025: Getting Work Done When You Have a Sick Child or Spouse

Download: MP3 (57.9 MB)

As a family of eight with three in elementary school and weekly visits to the church nursery, the odds of someone catching some kind of virus or another are stacked against us. We do our best through proper hygiene, diet, and sleep, to avoid sickness, but it’s inevitable.

Working and maintaining a healthy family life is hard enough, but throw in a sick spouse or child and things can become exponentially more difficult.

There were times when a sick spouse or kid would completely derail us. The loss of time is frustrating, but the loss of momentum can make things even more difficult even when you can return to work.

We’ve gotten plenty of experience working through sickness, and in this episode we share some of the techniques we’ve learned to keep our productivity up when managing sickness in our household. You can’t avoid sickness completely, but if you can purposefully plan for it you can get through it and still keep things up and running.

Highlights, Takeaways, & Quick Wins

• Accept that productivity will take a dip.
• Don’t focus on the things you aren’t getting done because it will hijack your productivity.
• Lack of sleep is going to cost you.
• Sometimes, it’s better not to work at all to get the sleep you need, so that you can be focused when you can work.
• Prepare and build margin into your schedule.
• It’s ok to reach out to people and share your feelings when you’re overwhelmed.
• Having margin is a choice—a lack of margin is not a necessity.
• Sometimes, trying to maintain things while there’s so much chaos sets you back even further.
• Build in extra time to account for the unforeseen things.
• The commitments you make to yourself are not less important than the commitments you make to others.
• As humans, we’re always going to choose family over work.
• We have to get over ourselves and ask for help.

Show Notes

• 01:34 Ben: This has been something, especially during this time of year, that we become very familiar with. As a disclaimer, we’re not talking about chronic illness. We’re talking about things like colds, viruses, stomach bugs, and that kind of thing.
• 02:03 Rachel: Some are worse than others. There’s a hierarchy of kid’s sicknesses.
• 02:10 Ben: Anything that affects the bodily functions of children under a certain age gets pretty bad. They don’t know the cues yet.

Getting Work Done When You’re Sick

• 04:07 Ben: I do want to do an episode that focuses on chronic illness, but I’m going to answer this as if she’s talking about the temporary type of sickness, though I’m not sure either way. Daniela asked, “Does how to deal with being sick yourself come into this topic, in terms of how to keep your productivity up on rougher days?” My experience with being sick is that, most of the time, I don’t feel like doing anything. It’s crazy, because during the times that I feel well, I look back on my sick self and think, “Why couldn’t you just muscle through it?”
• 05:00 It’s amazing how, when your body is pouring all this energy into trying to keep you alive, you have nothing left for anything. Sometimes it’s not that bad. I’m probably a little bit of a baby when it comes to that. Even if you’re sick for only 24 hours, it can feel like it’s going to last forever and you’re going to be sick for the rest of your life.
• 05:27 Rachel: Usually, by the time we get it, we’ve already nursed at least half of our children back to health. It doesn’t always go through everybody, but it usually goes through at least half of them and one of us. It’s like heads or tails, who’s going to get it this time?

Dealing With a Sick Spouse

• 05:49 I’m going to start with a question. On Twitter, if you follow me at @bentoalson, that’s where I post stuff that has to do with In the Boat With Ben, whether it’s related to balancing family and work life or raising your children from the standpoint of values. Today, I did something that I’ve never done before. I took advantage of their polling function. I asked, “Which is more challenging and why: Sick at home spouse or sick at home kids?” I’m not going to tell you what the results are yet, because I want to hear your answer. What do you think, Rachel?
• 06:38 Rachel: I think it’s probably the sick at home spouse. I battle against feeling guilty, because I’m not really taking care of you since they’re now six on one. It’s also hard because there are six on one. It’s super challenging.
• 07:03 Ben: According to this poll, 55% of those who participated in the poll agree with you. 45% said it was the kids. I’m going to have to go ahead and say that, hands down, the spouse being sick is the worst. Rachel can kind of take care of herself. When the kids are sick, they do need stuff from you, but they don’t really do much. They become lethargic, but it’s a little bit nice. It requires more of you in some ways and less of you in other ways, but at least you’ve got the spouse there. When the spouse is sick, most of the time you can take care of yourself, but they’re out of commission.

