When you become a parent, figuring out how to successfully work from home is a feat many strive for.

There are many benefits to working from home, such as…

• Participating in school or outside activities.
• Getting to spend quality time with your kids throughout the day, and not just during the bedtime routine.
• Witnessing and celebrating their milestones.

But there are also challenges with that luxury. Things like…

• Not having boundaries for work hours.
• Figuring out how to handle interruptions during live calls or presentations.
• Making time for daily chores around the house.

In this lifestyle episode, I dive into why I decided to pursue a laptop life and the top 3 tips I recommend to parents working from home.

Video Transcript:

So he is one of the reasons that I actually embarked on the laptop life. He’s got two modes. He’s got either ignore us or completely steal the camera.

When I had my side gig and I got divorced, what really propelled me into this “I need to make this laptop life work for me” was my pregnancy with William.

I had a very difficult time finding a job while pregnant. And I also knew that once he was born I would want to nurse him and I just knew that being home was necessary if I want it to be the kind of mom I wanted to be.

All of that said, it’s actually really hard to be a mom and an entrepreneur at the same time.

And I feel like there are a lot of struggles and this goes for dads too, not just moms. Moms and Dads, but the people who choose to stay home and work from home, you get so many benefits. But there’s also worlds of distraction and it’s hard.

It takes a while for your family to adjust. I remember when William was born and Alex, my husband was taking care of him during the day. It was hard for Alex and William to adjust to the fact that just because I was three feet away didn’t mean that I could just be interrupted at any time.

And so a lot of advice I’ve given out to moms and dads over the years who are starting their laptop life and it is to make sure that even if you do work in the living room or in the dining room, you have a dedicated space where it’s, “I can’t be disturbed.”

You just don’t want your clients and your customers to feel like your brain is only half there and you need to be able to concentrate.

And so as much as we want to enjoy this lifestyle of, “oh, we’re just sitting here on the laptop while the kids all play on the floor,” we all know that that’s not reality. Right?

And so the first thing I did was make sure I had a dedicated space. And then the second thing, and this goes really well for toddlers, parents of toddlers, if you keep just a few toys that they don’t get, I mean you can see there’s like toys all over my living room right now, but those few toys that they don’t get unless they’re at your desk or in your office, if there are ever times when you have to just deal with them.

I remember Alex got stuck somewhere and I was on a Webinar, I was on a meeting and William just had to be right there with me.

Pull open that drawer and take out those secret toys because parents, you guys know that kids find new toys interesting.

That was another thing that I did that worked really, really well. Eventually, I needed help and now I have a nanny.

My husband doesn’t work full time anymore. Once you get to the point where you’re really scaling a business that’s multi-six and seven figures, you really need to think about hiring out those things that may feel luxurious at first.

I remember when I hired my nanny and I asked her to also do some cooking and I hired a housekeeper, I thought, “well, I can do this stuff.”

But at the end of the day, if I’m spending time in my business, the time out of my business, I want to spend focused on my kids and my spouse, and so all of those other activities are distracting me from that quality time that I can have.

So if you’re a mom or a dad and you are trying to live your laptop life, that’s exactly what I was doing before my business blew up and that’s what I’m still doing today.

I’ve created a community of people who are living their laptop life. It’s called Create Your Laptop Life and it’s a community and weekly coaching with me where you can ask any question about your online business.

There’s tons of training and I invite you to check that out. I give people a $1 trial for two weeks. Come check it out.

There’s almost a thousand members, other moms, and dads, entrepreneurs like you living their laptop life in the midst of the chaos, and I would love for you to be a part of it.

As always, if you have any questions at all, just leave them in the comments below or you can check out more at Juliechenell.com. I’ll talk to you guys soon.