Micro Focus

How Postpartum is Teaching Me About Productivity

Picture and Illustration by the author

I thought I was a very productive person and a creative freelance professional until I became a parent, and I had to step up my game big time.

Already during the early months of postpartum, I learned a new meaning of the word focus: with a small baby and his crazy nap schedule, I get to concentrate on tasks for very tiny chunks of time, and at quite the most unpredictable moments.

I could call it deep mini focus, because the moment he is asleep and I am free (after some ninja rolling moves to get out of the bedroom), I know I might have 10? 20?,40 minutes, if I am very lucky, to do whatever I want to accomplish.

No time for “warming up my brain”, no way I can “wait for inspiration” or “feel like it”: if I want to get stuff done, that’s my window, and I have to jump straight into it.

When I was still a newbie (read: a couple of months ago), I was unprepared: once I was finally free from the naptrap, the many possibilities were overwhelming me. Where to start? What’s my priority? I was feeling a shiver of freedom traveling across my body, and my mind was spinning with all the appealing options: take a warm shower? A workout? Have a snack in peace? What about checking finally my e-mails? Or, shall I dare… trying working? This overwhelming freedom and abundance of options might paralyze you for a second.

And then, classic. As soon as you decide, and you sit down in front of your laptop with a freshly brewed coffee,… the cries are bringing you back to reality and to your duties, and you have not managed to touch the e-mails or the coffee.

I learned pretty quickly that I could not afford this indecision once the baby was blessing me with some minutes of freedom. I had to be resolute, like a soldier, jump into action, knowing my priorities, on autopilot, not questioning my to-do list. I learned that starting to do anything is better than overthinking. I started keeping a list on my phone of the most urgent tasks. With that, I could go on autopilot. From that moments, naps feel like a pomodoro timer, except this time my alarm is a cry from a baby at an unpredictable moment of the process.

I thought I was already pretty organised and efficient before, (e.g using every commute to sketch for client work, or answering all the e-mails to have my proud inbox zero; multitasking and listening to podcasts at x2 speed while animating..), but parenthood threw me in a sort of advanced level of the game, a whole new type of difficulty, to juggle motherhood with my freelance creative career.

Maybe because of this new challenge, and because I needed to keep creating despite being primarily a caregiver, this new chapter made me quite efficient and made me prioritise even better than before what is worth developing and carrying on, helping me find new purpose in my work.

Furthermore, this new situation, allowed me to be bolder with clients when negotiating rates. Because I had nothing to lose and I could only afford to take a decently paid job, I dared to ask for more, and with my surprise some nicely paid gigs came in. And the others? I was not sorry about loosing a 50 bucks commission, because my precious free time was not worth those pennies. Such a relief to be in those shoes, that don’t have space for such regrets.

I used to think I was so productive, and I was! But now I am more focused, and I don’t waste time on projects that are not worthy or do not have clear potential. And I am not saying one is right and the other wrong: this is a new chapter of my life. While for the first ten years of my creative career it was good to experiment, go down the rabbit holes of inspiration, and work overtime to follow passion projects, now I am in a different phase, in which I can afford only to invest my focused time in promising projects. Plus, I am more efficient now, because I can rely on my experience and I need much less time to get things right.

So, no — I am not telling you to have a child to be more productive! but it turns out that in my case becoming a parent allowed me land better clients and get a clearer vision of my path.

P.S. Note: now I am purposely choosing to use one of my moments of focus and quiet to write this piece, not because it’s a true priority, but because dedicating some time again to activities I love, like writing, gives me a sense of normality that I dearly miss these days.