As children are heading back to school whether it is older children gone all day or even the little ones headed back to preschool a few hours a week, like my kids, getting yourself back into a routine is essential. So for this months Behind the Scenes I am going to share with you what a typical work day for me looks like.

In my dream world I would wake up at 6:00 and sit down with a hot cup of coffee and get a good hours worth of work done before the kids get up.  The reality is that I sleep like the dead and usually don’t wake up until Benny is shoving me out of bed and putting my glasses on my face.

Every morning the kids have either dance, gymnastics or preschool so it means a couple of hours of hanging out before its running out the door.  I get the kid settled with breakfast and a show and I sit down at the computer to check in on social media and email.  All of my blog posts auto post for me at 4:30am PST so on mornings when a blog post has gone live I try to get a picture up on instagram and my Facebook page.

On mornings where we are at dance or gymnastics I try to sit down with my planner and look at what the day holds for me both with my business and my family.  I have become quite organized the last few months so everything goes into this planner and I try to stick with it the best I can.  I just ordered a keyboard for my tablet so hopefully I can also start working on either my blog or newsletter during this time as well.  It’s amazing what you can do in 55 minutes.

The kiddos go to school Tuesday through Thursday mornings together!!  Yes, because of how their birthdays fall and the setup of our cooperative preschool they are in the same classroom.  This means that I only have to work 1 day a week in the classroom, giving me Tuesday and Wednesday morning to work.  That is 2 1/2 hours I can devote to work twice a week without interruptions.  I am loving this time I get to hunker down in my sewing room and knock out projects. *If you are wondering my sewing room absolutely DOES NOT look like this right now, I will just save you the disaster I am currently sewing in 🙂

After preschool and lunch the kiddos are down for a nap, at the same time!  It isn’t always perfect but as long as they wear themselves out during the morning they will almost always take a 2 hour nap.  This lovie does need me to lay with him until he falls asleep which is pretty cute, especially lately when he wraps his whole body around me while he is falling asleep.  My husband is probably rolling his eyes right now because it is definitely not always this calm at nap time, he usually gets frustrated text from me about this guy.  But man he is adorable when he sleeps.

Nap time is definitely computer time for me.  I make myself a nice hot Americano and sit down to knock out a blog post, newsletter or work on a new sewing pattern.  As long as I don’t get too distracted, I am looking at you Facebook, I can usually get quite a bit of work done during nap time.

Afternoon and early evening is filled with the park or playtime at home, dinner and clean up.  Sometimes if everyone is happily playing I may pop on the computer to work on something, but my time is very broken up during this time.

When the kiddos head up to bed with my husband I head into my sewing room to work on whatever project I have going at the time.  I typically have a few sewing deadlines a week so there is always something to be sewing.  Rarely am I sewing without some sort of snack and always a coffee.  If it isn’t sewing at night it almost always has been paper pattern assembly.

Just this week I enlisted the help of a few friends to handle the assembly of all my paper pattern, something that was just consuming so much of my time.  I am looking forward to seeing what my week will be like now that I am not personally handling this part of my business exclusively.  This huge change for me and my business came from something I heard on the Being Boss Podcast a few months ago.  They said that when it starts to hurt you need to pay someone to help, and I can attest it was starting to hurt and I was missing the parts of my business like pattern design that were being neglected.  I can already feel the weight that was lifted and it has only been a few days, ha!

So there you have it, a behind the scenes look at what a typical work day is like for me.  Now granted there are so many days where this doesn’t all happen, or when the house is so out of control I have to do home stuff like laundry during nap time instead of work, but for the most part this is how my work days look.  My hope with this post is that you can get inspired to find time in your day for something you love whether it’s a business like me or even just pursuing a hobby.  I have definitely not found the work/life balance but I have found something that seems to be working for me and I hope you can find something that works for you too.

If you want to get all caught up with the other posts in the series you can get them all here.