When a spouse is sick, what used to fall on two people now falls on one person.

• 08:13 Rachel: When you do have a sick kid, it’s kind of like there’s one down, so it can feel a little easier because of logistic stuff. I know when our boys have stomach viruses, the one who has the stomach virus doesn’t want to eat. That’s one less meal I have to prepare. That sounds awful. For a spouse being sick, you’re alone for all of those transitions, or else someone is working when they’re miserable.
• 08:51 Ben: That’s terrible. I’m glad that you and I agree, Rachel, but that doesn’t make for a very interesting conversation. I feel like they are similar enough in nature that we can pretty much cover both with these points we’re going to go over.
• 09:09 Rachel: In certain instances, the gap can be a little closer. Sometimes, when the kids are sick, at least for me, they’re extremely demanding of my time. They just want to be held by me. It’s cute and I love it, but at the same time, I’ve got five others.

Accept that Your Productivity Will Take a Dip

• 09:57 Ben: Don’t kid yourself and think, “My kids aren’t going to get sick.” We’ve talked before about how it’s kind of bewildering, because we feed our kids a very healthy diet. We are really strict about how much sleep they get. We have a one in six chance of somebody bringing something home, but it seems like we’ve pretty regularly got somebody under the weather.
• 10:26 Rachel: It’s just been this year. I don’t remember it happening in prior years. We had one home sick this week because he was running a fever at school for like 20 seconds. He came home and was perfectly fine, but he can’t go back to school for 24 hours.
• 10:48 Ben: I totally get that, and I appreciate that that rule exists, because if it was my kid and someone else was there and sick, I would want them to stay home. It makes things more complicated. If your thinking is, “I need to find a way to keep my productivity up,” you’re going to be frustrated. It’s enough of a gift that you can get anything done when you have a sick spouse or kid at home. Accept that productivity will take a dip. These things are dealing with mindset, but we have these strict rules for the activities our kids are involved in, the amount of screen time they’re allowed to have, and the kind of diet they eat.

We have to be willing to break some of our rules if we need to keep our productivity up to a certain level.

• 11:57 You want to be careful with that, too. Don’t go overboard. Don’t break the rules enough that it makes it even more difficult to recover on the other end. We’ve had both experiences, where somebody’s sick and we try to keep the productivity up, we try to keep the house running the way we normally do, and we try to keep all these rules in tact, and it ends up becoming so tense and frustrating. Everything suffers anyway.
• 12:30 Rachel: When you’re holding onto your expectations for how much you’re going to get done when your kid is home from school or when your kid is sick, you end up getting frustrated, which pushes you into this mindset of, “I’m never going to get anything done. My time is always wasted like this. There’s always something that comes up.” You start thinking in these absolutes, and that mindset can make your productivity go down even more. You’re not doing yourself any favors.
• 13:09 Ben: Even when things are good. This goes back to what we were talking about previously. Be on that side of mindset and say, “It’s a gift that I’m able to get things done.” Thinking about things more positively leads to more positive outcomes.
• 13:31 Rachel: An example here is when our six year old was the one to stay home most recently. He wanted to stay by my side the entire day and talk to me about all kinds of different things. He probably told me 10,000 words of stories. I was trying to read some research stuff, because after I put the twins down for their nap, I’ll typically start a little bit of light work, because I still have to have my attention focused. It took me twice as long to get through that research as it would have if I hadn’t had someone talking in my ear the whole time. If I were holding onto needing to get through this many pages and I only got through half of that, I would have already started my work shift feeling frustrated and behind.

Don’t focus on the things you aren’t getting done because it will hijack your productivity.

• 14:31 Ben: It’s good to make allowances, and not to go overboard. You want to get to the other side of those and recover and get back into a rhythm, which we’ll talk about more here in a little bit. That can really alleviate some of the stress. Those are just mindset-focused approaches to keeping your productivity up that have to do with getting rid of guilt, expectations, and that kind of thing.

