How to Make Progress Even When Your Kids Are Sick--Self Mentor System Blog

It never fails. You've finally got some momentum. The kids went down okay the night before and you skipped the TV to get a full 7 hours of shut eye. That never happens. Your email is surprisingly quiet this morning--no emergencies as far as you can tell. 

Maybe today will be the day you finally catch up on the billing. Or maybe, just maybe, you'll finally carve out some time to get started on that passion project I've been.

And then the phone rings. It's the school. Your kid is sick. Snot, diarrhea, vomiting, the whole nine yards. And your whole day goes out the window. Then your whole night. Then the whole next day. And even after the little one is feeling better and back in their school routine, you've got days of laundry to catch up. You haven't slept a dozen hours in as many nights. 

So much for that project. And getting caught up? Forget about it. You'll be lucky if you ever see the bottom of this paper stack now.

When the kids are sick it can feel like making any progress is impossible. There's just too much to do. Running to the pharmacy, spending all night in the emergency room, not to mention the caretaking required when your munchkin is feeling terrible and it just don't won't stop.

Sure, you can throw work out the window. Eke out only what keeps you from getting fired. Tell yourself that the project you planned to do or the billing can wait until later. It's definitely an option to just not make progress. But you also could make progress.

After all, throwing in the towel never feels good. No one wants to emerge from 5 days of undone laundry to also realize you've got 5 days of undone billing. 5 days of unanswered emails. Sure, putting it off right now because you're just too tired will give you some short term relief. But you'll pay the price for it soon enough. 

Wouldn't it be great if, 5 days from now when you're emerging from the sick bay (right before you probably get sick yourself), you had done just a little something? What if you could be 80% behind, rather than 100%? Wouldn't it be awesome to prove you can show up for yourself, even when there's vomit all over your carpet?

The key to making progress when your kids are sick is creating doable work plans that ASSUME your kid is going to be sick. That's the opposite of how most of us do it. We make our work plans assuming tomorrow is going to "finally" be the day. Today you'll feel motivated. Today the emails won't pile up. Today there won't be any emergencies.

Instead, create your Daily Doable Work Plan assuming a pretty typical bad day. A day when the emails are nonstop. A day when you do have a sick kid at home. A day you don't feel motivated (after all, how many days do you actually wake up feeling motivated?)

You can always do more. If that perfect day does magically arrive, you can keep pushing through on that project. The key is not to set that as the expectation. You set an expectation for work you can do on your absolutely worst day, even with sick kids and everything else.

The reason the first phase of the Self Mentor System is called "Stepping Stone." Because that's where learned to start if we actually wanted to make progress on the days life happens (because that's every day). We don't have the energy to crank out an hour of billing, or 10 pages of writing, on a sick kid day.

On a sick kid day, we might have the energy for adding one item to the accounts billable (5 minutes) or adding a quote from an article to an essay draft (8 minutes). Knowing that's all we can do, that's our stepping stone, and that's what drives our daily work plan. Maybe we'll do two lines of billing, or even three. But we don't have to.

We start with a truly doable goal that we can actually meet. And 5 days later when we're the ones getting sick, we thank ourselves for doing ANYTHING when we could have just done nothing. 

And that's self mentoring. Till next time,

Lee & Mary

Co-founders of the Self Mentor System

P.S. If you're struggling with implementing the Stepping Stone or any other aspect of the Self Mentor System, consider joining our Group Mentoring Community over at www.selfmentorsystem.com. You'll get weekly Q & As with us, a weekly guided working session to take you through the steps of the system, opportunities for personalized attention, and a supportive community you can connect with in real time. All for a low monthly price that will never go up as long as you remain a member.