Three management skills I use with my newborn
Since having a baby one month ago, my day-to-day looks completely different (case in point, I can’t remember the last time my colleagues spit up on me). The good news is that I’ve found many of my workplace skills have made the transition to motherhood easier. Here are three lessons I’ve learned:
- Stay slushy
Fun baby fact — if we continued to grow at the same rate we do in the first year of life, we would all be tall enough to reach the moon. What that means for me as a parent is that the moment I think I’ve mastered something, his schedule, what soothes him, etc…, it changes. That keeps me in a constant state of learning, which frankly can be exhausting. What’s helped is what we call at LifeLabs “slushiness”; avoiding a fixed mindset and embracing a state of perpetual change. By not expecting every day to look like the last, it reduces my frustration and gives me the patience to keep learning new things.
2. You can’t do it all — so know your priorities
At LifeLabs, we’ve studied the time habits of thousands of managers and one consistent theme is that everyone has far less time than they think they have. I’m finding the same is true when dealing with my newborn. By the time I’ve fed him, burped him, changed him, etc… hours have gone by and it’s time for the cycle to repeat again. What has kept me from feeling like I’m on a milk-fueled treadmill is using the power of a time audit to create an accurate picture of how much time keeping this baby alive takes (before you write this off as unrealistic, keep in mind I already have to track the timing of his feeding/pooping/sleeping). I’ve realized that realistically I have enough time to accomplish one non-baby related thing per day. Armed with that knowledge, I can prioritize the thing that will bring me the greatest feeling of recharge or progress. Most days that means a nap.
3. The power of pomodoro
Baby humans start off needing to eat every 2 hours. To cope with this round the clock cycle I’ve applied the pomodoro mentality — a time management technique where you work in 25 minute bursts with short breaks in between. While I don’t stick to that timing per se, the idea of breaking the day into intervals has both helped ensure that I take advantage of the moments I have to accomplish critical tasks like eating (lesson learned from the day that I reheated my lunch 5 times). It’s also helped reduce the frustration during the really rough patches by giving me a mental endpoint — as bad as post-feeding fussiness gets, I remind myself that we get a chance to re-set in two hours at the next feed.
I’m clearly still very new at this parenting thing and I expect that what I’ve learned so far will likely not apply in two weeks, but for now it’s great to know that I can re-use some of my work tools in this next chapter. Now if you’ll excuse me, the boss is demanding another meal…