Arrange Blocks of Productive Time

• 15:05 A lot of what we do for this kind of thing is more preparatory in nature, and Rachel and I had a conversation a while back about, basically, organizing your schedule in blocks of time. I haven’t been keeping up this practice, but Rachel has pretty regularly. Also, she helped me recently organize my schedule into these blocks of time. The thing I really like about that is that when you have these blocks of time organized, you’ve got your schedule set, there are benefits to having that rigidity and knowing when things are going to happen. Also, you can take those blocks and move them around. You can shift them to other times if you need to, and it’s just like reorganizing.
• 16:36 Say, for example, you have a stack of blocks. If you need to make room for something where there are blocks, you just move those blocks out of the way to another space where they fit. Now, you’ve got that space available. That may be something you need to do if you need to manage a sick child or manage the house when a spouse is sick. You may just need to have time where you don’t have to work and shift that somewhere else. That’s something you have to plan for. There are those focused blocks of time, where you’re doing work you really do need to focus on, and you can’t have the distraction of taking care of the house or the kids.
• 17:18 There are other tasks, for most people, that don’t require as much of your focus. We call this “light work.” Where you have light work, you may be able to do that during a time when you’re watching the kids or taking care of the house. The same kind of thing is true, you may need to move that block where you’re doing light work to a time when you know you’re going to be responsible for taking care of the kids and shift some other things around. Having that structure in place ahead of time gives you the freedom to make those shifts when it’s necessary.
• 18:16 Rachel: Light work is stuff that doesn’t require our full attention. For me, something that requires full attention would be writing, brainstorming, or that kind of thing. Something that doesn’t require all my attention is my 15 minutes of social media time that I do for business, watching a video that’s teaching me about building a platform, or something like that.
• 18:29 Ben: Cory Miller said, “Both my wife and I work from home. I usually assume that if either my wife or my child is sick, or both, my productivity level is going to plummet. Should I just plan on waking up earlier or going to bed later to work while they’re sleeping, or are there better methods of keeping my productivity at a good level?” That’s a difficult call to make. When we’re talking about shifting around these blocks of time, you do have to take into account that, if you shift a block into a time when you’re normally sleeping, that lack of sleep is going to cost you.
• 19:12 You have to determine whether if you do that, is the lack of focus you’re going to experience because you didn’t get enough sleep going to sabotage your ability to focus when the kids aren’t sick? You’ve got to weigh your choices there and make those determinations. It’s really a case by case thing.

Sometimes, it’s better not to work at all to get the sleep you need so that you can be focused when you can work.

• 19:49 Rachel: It’s hard as entrepreneurs to permit ourselves to take a day off. Whenever our kids are sick, Ben’s sick, or even when I feel sick, it’s really hard for me to sit back and say, “It’s okay for me to take a day off. The world isn’t going to fall apart. Yeah, I may have a little extra work to do to catch up, or I may not ever catch up, but it’s okay.” That mindset helps. It’s hard when we’re in the position where we need that mindset, because it’s not often the first thing that comes to us.
• 20:29 Ben: Sometimes, it really is this false belief that if we don’t do this now, we’re going to be behind, when really, doing it now is going to sabotage the things you need to focus on later. It’s actually putting you further behind than it would if you would have just taken that rest. It is a mindset thing, but there’s also some objectivity that comes into that. Think through that and experiment with it. Go ahead and take some of your sleep time to catch up on some work, and see how it affects you the following day. I have to say, last night I stayed up way too late.
• 21:13 I was working on something I wanted to get done, and I’m under a bit of a deadline with it. I thought, “I’ll just stay up and I’ll work until this point,” and I ended up losing quite a bit of sleep. Today, I haven’t been as focused. There are things I had on my list to do today that I haven’t even gotten to, and the house is a mess. So many things are affected by that one decision.
• 21:46 Rachel: It was kind of a train wreck this morning too, because we’ve had such heavy rain that they canceled school. It wasn’t until Ben actually got the kids up to school that they said they were canceling, and it was a two hour delay first.
• 22:01 Ben: This morning was a mess. I got there to drop them off, and they said that there was a two hour delay. I had also not had time to make their lunches before we needed to leave, so my plan was to drop them off, come back and make their lunches, and then drop their lunches off. We ended up hanging out at the school and trying to figure out if we should take them back home or if they should stay there, and we finally decided to have them stay. I came back home, made their lunches, and as soon as I dropped their lunches off, I walked into the office and they said, “By the way, school is cancelled today.”
• 22:41 Rachel: It was like, “Are we on an episode of Punked? What’s going on here?” That’s the same thing as having a sick day, except now you have everybody at home and you have to figure out what to do with them.

