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Last year, my wife and I made a somewhat terrifying decision to skip summer camp for our kids. It meant adjusting our work schedules, juggling childcare, and wondering if my business would crash and burn. Spoiler alert, it didn't. So guess what? We are, we're trying it again this year, and this time, we're going to do it, hopefully, a little better.
So in today's episode, we'll get a recap of last year's experience. I'll share some of the lessons that we learned, and I'll explain how I'll be better prepared this time, and then maybe how you can do this as well if you are able to.
You know, one of the things one of the reasons I became a solopreneur, a self-employed person, is so that I would have this sort of time freedom, to spend more time with my kids and to not have to work the rigid 9-5 or ask for time off and things like that.
So, let's get into it. We'll talk about a recap of last year's decision, then we will talk about some of the lessons I learned last summer, and then how we're better prepared this year.
So, first of all, last year's decision. We ran the numbers and we found out that it would cost between 9 and $10,000 to send our kids to day care and summer camp, which is too much money. That's too much money. And, you know, if we were intending to do it even part-time, it would have cost a bunch of money. And it's actually, it's a good thing that we didn't because we ended up having some other unexpected expenses. Two appliances went last summer and that was upsetting.
But aside from the financial motivation, I also recognize that we are in a limited time frame for when our kids want to hang out with us. Right now, they are younger, eight and younger, and they want to hang out with us. And I already see in my oldest that that is increasingly less true. And so I want to, we both want to maximize the amount of time that we can spend with our kids because we are lucky enough to have flexible schedules that allow us to do that. We are lucky enough not to have to only see our kids on nights and weekends when we get home from work.
And so we made some adjustments to our schedule. My, you know, my wife worked weekends. I took off certain work days. We did have a good support system in place with my father-in-law and our babysitter. However, our babysitter now has a real job. Not that babysitting is not a real job. It's a hard job. But she has a full-time employer. She's also a nurse like my wife, and she's getting married this summer. And so, I suspect that we won't have her for much longer.
And so, while we did have a good support system in place and we made adjustments to our work schedule, I last yeI'll link to last year's episode if you wanna hear the first installment in this series, I guess. I gave myself a solid B for how things went overall, and then to kinda recap the good, the bad, the ugly.
I don't think I did good, bad, ugly for this but the good. Right? Even with my reduced work schedule, I felt flexible enough to take some spontaneous family trips. Like going to the zoo on my son's birthday. His birthday was on a Friday, and I had already marked some time off in the afternoon because we were getting new furniture and so I really needed to work. I felt I needed to work that morning, but I thought well, we should go. I should go. So I was able to do that. I was able to completely disconnect during family vacations, which is nice.
I hate working on family vacations. I talk, you know, this is something I've talked about a lot this year because of my yearly theme, the year of being present, and the fact that we went to Disney World and I didn't bring my laptop or do any work.
I was also able to maintain boundaries, so I didn't wanna work full weekend days. And I tried very hard not to do that, especially when my wife was home, because we had very few days where all five of us were together, right, between her working and me working. And so, I really wanted to be able to spend those times with the family.
Some of the challenges, though, were that if I was unmotivated on a work day, it really felt amplified that I had limited work time. And so I put even more pressure on myself to get the work done. I still took on too much. I was still saying yes to a lot of things that I shouldn't have.
And then, you know, a couple of things that, one, I see coming again. But early in the summer, there were some communication issues between my wife and me. We were kind of just surviving in early summer, and we weren't communicating as well as we could have. And that did get better, but that was a problem early on.
And then the personal challenges, maintaining an exercise routine, healthy eating, that's going to continue to be a problem, a problem, but I have, I turned 40 in October, and I want to lose 40 pounds by then. I guess it's closer to 30 now. But I wanna lose an appreciable amount of weight by then, and diet and exercise are crucial to that. And so I am more motivated this year to make sure that that happens.
How are we going to be better prepared this year? Well, first of all, we are unlike last year; we're more on top of the childcare and how our schedule is going to work than we were last year. Right? We had a plan for June in May, and now my wife is gonna make the rest of her summer schedule, and it'll be, it'll be a little bit better and more manageable.
