How to 'create space' when you are a mom with side hustle, decluttering kids' stuff, how to start family meetings, how to be more creative without it feeling like a chore. 

Welcome to a bonus Q+A episode of Simple Saturdays . I am sharing the As to some of your Qs.

 

 
LIFE ON PURPOSE: My current dilemma is how do I fit it all in? I work 40+ hours a week, love on my three boys, try to get to the gym three times a week. I am up at 4:30 every morning to work on my side hustle and fall into bed every night. Where/how do I "create space"?

* Yes, I would be asking you the same question, where do you fit it all in?
* One thing that I am seeing is that you have a side hustle going. Which many people start as a way to eventually become a full-time job. If this is the case for you then it seems like this is a very intense season for you where you are trying to build up a business as well as still doing your day job.
* Side hustles actually suck when you have kids and a day job. It takes a lot of boundaries to protect these different areas of your life. There are a lot of people telling you to build up your side hustle but they don’t often tell you that the rest of your life can suffer from it if we don’t get really intentional about it. BUT when the side hustle is helping us build up the life we want to be living they are something that needs our time and attention.
* Think about the other really demanding seasons of your life (new job, school, new baby) and the areas of your life that you had to put on the back burner for a bit. When we have these really intense times, we do have to make sacrifices. So my advice to you is to firstly, become aware about what you are sacrificing and take ownership of that
* I know, it isn’t fun. But there is a saying: we can do anything but we can’t do everything.
* You are in a season where you have to make choices about where you will spend your time. And if you want to create more space, something else has to go.
* If your schedule is too much, you have to give yourself permission to make sacrifices. maybe you don’t go to the gym one morning, or you are making everyone frozen pizzas for a week, or you hire a babysitter to come over for a Saturday morning.
* But own it. During this time, stay present and own your decisions that are helping you build up the life you want.
* An approach you might want to take is from the book Pick Three by Randi Zuckerberg. She divides life into five categories: work, sleep, family, friends and fitness. She says, in a perfect world, we would all do every one of those things every day. But her book is the encouragement to pick three things to focus on each day and rotate them so your week has some of everything in it.
* There is no secret I can offer you to create space, because it really sounds like there is no space. There is no trick to it, it is just the number of hours in the day and how we fill them. We must choose, we must make choices. We must own those choices. 
* Which brings me to my last point. Keep the end in mind.
* Get really clear about what you are doing and why it matters to you, and to the world.
* When we lose sight of our mission, we lose steam and we start getting restless.
* Keep your mission in the front of your mind.
* Get back to why this all matters to you and what the benefits of this hard season will be.

 
SIMPLE HOME: How do I declutter kids’ stuff?

I have so much to say here,  but the major thing I have learned is to model it for them. They need to see us doing it and see the benefits.