Reducing Negativity

• 22:57 People in the chat are saying that they struggle with negativity when their spouse is sick, but when their kids are sick, they just feel nurturing and they have this caring sense.
• 23:10 Ben: Negativity toward the spouse?
• 23:12 Rachel: I think it’s negativity toward the situation in general. I feel the same way. When Ben gets sick, I almost feel angry—not at him, but at the situation. Now, I have a much harder job, because there isn’t this other person here to help me. When a kid is sick, the only thing you want to do is cuddle them, take care of them, and make sure that they’re okay. I don’t know what it is. It’s like this psychological phenomenon that happens when you’re the one who’s well, your spouse is the one who’s sick, and it’s almost like, “I want to spend a day in bed, but now I have to take care of all these kids!”
• 23:59 Ben: Yeah, because I’m having so much fun.
• 24:04 Rachel: It’s almost like my brain can’t wrap around the feeling of sickness so much as it can wrap around the idea that Ben gets a day off and I don’t.
• 24:25 Ben: There is that aspect of it. Robert brought in some clarity and said, “Negativity in general. Not resentful of the sick spouse, but feeling more hopeless about everything, less resilient to setbacks.” I tend to be more of a positive person, so I don’t relate to that quite as much, but I do have these experiences from time to time when It seems like everything has suddenly become overwhelming. Though I know that I’ve had so many experiences where we’ve recovered, we’ve gotten through it, and we get back on track, for some reason, it’s the same as being sick. When you’re in the middle of it, it feels like there isn’t an end in sight, and that really wears on you.
• 25:12 Rachel: It does. I think we’ve been feeling it the last couple of months, because people have been bringing home respiratory infections and all this kind of stuff that they pick up at school.
• 25:32 Ben: That can affect your productivity also, when you feel that way. It’s almost like, “What’s the point?” In those moments, my encouragement would be to reach out to community. We’re going to talk more about that as well, getting help.

It’s ok to reach out to people and share your feelings when you’re overwhelmed.

• 25:57 In a delicate way, when you talk to your spouse, say, “I feel so overwhelmed. I’m not saying that to say that you should be doing stuff. It’s just the situation. I feel so bad for you because you’re sick, and I hate that for you. I know it’s hard for you to be sick.” Be empathetic, but also feel the freedom to express your feelings. When you are able to express your feelings, you’re able to start working through them. Spouses, be okay with your significant other’s emotions. Let them express their feelings, not be ashamed or afraid to do so because they think it will have some kind of implications. For example, the husband who doesn’t want to talk about how overwhelmed or worried they feel about something because they’re afraid that’s going to set off their wife’s worry and concern. You don’t have to be strong like solid rocks for each other. Allow that exchange to happen. You need it for and from each other.
• 27:26 Rachel: There’s a great quote from Brene Brown, who says something like, “Show me a man who can just sit with a woman in her despair and not try to fix it, and you’ll find a man who’s completely comfortable with who he is.” It’s the same thing with a woman, “Show me a woman who can sit with a man in his despair and not feel fear about it, and you’ll see a woman who’s comfortable with herself.”

Preparing for Sick Days

• 28:42 Ben: We talked about how you can be preparatory in setting aside these blocks in your schedule, but when you have light work and you separate out the stuff you know you’re going to have to focus on from the stuff that doesn’t require as much focus, you separate those things out and you have that list. Yes, they have a reserved time, but you also have that list available for those unforeseen times when you’re going to need to be with a sick child or taking care of the home. You have something you can go to and say, “I can’t accomplish what I really want to accomplish right now because I can’t focus on it, but I can at least work down this list of things.” Having that ready to go is really helpful.

Prepare and build margin into your schedule.

