Are “Productivity” and “Parenting” Mutually Exclusive? How to Get the Right Things Done

Our productivity challenges (and opportunities) don’t end at our office door (or home work station). For parents, productivity thinking can be a godsend. By “parents,” I am talking about adults with dependent kids. Productivity for parents (or “P4P,” let’s call it) is about being the most efficient and effective you can be in your work and career but with the major wrinkle of having little mouths, heads, and feet dependent on you to survive and grow.

For today’s article in my personal productivity series, let’s take a turn from my usual focus on work to explore what productivity for parents really means; the superpowers you develop through parenting; and my personal advice for remaining productive as a parent.

The Parenting Crunch: Two Competing Views

I have three kids ages 9 and under and two older stepkids. I’ve learned a lot over the years about how hard it is to get parenting and productivity to work together in harmony. In my books, productivity for parents is about being a great parent but it’s also about advancing your own goals. P4P is about embracing imperfection and being ultra realistic and pragmatic in your approach. It’s about achieving your goals through bite-sized, manageable chunks.

As a parent of young kids, you will have less time, energy, and money than others. You will also have more boundaries which you can use to your advantage. What’s important to remember is that being a parent doesn’t have to determine how productive you are – if you find the right flow and approach that works for you and yours.?

I know this is true because I have hired people from all stages of life, many with kids (sometimes lots of them) and many without. Some have little kids. Some have older kids. Some are taking care of parents or other family members, which is equally (or more) work. I can honestly say that there isn’t one group that is more or less productive than the other. There are ultra productive (and unproductive) people with kids (even little ones) and ultra productive (and unproductive) people without.

This leads me to believe that both of these opposing viewpoints are correct:

Kids make you unproductive.

Kids make you unproductive in many ways with the most obvious way being: they take up a lot of time. As a natural productivity junkie and efficiency evangelist, it makes me cringe at the number of unproductive ways of working and being that kids have forced me into. Let’s explore just some of them.

Kids take everything out of you. My weekends typically look like 2 hockey practices, 2 hockey games, 3 piano lessons, 1 skating lesson, two birthday parties, and a whackload of errands. There could be a ski lesson and baseball practice in there too (and often a practice at 7 am). Kids will exhaust you, deplete your energy and patience, and tap your nerves til they’re raw. No productivity expert will ever tell you that wearing yourself down to the bone is best for delivering optimal output. I (and many other parents) will admit to feeling relieved to get back to work Monday for a “rest” after the weekend.?

Kids force you into an unproductive schedule. You are driving them to school (or hockey, soccer, piano, basketball practice) during rush hour and picking them up again in rush hour again. I will admit to screaming in the car many times, “ANYONE WITHOUT KIDS AT THIS TIME OF DAY, GET OFF THE ROAD!”

Kids splinter your attention span. We all saw the dramatic effects of how schooling kids at home during COVID devastated many parents’ ability to focus, and their sanity too. Kids, especially small ones (but many big ones too), need constant help, support, and coaxing. It’s hard to just “tune out” and get done what you need to get done. There’s a constant tug on your focus and attention span.

Kids make you productive.

Of course, there’s a whole other school of thought. I have often asked myself, Why didn’t I do a particular thing (grow my business, write more, travel, learn to cook) before kids? (or “B.K.”, as I like to call it). If I could go back in time (which alas! I can’t), there is so much I would do differently with all I’ve learned from being a parent. Having kids has forced me to correct many bad habits and learn new skills, systems, and speed. In some ways, I believe parenting gives you superpowers.

Kids force efficient choices. B.K., I’d drive across the city to go to the best workout class I could find. Those days are gone for good. Today, I opt for my home gym for a short workout after I get up. I am not in the best shape of my life and I miss the social aspect of the gym, but I have accepted the most efficient choice.

Kids force you to strengthen your systems. B.K., I would go to the grocery store almost every day to buy what I felt like that day to eat. But that’s an unscalable system when there are up to seven mouths to feed. While food management isn’t perfect in our house (and my husband and I have our share of disagreements about it), we opt for meal-prep kits which reduce the stress of grocery shopping, deciding what to make, or eating the same thing every darn day.

Kids teach you to work in non-ideal conditions. I have written reports during hockey games or Karate practices and with kids sitting in my home office coloring next to me. None of these are ideal working conditions or recommended for your best work (or mental health). But parenting gives us “special forces training” where we learn to work in “hostile” environments. While you could say it’s a disadvantage, it’s a superpower too.

