Rachel and Avram share how as a parent, time seems to really get away from you. So what can you do to make the most of your time? This episode is not about productivity but rather time management hacks, including one of their favorites—Parkinson’s Law. In real-time, they demonstrate how Parkinson’s Law works by recording the episode WHILE Rachel was feeding the baby!

Show notes

2:10 Avram and Rachel introduce their favorite law—Parkinson’s Law

4:00 Rachel shares how Parkinson’s Law played out in a day

5:30 Playing board games while nursing the baby? Mind blown!

6:30 R&A talk about carving out time for connection when you have a new baby

8:58 What was it like running a business before baby and now

10:38 The realization of which tasks were not missed when Avram was out on paternity leave

11:20 How parental leave let A&R look at their business almost like a third party

Mentions & Resources

Clockwork Accelerator (Course)

Clockwork Accelerator (Podcast)

Adrienne Dorison (Person)

Mike Michalowicz (Person)

Clockwork book by Mike Michalowicz (Book)

7 Habits of Highly Effective People Book by Stephen Covey (Book)

Episode Transcription

Below, you will find a transcript of this entire podcast episode. Enjoy!

Avram Gonzales: Hello and welcome to the Babies and Business Business Podcast. I’m your host, Avram Gonzales, joined by my beautiful wife and co-host, Ms. Rachel Gonzales. Rachel, you’ve had a big day, haven’t you, hun?

Rachel Gonzales: I have had a big day.

Avram Gonzales: You were out like five, six hours. Just you and the baby.

Rachel Gonzales: I thought it would only be like an hour and a half in addition to the hour meeting that I had , it turned out to be quite a bit longer than that.

Avram Gonzales: Such an adventure.

Rachel Gonzales: Yeah.

Avram Gonzales: Time is a funny way of running away when you’ve got a baby and you’re on the move, and we’re gonna talk about that today. Our topic, as you might have read, is what you can accomplish when you have no time.

And this is something that everybody gets squeezed. When you’ve got a new baby and you add that into the mix of already being a business owner, I think that’s most people listening, right? You’re listening because you’ve already had a business and then the baby’s the new thing, usually not the other way around.

And we’re gonna talk about some things that we’ve learned in time management, not about productivity, but time management. We’re gonna introduce new principles to during this podcast and some realizations that we had that you should be able to take home with you and. As well. And yeah, let’s just jump right into it.

What do you think? I think that’s good. Okay. Unless you had something else to add? Nope. All right. Good deal. First thing we wanna talk about and how to, what you can accomplish when you have no time. If talking, having this conversation, we have to talk about Parkinson’s law.

Parkinson’s law. You want me to say it? I got it. Yeah. I actually looked it up for this cuz what we usually say is Parkinson’s law is I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the notion that work expands to fill the time available for completion. We learned this from Adrian Dorson, the Clockwork Accelerator, the run like clockwork podcast and book.

Cause you go check them out if you haven’t already. We talk about them a lot. They’ve had a huge impact on us. What would you say has been one of the big takeaways for you in Parkinson’s law or ways that you started to understand it? And we’ll talk about how our, how we had this phenomenal day using Parkinson’s law, but what would you share

about it?

Yeah, I would share that it, I don’t know. It makes you be intentional about how you go about doing anything that instead of just saying, Oh, I’m gonna sit down to do this task and it could take me all day, and being totally okay with that, you actually say, Okay, I have this thing to do and I wanna get it done in this amount of time.

And so you give it a time and. I have found it to be true. Most of the time. If I’m paying attention, if I’m just saying, Oh, I’m just gonna do this thing, then time could just run away. It does. But if I sit down and I say, I have 30 minutes to do this thing, that thing gets done. ,

right? We’re sitting here right now.

It seems like we keep recording a lot of podcasts. You’re breastfeeding the baby . At any moment he could be done or he might need to switch, and we’ve literally got 10, 15 minutes to record this podcast. This is Parkinson’s law at work. We are constraining the amount of time and limiting what we are doing here so that we do get it done.

And like you said, time is away of running away with itself. And if you start your day by saying, I’m just gonna do this, and then I’ll do this. But you didn’t set parameters for it, you lose it. Yeah. So tell us about the amazing day we had yesterday. By the way, we were so tired. We just could not record this podcast.

But the excitement, we knew we had to do it. What happened yesterday? What are all the things that we had to do? Because it’s the thing, right? Like lately we’ve been having a hard time getting to a lot of things. We used to get.

Rachel Gonzales: Like a shower, for instance, , it’s taken us a while to even get to a shower, but that’s not really what we accomplished yesterday.

We, I had just put the baby down and I knew that he wouldn’t be hungry for another 30 minutes because that’s about when he’s hungry. So I was like, Okay, let’s do the. And I have to say, we finished the dishes, so it was almost noon and we were like so close . We had two minutes left that I needed to finish up.

All the dishes and he started making noise, we could hear with the monitor, and I just felt so accomplished because here I was, I took this task. It was a mountain of dishes, , believe me. And so Ave and I, we just got to it and we got it done and we felt so, so accomplished.

Yeah, it was crazy.

That’s just one of the things then, We, what we did is while I was nursing, so a lot of the time when I’m nursing, I’m just sitting on the couch and I’m scrolling Facebook or I’m just bo red out of my mind.

Yes, I am staring at my beautiful baby and talking with him and like making sure he is not sleeping on the job. But I had an epiphany. I could be doing something. So we played games, we have board games that we love to play and we got to play a ton of them.