So we're gonna have more planned activities and outings. This was something that I struggled with. I still didn't like taking my kids out places last year by myself. I felt pretty overwhelmed by it, and that's just something I had to get over.
Being in Disney World helped with that. And so, you know, I am taking them out more by myself. And so definitely more of that, more planned activities, more outings.
We do have a new fence in our yard. And thanks to that, there can be more unsupervised play in the backyard, which is nice. I wanna find we do wanna find, like, a better balance between free time and organized time, though. Kids need structure. And when they don't have structure, that's when they get bored and mad, and they have trouble regulating their emotions, and me too. Right? So I need to remember that even though as an adult, I would kill to be bored, as a kid, boredom is just terrible. Right? Because, not boredom in the sense that they have free time to expand and explore, but boredom in the sense that if there's no structure, if they don't know what to expect in a day, then, that will wreak havoc on their little brains, and it'll make it worse for me and my wife.
So we're definitely gonna have more structure to the kids' day. We have memberships in a couple of places. Now that's another thing. Like, we are in a better place financially than we were last year, and we have explored what we can do more. We're taking a couple of trips. My parents moved to Upstate New York. I'll be doing an extended trip down here. And so that will, in general, be better, I believe. Right?
As far as my working plan, I do have more realistic expectations for what can be accomplished. I'm not saying yes to a bunch of work. The regular contract work that I have is great, and I have made space for that.
As far as fulfilling other financial goals for the summer, I am actively seeking sponsors for this podcast and other projects. And so, you know, I need to be better about pitching those, but those are things that will help me kind of get through the summer.
I have one conference scheduled for this summer, and that's it. That's in June. Crafting Commerce, actually. If you'll be there, say hello. I will be there for both Jay Clouse member event and for Craft and Commerce. So I'll be in Boise for a while. But I do have more realistic expectations about what I can accomplish.
I'm also going to be better about time blocking and prioritization. My goal is kinda one major project per month, with June being my LinkedIn learning course, July likely being my own product, and kinda juries out for August right now. I don't know, a couple of potential client projects that I'm holding space for.
I also wanna I you know, I've identified my green zone. If you're unfamiliar with the idea of, green zone, it's it's from Carey Nieuwhof’s book, At Your Best. You kind of identify when you are most productive, and you want to maximize your work time for that. So my green zone is usually the morning, and so I will maximize my time for that.
Something I was bad at last year that I am definitely going to do better this year is time boxing and blocking off my schedule. I made my schedule open last year because I figured, well, if I was limiting my work time, I should open it up for when people actually do wanna meet with me. My time is still my time, and I need to remember that I need to prioritize my work over just any old meeting and that people don't need to meet with me the same week that they reach out to me.
So I'm likely going to have one meeting day per week if I can help it, and that will probably be on one of my coaching days. So my coaching days will probably be, like, meetings and coaching, because it's asynchronous coaching. So that will be a big change for me because people won't be able to just plug up any hole on my calendar. That was something that really set me that really affected my work schedule.
On top of that, I'm also gonna build in margins for unexpected situations, you know, client work or emergencies or projects, you know, good projects that come up quickly. If it's a project that makes sense and it's easy enough and it's good for me or, like, a long-term coaching thing because coaching is my main business, then, yeah, then I wanna have the margin for that.
As well as a margin to just take time off, right, like I did last year. So, my family is the priority as long as my business is not withering away. Right? That I'm not gonna take every day off or a part of every day off. But, you know, for when there's an ad hoc family outing somewhere, I don't wanna miss that. I had the flu over Memorial Day weekend, and I missed my family went sailing. My father-in-law has a boat. I'm really sad that I missed that.
On the family side of things, better communication systems. Regularly check in with my wife to see how things are going. More intentional conversations about giving each other a break. Between you and me, I am better at taking a break when she offers than she is when I offer. And I'm going to impress that point upon her that, you know, we basically have, like, a code phrase. It's not really a code. It's like, do you need a break? And that is a nice way of saying, you know, go take a walk. Like, you're losing your temper. Go take a walk. Because it is tough. Right? It's like the kids spend a couple of weeks adjusting to their new schedule, and that gets really hard if it's unstructured. And then you have the rest of the summer, and then you have to start transitioning them back into the school year. So it does get tough.
