Don’t Let your Kids Crush Your Dreams
By: I Sun
Tags: Work Life Balance, Entrepreneurship, Kids, Productivity

Don’t Let your Kids Crush Your Dreams

How to Juggle Kids, Career, and a Business One-Handed

Source: Tina Bo at Unsplash

If you’re a parent, you know what it’s like to have to do things one-handed. Newborn cradled in one arm like a football as you make yourself a coffee to fight the sleep deprivation brought on by waking up every 2 hours.

Parenthood. It’s an exclusive club with a lot of members.

When I roll into work at my engineering job all my other co-workers who have kids too give me the “sup” head nod of acknowledgement. They know the battles I’ve endured.

What they can’t understand is how I manage to be highly functional at work while also running a restaurant business and dealing with a newborn and toddler.

They say when you have kids, your life is over. Kiss your dreams goodbye, it’s all about the kids just embrace it.

That doesn’t have to be the case. You just have to become more efficient at everything you do. These are the tools I use to squeeze the most out of the day.

Organizing Tasks with the Reminders App

It started off as a joke but something I used to say at work has now become my mantra.

Set your goals low and you will always achieve

Now that my brain now has to deal with the parental adventure of keeping mini human beings alive I had to shift my memory banks into an app on my phone.

Create smaller, achievable tasks that can be completed in an hour or less Knock out 2–3 a day. I’m able to do this without being an absentee dad by either plugging away while feeding the newborn (not like you need to be engaging them in conversation during a night feeding), early in the morning or late at night when the kids are asleep, and one of the most productive workspaces…the bathroom. Reward yourself for knocking out that quota. For me that’s playing a couple rounds of Clash Royale on my phone or grabbing a brown sugar boba ice cream out of the freezer.

I like to create multiple lists and try to rotate between different types of tasks versus focusing on one thing for a long time which helps me from hitting roadblocks or getting tunnel vision on something. Scheduled tasks are great because they remind me to do things that don’t happen often enough for me to remember naturally like scheduling a hood cleaning every 3 months.

Source: I Sun

Brainstorming with Dropbox Paper

Another great app for jotting down anything I’m thinking about at the time is Dropbox Paper. I used to use Google Keep since it was integrated with GMail but I found Paper to have a cleaner feel and more features.

I use it as a scratchpad for absolutely any fleeting thought that comes to my head. As we were preparing for the opening of the restaurant my partner and I would collaborate in Paper on operating procedures or share notes about things on licensing and permits. These days we use it more for brainstorming thoughts on improving our operations.

Source: I Sun

You can track collaborative tasks in here as well but we don’t use it much since I usually have a short phone call with my partner every day.

Payments and Payroll with Square

As a small business, Square was a good fit for us because of the low startup cost. I already had an iPad laying around, I just had to buy a Square Stand that came with the chip and contactless reader for $100-something.

What’s cool about it too is I can do basically everything from my phone:

Check daily sales

Check time cards

Run payroll

Find transactions

Pro-tip: If you have over $250k in sales and your average ticket is $15 or more get in touch with their customer service to lower your rates.

Do Your Numbers with Quickbooks Online

While Dropbox Paper and Reminders are free, this one requires a $20/month subscription. It’s totally worth it because if I try to use the desktop version my toddler would materialize out of thin air and start bashing on my keyboard. He’s already pulled out two keys off the keyboard so I don’t want any more smoke there.

Source: Quickbooks

Being able to access all our accounting data through my phone helps me stay in touch with our cash flows, monitor banking feeds and look over Profit & Loss reports.

It’s got a nifty feature where you can swipe through your transactions like Tinder to confirm whether it has been categorized appropriately. It’s not as powerful as using it on your desktop but it gets the job done.

Don’t Deal with Checks, Use Bill Pay

Most of our bills are on auto-draft, the ones that aren’t I set up with Bill Pay using my bank. It cuts the check from your account and mails it to where I specify without me having to buy stamps or risk getting a tongue laceration licking an envelope. You can schedule them but I typically manually kick them off as driven by one of my reminders.

Scheduling with Homebase

Managing schedule for our front and back of house staff used to be a hassle. We got rid of that pain with Homebase.

Source: Homebase

With Homebase I no longer have to deal with the occasional call out or change of shift. Everybody can see their schedules and can trade on their own (which I have the opportunity to approve). Employees can put in their availability which helps with scheduling.

Takeaway

Just because you have kids doesn’t mean you have to set your dreams of starting or running a business to the side. Find ways to simplify your life by harnessing the power of all the apps out there (most of which you can use for free).

Soon you’ll be running your business all with one hand without sacrificing what matters most…spending time with your kids.