• 29:46 Rachel: It’s tough for me, too. I have zero margin for any unexpected things. This week, not only did we have a sick kid, but I also had to work three parent teacher conferences into my work schedule. It stole an hour and a half of my time. Because I don’t have any margin with work stuff, I had to give up a whole block of accomplishing something.
• 30:13 Ben: You have to ask yourself some really hard questions. Is everything I’m doing really necessary, or am I habitually filling my schedule to the brim with busyness? Having margin is a choice—a lack of margin is not a necessity. I’m saying that as an absolute statement, because I know that there are people on the fringes who will say, “You don’t know what my life is like and how much responsibility I have and what if?” Stop asking “What if,” and really take a hard look at your schedule. If margin is something that you want, and I would argue that it’s something that you need, if you look, you will find something in your schedule, your workflow, or that you’re doing in your life to build that margin in.
• 31:22 For things like this, having a sick child or spouse, or for countless other things, without that margin, you end up losing work time. Like I said in the pre-show, kids are such a wild card. It affects what you’re able to accomplish, the goals you’re able to work toward. Wouldn’t you rather have a list of things you know you can accomplish because you have enough margin built in to account for the craziness? You’re never going to account for all of it.
• 31:54 Rachel: Matt just asked, “Do you mean margin in your work, or everywhere?”
• 32:01 Ben: Yes, we are going to get to that, Matt. I’m talking about in your schedule as a whole. If we’re talking about those blocks of time and you’re looking at your schedule in that week view, and you’ve got these blocks that are colored blue for focused work, yellow for light work, and then you’ve got blocks that are green, and those are the margins. You don’t schedule anything there. That’s just extra time that is available in case something happens and you need to push something into those times.
• 32:45 Rachel: I would suggest having things you could do with that margin time if it’s not needed otherwise.
• 32:55 Ben: You definitely could, but you’ve got to be careful not to place expectations on yourself. You could easily fall into the trap of thinking, “I’m pretty consistently having this margin time, I guess I can expect that I can accomplish something.” You’ve got to be really careful about that.

What to Do When You Lose Time

• 33:17 Robert says, “How do you recover momentum when the sickness gets passed around the house from child to spouse to you? The extended sick period plus recovery makes it so that things sometimes have to come full stop for a week or two before we can get back on track.” We’ve definitely experienced that before, and one of the ways that you can make that easier is that you can have rhythm in your life. Right now, our rhythm as a family is kind of struggling. There are some things, little tweaks here and there, that gave us a little bit out of rhythm. The more solid your rhythm is, the easier it’s going to be for you to recover and get back on track. Sometimes, to work through that sickness without missing a beat, I liken it to when we were performing a lot with our band.
• 34:23 I think it was only one or two times ever that we got so off track with one another that we actually had to stop a song and start over, which is pretty embarrassing. You’re up there on stage, people are listening to you, and you can feel how much discord there is with everything that’s going on. Out of service to the audience and everyone involved, you have to say, “Okay guys, I’m so sorry, we’ve got to stop this song and start over, because we’ve totally gotten off track.” Hopefully that doesn’t happen too much, but it happens sometimes.
• 35:07 Rachel: You’re saying that’s what it feels like with the family?
• 35:09 Ben: That’s what it can feel like. If you’ve got a solid rhythm, sometimes you can get through those rough patches in the “song” and you know that you’re off, but you can feel that solid rhythm, it’s driving and it’s steady, and you know you can jump back on it if you need to. Rhythm really just looks like having a set schedule, having a time and a place for everything in your schedule, and being punctual with that and strict where you need to be strict. That doesn’t mean that you never deviate from that. There’s something that Austin Kleon says that I really like, “You can’t break routine if you don’t have a routine to begin with.” Having that rhythm really helps, but there may be times when it may be better for you and your family to totally stop the song and take the time you need to recover before you jump back into it.

Sometimes, trying to maintain things while there’s so much chaos sets you back even further.