Avram Gonzales: They don’t come out like this normally cuz otherwise we’re just just sitting and hanging out.

That was a big realization we had.

Rachel Gonzales: It was great. And Avram, he loves board games and he’s always down to play a board game. And for me it’s but the dishes aren’t done and the floors aren’t swept. And and I have this whole list. I’m a captive audience when I’m nursing, so he got to play a game.

It was wonderful. We had a great time. And then the kicker of the day was we had put him down again, so everything revolves around his schedule. We’d put Lincoln down again. He was in bed and we made dinner from scratch. Oh. And we sat down and ate it together without having a baby in our arms.

Avram Gonzales: No. That Martha Stewart One pot.

Rachel Gonzales: It was awesome. Just having that time to connect, we’ve had some conversations recently with just with the situation that we find ourselves in. Lincoln isn’t taking a bottle right now, and so I am 100% the person that feeds him, and we’ve been having some stressors and just, stressors.

Woohoo. That’s a shock having a new baby. We had some conversations about. Connecting and bringing each other back to what we really want in our relationship and making sure that we have a relationship during this time of transition. And a lot of things, a lot of great things happened yesterday, including.

That time to connect both with playing games and having dinners together.

And we did several loads of laundry and we cleaned the bedroom and a lot of the master bathroom and put away around. And in the living room

Avram Gonzales: It was like this whole whirlwind of stuff and it was all based around crying to squeeze as much as we could out of the little intervals that we had available.

Oh, we’ve got 30 minutes right now while he’s eating 20 minutes, let’s just play a port a part of this game. And then we’ll come back to it cuz we’re gonna be back here two or three times today. Then it’s the time that he’s got wakefulness and he’s in somebody’s lap or in a chair and we’re like, what can we do now we’re squeezing some laundry, folding out.

That’s what we did all day yesterday. And it’s wow. So many light bulb moments. Let’s talk about some of those in those things that we realized in our time about Parkinson’s law. And I think here’s the deal, right? We’re reflecting back on the time. What it was like in our business before baby and what it’s like in our business now, night and day.

Night and day. So like one of the big things that we realized yesterday and just recently is that before baby, we had no sense of real urgency about anything. And especially in the business, if you need to sit down and take three days to do something. Oh it’s whatever, but with baby like you, it feels like you can’t afford to take that long, or it’ll be freaking weeks

So no sense of urgency. So we started, we feel that it’s real now, and I think that’s a gift. Second thing is we realized that we were entirely focused on the wrong activities. Would you say that?

Rachel Gonzales: Absolutely. Oh my gosh. It just feels like sometimes you’re just in it and when you’re in it you see nothing but it.

And it’s Ah, there’s no way out. It’s like this huge mist that covers your eyes, and all you have is just like what’s right in front of you, and you’re just frustrated or stressed by it, or you’re just lost in the midst of. Of all the things.

Avram Gonzales: Everything feels urgent. Yes. Because of that, you can’t tell what’s actually important.

Shout out to Steven Covey, and seven habits to Highly Effective People. That’s the one that has the urgent versus important time management. That’s a big deal. So we found out that we were focused on the wrong activities, but the reason that we found out we were focused on the raw activities is check this out, right?

We might have talked about this already. I may have spent. If we looked at the clock time that I have, cause we always clock our time, we track all that stuff even though we pay ourselves. And it doesn’t matter how many hours we put in as owners, about an hour and 15 minutes a week average for seven weeks after Lincoln was born.

Yeah, there were a lot of things on my daily schedule that didn’t occur anymore and when we came back to work, Realized that nobody had missed them. , gosh, I sure hadn’t. Our clients didn’t, none of their results were any different with their advertising campaigns were, nothing was negatively affected.

That’s how we knew we were focused on the wrong stuff.

Rachel Gonzales: And it was so interesting when we did a quote debrief of what we got out of the time. It just became so very clear, and that’s how we We were able to distill it down to what are, like, we came up with some things that are absolute, no GOs for us and absolutely must happen kinds of things.

And then we just talked about what matters and so we were able to get the viewpoint of a third party looking into our business because we’d been, if you will, removed from it long enough to actually have that, that like unbiased view.

Avram Gonzales: So what can you accomplish when you have no time?

Rachel Gonzales: everything

Avram Gonzales: a lot, man. It’s the constriction and the constraining of that time is the beautiful gift that your baby can do for you and your business to help you get focused, to help you get clarity, focus on the things that matter, and spend as little time on the business and as much time as possible with your baby.

That’s really what it’s all about. That’s why we’re having these conversations today. That’s why we’re so happy. To have you here on this journey, the Babies and Business Podcast. So if you haven’t already, please go ahead and subscribe to our podcast. Share this podcast with a friend. Do you have somebody who’s struggling with managing their times, staying focused with baby?

Send this to that one person who needs it, and leave us a positive review on iTunes so we can, So more, let’s say, so more people can find out about this show. That’s it, That’s what we’re talking about today. And if you have topic suggestions, maybe even some guests that you think that we should have on here.

You can’t nominate yourself. We’re not gonna do that. All right? It’s gotta be somebody else. Let us know. We’d love to we’d love to talk about it and and see what’s possible here in the future. So we can’t wait to catch you on the next episode. Thanks for tuning in.

Rachel Gonzales: Thanks for tuning in.