If your CEO day is going off the rails, here’s a little pep talk for you: Don’t let your entire day be shot just because one 2-hour segment of it got out of whack.
Seriously. That’s 2 hours, out of 24.
You don’t need to make anything more of them than that 1/12th statement. You have all the rest of your day to play with. (Well, not play, but you know what I mean.)
You’re going to be fine – just fine. Even if you have to give up your *own* 2-hour time block of free time this afternoon to get everything done. (But that’s only if it’s dumpster-fire level. Which it probably isn’t.)
You can just regroup, reprioritize, and tackle your new (and shortened) to-do list. Or push half of it off to tomorrow’s morning margin hour, or skip taking the kids to the park this afternoon and tell them to run around outside instead while you hit the to-do list.
And you’re going to feel SO SOLID that you got to everything on your priority list; tomorrow’s short list is handled, too; and YOU’VE got the energy margins to cover everything essential.
THAT’S what the point of work/life balance during crunch season is. It’s all going to work out.
You just have to get rid of the story in your head that says it’s not going to and everything’s failing because you slacked off for an hour.
(When really, you didn’t – it’s that your kids made a mess, and the two-year-old was super grumpy, and then the baby spit up all over everything necessitating an immediate emergency laundry load. For both of you.)
Or that you had 3 clients with hair-on-fire questions in Slack that had to be dealt with, and once you’d handled *them*, you got an invoice rejection notice from one of your steady contracts. And you had to go find out what the deal was with *that*.
You weren’t fooling around. You just got derailed in your day.
And that happens to everyone.
Listen, I do this recovering and rejigging thing all the time – even as an experienced online mom. Last time it was because I was meeting friends for coffee (it’s the summer), *and* I had a live class to go to for the business (it was important *not* to catch the replay like I usually did), *plus* it was my CEO day for accounting and planning and metrics tracking (not to mention grocery shopping)!
What’s a mom to do?
Why, see that she has a *choice* – this isn’t some “way too full/now I’m overbooked” day that’s happened to her, and *choose* what priorities she’s going to bump as top-notch and which ones she’s going to drop.
Because if today’s a going-3-ways-Friday, and that’s *not* how you want to live, then guess what – *you* get to do something about it.
And you can.
(For reference, I dropped the live class, with momentary regret, got the *minimum* number of groceries, *chose* to still go for coffee time ‘cause those friends aren’t available at any time of year *other* than summer, and pushed the accounting off to Saturday.)
That’s business life, my friend – but it doesn’t have to be the norm for you. You just have to have the *strategies* in place to handle it when it *does* come up.
So chin up, take heart, and tromp back out to that to-do list. You’re going to cut it down to size, trim it down so it can’t keep yelling at you, and then get right on stomping out the fires.
All of them.
‘Cause you’re a CEO mom, and you make it happen.
Let’s do this.
