How do you get it all done when life gets crazy?

Guest Post: Nicole Guzman is the founder of GooseWorks, a full-service branding and web development studio based in Newburgh, NY. She runs the studio with her husband Joe Guzman and has 2 tiny team members to round out the full family business cast. Nicole is a web developer who loves great design and isn’t afraid to talk about it. She has 10+ years of experience creating websites and making the web a better place. 

We’ve all been there: It’s a Tuesday night, you’ve got a big meeting or a deadline on Friday and your kiddo wakes up in the middle of the night with a fever. Now that we’re juggling work life and home life and school life more than ever before, how can you accomplish what you need to? Here are four tips to keep yourself sane and get. it. done.

1. Delegate

Do you have a team that works with you? What’s on your list that they can help you with? Write down all of the tasks that need to get done in the next few days and figure out how to break it down so that your team can handle it instead of you. If you don’t have a team, see if you can hire a VA, get help from Upwork, or even ask your family for help with some of your tasks.

2. Be Honest

Sometimes it’s best to just be honest with your clients or customers and let them know what’s going on. If you can let them know early and have a plan in place to handle delays, most people will be understanding. If something critical needs to be completed, prioritize that and let the other items move to the back of the list.

Choosing the types of clients you work with is key when it comes to mompreneurs. If you have to shuffle around a few projects, you want to know that the people you work with are going to be understanding, especially if it doesn’t happen often.

3. Focus

Grouping your tasks together into manageable blocks of similar work will help them get done much faster. If you have three phone calls to make, do them back-to-back and cross them off the to-do list!

Taking one group of tasks at a time also keeps that list from feeling overwhelming. It’s easy to feel out of control when you have to jump back and forth from work to life and then back to work again.

4. Partner Up

Life happens and we all have times where it seems to take over everything. Set up a few great partnerships with other entrepreneurs that you can send work to if you’re really completely overloaded. This might be helpful if something is going to affect your work for longer than a day or two, like an unexpected illness or maternity leave.

It’s better to pass on a project or new customer than to take on something you really can’t handle. Your clients will appreciate the honesty, and the partners you work with will love knowing they have a reliable resource they can send work to when their life is too hectic to handle their workload.