I also wanna do, like, more realistic financial planning. I'm not treating money not spent as extra money to spend, which is something we did last year. And we also didn't budget really for summer activities and unexpected expenses like the failures. Right? I just said, hey. We're saving $9. This is great. We have $9. But instead, like, we're definitely gonna sock more of that away for savings, and we are planning, like, a couple of big trips. Aaron's going back to school in the fall, and so these are things that we do need to account for, and so better budgeting is crucial.
So, what are my expectations for this summer, which as I record this starts in less than two weeks? More focused work on my core business offerings while also continuing my most important contract work, which is the work that I do for rss.com and for my friend Justin Moore. Those are really important projects, and I believe in both of them. And I really enjoy doing that work, and it's really important to me that I continue to deliver clearer boundaries around project scope. So I definitely need to consider and account for how much time a project will take me before I say yes to it.
I also need to say no to more things, so I'm not gonna say yes to every little thing that comes through.
I'm gonna seek more sponsorship so that I don't have to take on as many projects. I'm going to better vet potential coaching clients. Ideally, I would like to land one or two bigger coaching clients versus a bunch of one-off coaching clients because the momentum that builds from repeatedly meeting with somebody and not having to relearn a bunch of things is good.
And I'm gonna focus on my own projects and products. Hopefully, start selling a couple of them that don't take my personal time or that don't require real 1 on 1, like, 1 to 1 in real time. Right? Like, most of my coaching is one to one real time. I'd like to really make a version of my on-demand or asynchronous coaching that works and that people actually want for family expectations. Right? I wanna do all the, you know, do all the campy family guy things. Right? Like, family man things, not family guy.
Create meaningful memories with the kids, plan fun activities, which we're already doing, and not think about work when I'm not at work. I've been doing that has been my whole yearly theme, and I think I've been doing a really good job of it. I'm actually really pleased with how my yearly theme is going. Maybe I'll do like, a bonus check-in halfway through the summer.
But the way I'll measure success in my personal life is we have appropriately saved money? Have we spent a good time with the kids? Are we not losing it? Or are we losing it less than we were losing it last summer? And are the kids having fun?
So that's what we're thinking about for this summer. Again, like last year wasn't so bad that we're not doing it. And we do have support still from my father-in-law, and I think we're recruiting a couple of other babysitters, which is good, as needed. But we do know the onus is gonna fall mostly on us. My father-in-law has a life, and he definitely he has been very helpful and generous with his time. And I always wanna make sure that we're not taking advantage of that. I wanna make money to support my family, so I can spend time with my family. Right?
Not doing summer camp is a great way for me to both save money but also spend more time with my kids. And if I didn't have that philosophy, and I didn't do the things I do, which is, like, build space in my life through systems and automation, I wouldn't be able to do that. Right? Like, I know that, like, one day in early June, I'm gonna record a bunch of podcast episodes and schedule them out or give them to my VA to schedule them out for the summer so I don't have to constantly think about, oh, what's my next episode?
So, you know, I don't have a strong conclusion here. This is just, we did something last year. I'm excited to see how it goes this year. I think I've learned a lot.
What are your summer plans? Are you doing summer camp? Are you trying something like this? Do you have you done this? Do you have any tips for me? You can write in over at streamlinedfeedback.com. That's streamlined with a n ‘d’ ,feedback.com. I'll follow up with an episode at the end of the summer.
I might do some Joe's audio notes throughout the summer. If I think about it, I've been, like, slacking on those lately. I just, I don't feel like I've had much to talk about this, you know, between trips and the school year ending and me being sick, but I suspect that'll change. I find that a lot of my best thoughts come when my kids are, like, playing outside. So if you want kind of more up-to-the-minute on that, check out notes.casabonda.org. But that's it for this episode.
Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, I hope you find some space in your week.