next 3 hours so that I can have time to truly focus on my family and not deal with the constant pull of the next thing on my to-do list.
I have to recognize my privilege before moving on here. I work someplace where hours aren’t set, and the expectation is simply that we get the work the needs to be done accomplished on our own time table - not everyone has this, but I have worked for the past 10 years to ensure that at this stage in my career I do.
This change was prompted when I first went to work for this startup when my son was only 9 months old. We were working out of the founder’s house and I was literally having to pump breastmilk on the floor of his guest bathroom 3x per day. I had no boundaries about when work would creep in and I started to resent the feeling that I was always on call. There was a moment when my husband and I were moving - we had bought a new house about 3 months after I started at this job - and we literally had moving men coming in and out of our house, we had an infant who was crying, and the air conditioning wasn’t even really working and I was getting call after call from work and I thought I might have a mental breakdown. This was on a Saturday also, so it’s not even like I had taken a week day off from work to move, this was supposed to be my day off.
Right around that time I also noticed that I would be checking my phone and email while making dinner, while giving my son a bath, while rocking my son to sleep, while he would play on the weekends, etc. I was never not tethered to my phone and the constant stream of work that was pouring in. So I decided I had to make a change. And that change was to turn my phone onto do not disturb or airplane mode for the hours of 4pm-7pm each weekday and also during most of my son’s wake times on the weekend. I also actually turn my phone into airplane mode from 10pm to 5am - but that’s to protect my sleep and not my family time. It took me a while to break the habit of constantly picking up my phone to look for new notifications, but now I don’t even think about it.
When I get home from our office (which is thankfully SOOO close to our house), I put my phone down and make dinner. Then my son gets home with his dad about 15 minutes after that and he helps me in the kitchen and eats a snack. We sit down and eat dinner between 5-5:30pm depending on what I’m making. After dinner there is time for my husband or myself to do a quick clean up of the dishes while the other one plays with the kids. Then we all have time to sit down together to watch a kid’s show or play cars/tractors/airplanes or read books before it’s time for bath around 6:45pm. At that point, my husband or myself give Judah a bath, get him ready for bed, and give him his nightly bottle while the other one of us cleans up from play time and finishes any remaining dishes from the day. Sometime between 7-7:30pm we both reconvene on the couch and generally open up our laptops again to follow up on anything urgent from the day before shutting our computers around 9pm. I know some people might even consider that excessive, but hey #startuplife.
There are some nights where I open my computer at 7pm and there truly is a dumpster fire to deal with. Our sites have crashed, our number one client is pissed off, our top vendor is messing with our pricing, etc. But 99% of the nights that I open my computer there are maybe 1-2 urgent items to deal with, but nothing that would have been drastically helped if I had gotten to it 3 hours earlier. On the other hand, I shudder to think about the consequences if I continually prioritized work over spending those 2-3 hours with my family each night. I imagine that I would continue to see a deterioration of my relationship with them right before my very eyes. It may have been subtle at first, but over time the damage to those relationships would be irreparable and would have been made for the trade off of potentially keeping a few clients slightly happier with my response times.
Work/life balance is incredibly hard to achieve at any business as a working mother, but especially when there is literally no backfill for your role. If you are the only person at the entire company who does a thing and no one else is qualified to do that thing the pressure is intense to perform on all cylinders at all times. But that is an unsustainable goal. In order to do your best you also have to take time to invest in yourself and the priorities that you have outside of work. For me, that initial investment came in the form of utilizing do not disturb from 4pm-7pm each work day. Simple, but incredibly powerful.