• 36:33 Rachel: Yeah, it does. Sometimes, when things are getting passed around from kid to kid or from spouse to you, it’s okay to take a week and just breathe. You can get so stressed out, because not only do you not want to see your loved ones sick, but there’s always so much stuff to do. If there’s a virus in the house, you have to clean and do laundry. If there’s puke involved, that’s even worse. That can make you so stressed out that you’re not worth a whole lot when you go to work. When that happens, I try to think, “This is like an unintended sabbath, and I’m going to take it for all it’s worth. Even though I’m scrubbing floors right now, I can listen to a podcast while I’m doing that. There are other things I can do to not necessarily work, but to better myself.” Sometimes, those things come unexpectedly, but if we can learn to embrace them, we’ll be happier.
• 37:52 Ben: It’s just a humanity thing. We have this need and desire to be in control, and when things get out of control, there’s something in us that fights against that. When they’re so out of control that you’re hurting yourself by trying to reign everything in and hold onto all of the moving parts, letting go is such a relief.

Creating a Buffer for Your Work

• 38:28 Matt was asking earlier about building margin into work, and I think he might mean things like projects and that sort of thing. I’m going to bring in two different approaches here. Let’s say you’re a person who puts out regular content. Maybe you’re doing a podcast, you put out a blog, or you send out a newsletter. One of the things you can do to be ready for times when somebody is sick is to have a buffer. Have some episodes or some articles in the queue that you can pull from. Maybe these are articles you’ve written before. You shouldn’t put out the exact same podcast show, but it could be something that makes it a little easier or something you’ve already recorded that you have waiting in the wings.
• 39:41 We do this on the seanwes podcast. He stays a few episodes ahead. His daily TV show is insane and he actually has a buffer of 14 episodes. If you think about it, that’s only two weeks, but that’s a lot. If something happens, he’s got that buffer that he can use and then rebuild. It’s the same thing we had done with savings before. We’re trying to get back into that, building a buffer of several months of savings, so that if anything happens, we can always use that with the intention of building it back up. Having that buffer is really helpful.
• 40:39 Rachel: Something like that takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of planning. For those of us who are averse to planning, that can feel like a really tough thing to do. It’s also a freeing thing to do, because we no longer have the pressure of working on a day when a spouse is sick or several kids are sick.
• 41:07 Ben: I just think about how nice it is to know that when I absolutely need to take a day off, there’s still stuff coming out. I have enough scheduled ahead that it’s taken care of. That might mean that I need to hustle extra hard the following week. When it comes to things like projects, where you have clients you’re working for, maybe for a website design or logo, something of that nature, always build in extra time to account for the unforeseen things. The unforeseens can come in so many shapes and sizes. Somebody told me this, and I always thought it was crazy until I had an experience with it, but you take how long you think it’s going to take you to finish that project, and you double it. That’s what you tell the client.
• 42:02 Rachel: At least double it. If you’re not good at estimating time anyway, I would suggest tripling.
• 42:14 Ben: Be careful with that, too. If you’re like me, you might have this tendency to allow a project that you could get done in four weeks, if you’ve got an eight week deadline, to get dragged out over eight weeks. That’s no problem. I have to be really intentional about protecting that extra time by being focused in the beginning.

It’s good to get in the habit of building in extra time and building that expectation in your clients.

• 42:56 That might mean that you need to turn down a job if they need something rushed or charge a lot more.
• 43:06 Rachel: I think deadlines help with anything. My background is as a journalist, so every day I had a deadline. I feel like it not only makes you more productive, but it helps you focus more. You know you only have this certain amount of time, and it’s hard when it’s a soft deadline, because you know that the client is not expecting it at that time. It’s just this deadline you’ve made for yourself. If you trick your brain to think that deadline is the hard deadline, it opens up so much more to not do things last minute.
• 43:52 Ben: I don’t like that, though. I totally agree with what Rachel is saying, but I don’t like the idea of the client’s deadline being the hard deadline and your own deadline is the soft deadline. That perpetuates this idea that it’s okay for me not to fulfill the commitments I’ve made to myself. It’s saying that commitments I’ve made to other people are more important than commitments I’ve made to myself. I don’t know that one is really more important than the other, but I definitely wouldn’t say that the commitments you make to yourself are less important than the commitments you make to others.
• 44:37 When you fulfill a commitment you’ve made to somebody else, you meet a deadline, it affects the way you see commitments you make to yourself. You’re more likely to see them through. It’s even more powerful. When you make a commitment to yourself and you see that through, that highly influences how well committed you stay to others. I want to get away from thinking, “Well, that’s just my deadline, so it’s okay.” This is me personally, because this is something that I struggle with.
• 45:15 Rachel: When I worked for the newspaper and I had the hard deadline, which could be considered like the deadline from a client, I always made myself a deadline that was several hours before, just in case. You’re kind of dependent on whether or not you can get ahold of people, so it’s almost like the unforeseen stuff.
• 45:36 Ben: That can be difficult, too. If you have an unhealthy relationship with deadlines and there’s a lot of fear and anxiety involved, you don’t want to experience that with your personal deadlines. There’s a whole conversation to be had about that.