My Personal Tips for Mastering P4P

1. Put your kids first.

While this doesn’t mean you spoil them or let them walk all over you, your kids’ needs come first. Ironically, I have found this makes me more productive in many ways. If my kids are on a good schedule or in a good school or are well fed, I feel better and can focus better. If not, then I am antsy, unfocused, and guilt-ridden. The times when we have poorly planned our summer activities for the kids I have missed the school concert (by accident), or forgotten about homework, it has impacted my kids — and it has also impacted me. (It’s a selfish way of looking at this, I know, but hey no mom-shaming!)

2. But learn to detach.

How much were you influenced by your parents and how much is totally your own doing? I was, and still am, very influenced by my parents, but my life is not anything that they would have picked for me. Accept that your influence on your kids will only go so far in the long run. My eldest daughter is one of the best hockey players on the ice, and my son is, shall we say, the opposite. I sit in frustration at hockey that my son has never embraced the full-on competitive spirit of? team sports (like me and his sister) and feel like a mom-failure in the stands. But I have had to learn to detach (or get kicked out of the arena).

Kids need space to do their own thing in their own way. Now more than ever, kids need time to be off screens, get bored, and make up their own plans and games. There are many parents (moms in particular) who supervise piano practice and do homework every night with their kids, go to every parent-teacher interview (never delegating to the other parent), and are active in the PTA. I am not one of these parents (not that this is something I am proud of). Whether you are ultra involved or not, parents need a healthy detachment from the results of their kids.

3. Get out of the house.

I know that this is a touchy subject for many of you, even controversial. While I am not anti WFH (work from home), I am anti not getting out of the house. If you are a parent, you need to get out of the house even if you work from home (preferably without the kids). It’s not good for us mentally to stay at home for too long. It makes our thinking and ideas stale and hurts our ability to connect with others. While many have grown a thriving business from home, I personally found it hard. For many years, I grew Risk Oversight from home and working onsite at clients. When I moved into an office downtown, there was a psychological shift. I could focus on growing the business. It was easier to separate myself from home for parts of the day. I still have my home office, and I might go back to it full time in the future, but for now, the idea of “going to work” is really helping me grow my “work.”

4. Hire help.?

Forget the fancy courses, the expensive coaching sessions, the MBA, or the Louis Vuitton laptop bag. The biggest investment you can make in your career if you are a parent is getting help with your kids and your house. It’s hard, nearly impossible to maintain a serious career or grow a real business while doing a great job with your kids if you don’t have any help. While some “experts” will tell you otherwise, it’s often the work you do on weekends or evenings that helps you make the most serious advances in your career. In our house, we can have 2 or 3 kids off to different activities, then 1 kid who needs to do homework, and a motherlode of dishes on any given night. We need to hire people to help us during the day and on the occasional evenings. (This is not only career-saving but relationship-saving, too.)

5. Maintain your networks.?

This comment is directly related to mistakes I have made and still make. Parents — and women especially — start losing their friendships and networks rapidly in adulthood, typically from the age of 33 to 50 while they are spending more time on their kids. This becomes an enormous disadvantage in the work world, growing your career or business. I am in the throes of this now. With kids' schedules and running a business and just finishing my busy season, I struggle to get out regularly for catch-ups over coffee, drinks, lunches, or dinners. It wasn’t until I was planning for the launch of my book a couple of years ago, that I started a conscious effort to “get out there more.” I hadn’t gone to a professional conference in years, and rarely met up with friends, and I still haven’t golfed in 10 years (another B.K. past activity).

The rapid loss of networks is especially bad on moms. It limits your informal networks that lead to new business opportunities and promotions. It limits your ability to recharge and avoid burnout with people who bring fresh perspectives, energy, and a break from your routines. If I am to look into any coffee shop, restaurant, or bar in Calgary’s downtown business district on any given work day, it is disproportionately full of men.

To maintain your network, do your best to get out for coffees, lunches, events, or have people over. Meet people from your kids teams. Don’t wait to be asked–you be the asker, and make it as low-stakes and simple as possible. Tea, anyone? Do what you can, while practicing pragmatic P4P principles too.

On the days and in those periods when you’re stretched to the max, first pause and think about all the joy, laughs, stories, love, and memories kids bring into our lives. Then, take a deep breath and acknowledge that kids also bring along a heck of a lot of obstacles and constraints to overcome. Finally, rise above the momentary fray and remind yourself that although the journey is far from ideal, productivity and parenting are not mutually exclusive concepts. Parents need to figure out how to stay productive to survive the demands thrown at them on a daily basis.

There is no “perfect” to parenting and no perfect journey to productivity for parents. But the way we navigate it teaches our kids what’s important (and what’s not) and reminds us that success at life and work takes flexibility, perseverance, and the ability to go at it again every day.?

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