In today’s Q&A with S&J, Derek asks us:
“How do you work when your kids are home in the summer?”
Shane: What’s up guys, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J. We’ve got another awesome online business question today from one of our Patreon supporters.
Jocelyn: Alright, today’s question is from Derek, and Derek says “how do you work when your kids are home in the summer?” Oh, Derek it can be tough. For sure, our kids just finished school a couple of days ago, which is awesome, because we are now working on their YouTube channel, and our kids are getting a little older now so they can sort of entertain themselves, but then you have to go investigate to see what kind of messes they’ve made and all kinds of fun stuff like that. It can be very difficult to work with the kids at home. Usually we do have a babysitter, but there are times that we do have to work with the kids in our house.
Shane: So really what this comes down to is scheduling and priorities. We do have our kids at home most of the summer even when we have a babysitter. It’s only for a few hours out of the day so basically, what we kind of structured it is this. Number one, I get up pretty early. I get up before the kids get up to get some work done because it’s just a lot easier to get it done when the kids are in bed. Jocelyn chooses to actually work at night so she waits until the kids go to bed. I usually go to bed maybe a little bit before Jocelyn but she works at nighttime, so she’ll work on some stuff at night, but then in the morning, we have everything pretty tightly scheduled and we put the kids first. We get up, we record YouTube videos, we play with them, we play board games, we play video games, and that usually happens until about 10:00 or 11:00 o’clock
Jocelyn: All those things are scheduled, there’s no mystery. We know exactly when we’re spending time with them. We write it on the calendar.
Shane: And that way, basically, we have invested in our kids first. They feel like we are investing in them first. We’re putting them at the front of our schedule, so they are the priority. That makes it a lot easier throughout the day. When there are times where mommy and daddy have a phone call and we have to take it, and the kids can watch TV, or read a book, or play a game with each other and take care of that themselves. When we need to take them over to the babysitter for a few hours, we have no problem doing that, no guilt, because we do spend so much time our kids, and we spend that time first. We always schedule them first in our calendar, so that’s basically how we do it. Also, you better be flexible when your kids are at home. By no means does this work perfect. There’s times just like in school when they get sick and they have to stay home or something. There’s always a variable when you’ve got small children. There are going to be times you’re not going to be able to get stuff done. If you do have some kind of phone call or appointment, you better have backup plans and contingency plans for childcare, and things like that to make sure it happens, but you just got to get it on the schedule. You got to calendar it and you have to be really vigilant and think ahead when your kids are in the house, or you’ll end up all day chasing the kids. If you don’t have a plan with an eight to six year old, that’s a plan for disaster. So basically, plan it, schedule it, and stick to it as much as possible and then be flexible. Don’t be afraid. Like this morning, I got up at five o’clock. I’m out there working. Isaac woke up at 6:00 and he comes and goes “dad I’m freezing come lay down with me” I’m like, what do I do? Am I going to sit here and write emails, or I’m… you know, my son’s eight years old he’s probably got six months left before he’s never going to want to look at me again in public, so I decided I want to put the stuff down. I went lay down with him for a little while, and that was a great can’t miss moment and I’m glad that I did that. Other times, he’s got to understand mommy and daddy gotta work.
Jocelyn: Alright great question from Derek. If you would like to ask a question for a future Q&A with S&J, you can head over to flippedlifestyle.com/patreon, that’s PA-T-R-E-O-N to learn more about how to do that.
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