If you have to scale back on your work significantly because you’ve got to deal with stuff, communicate honestly with your clients or your boss.

• 46:14 Let them know what’s going on, and do it sooner rather than later. Don’t wait until the last minute. While they may feel disappointed or it may affect their bottom line, any number of those things may be true, but you can’t get away from life. People generally understand that life is going to happen to you. There are going to be people who don’t, and you’re going to have to deal with that, and that’s frustrating and unfortunate. Generally, though, people are understanding, especially when you’re communicative and honest.
• 47:02 Rachel: As entrepreneurs, people who work for ourselves, or even people who work for bosses, we can put so much pressure on ourselves to get our jobs done in the time we think it should take. The thing that kids introduce into our lives is a sense of unpredictability. You never know if you’re going to wake up one morning and somebody’s eyes are crusted shut or something. That happened to us recently. Like Ben said, it’s such a wild card. If we can take that pressure off of ourselves, we would feel so much more freedom to move into the things we were meant to do anyway.
• 47:54 I know for myself, I can list a whole bunch of things I want to get done in a day. If somebody wakes up sick, they’re super snuggly with me, and I have to hold somebody while I’m trying to work on a computer, it just feels like resistance the entire day. I get so frustrated, and it feels like it knocks me all off-kilter. We can lessen the pressure a little and not feel so obligated. We should feel liberated to just be people, because we’re people first, not workers. Sometimes, when these things happen in life, it sets us back, and that’s human. It’s human nature, because we care about our families.

As humans, we’re always going to choose family over work.

• 48:59 Ben: People would be understanding if there was a fire or a tornado that ripped through your house or something like that, and sickness, in my mind, falls under that category of an act of God. It’s something that’s completely outside of your control. Whether it’s for the client, the job, or whatever it is, you can’t do your best work under those circumstances. They don’t want shoddy work from you because you’re trying to keep up with their expectations. I know that there are cases where people are unreasonable and don’t care about your circumstances.
• 49:44 Rachel: They got perfect attendance at school and never take a day off.
• 49:48 Ben: I know that that stuff is out there, but to answer Robert’s question, “What do you do if you’re going to miss a crucial deadline because you had to care for a sick spouse? Does it diminish your credibility as a professional who delivers on commitments, or does it help them to see that you’re a human being?” I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive. A professional who experiences something outside their control, who is honest and communicative, still maintains their credibility. A professional is also going to look at that situation and say, “Okay, how could I have been more prepared for that?”
• 50:31 Maybe you can put some things in place to avoid missing that deadline in the future. If you do those things, if you’re honest and communicative, your credibility will remain intact.

Reaching Out to Community

• 51:01 Ask friends and family for help. Especially here in the States, we are very independent and self-sufficient. That’s the culture, but in other cultures, generations live together under the same roof. We can’t imagine what that’s like. There are definitely pockets of that here in the States, but many of us need to get better at asking for help and taking on the humility of saying, “I can’t handle this.” It’s such a backwards thing. We want to look outwardly like we are in control of our lives, like we’ve accounted for all of the moving pieces. For us, there’s this element where we’ve chosen to have six kids. If suddenly we need help, we open ourselves up to people saying, “If you guys can’t handle it, maybe you shouldn’t have had so many kids.”
• 52:12 There’s this fear. We’re projecting our fears onto what we think other people think or feel about us, and we’re putting this wall between us and being able to receive the gift of help from others who really want to give that. It’s also a gift for them. People who get to help somebody who’s going through a difficult circumstance receive value out of that interaction.

We have to get over ourselves and ask for help.