A lot has changed since the birth of our daughter two weeks ago! There's the emotional and biological change of another human being (that you prioritize above all else), and the obvious impact on my available time.
A reader recently asked:
- Jo from England
Creator Science has two full-time employees: my wife and me. When we started seriously talking about her joining the company last June, the goal was to provide complete flexibility for her to take as much maternity leave as she wanted.
I wanted to take paternity leave, too – but the business wasn't set up to make that easy. I didn't have a lot of "open space" before she was born, so things had to change.
I'd love to say that I got weeks ahead of creating content...but I didn't. I've never been weeks ahead of creating content. Our typical output looks like this:
- (2) newsletters/week
- (1) audio podcast/week
- (2) YouTube videos/month
- Daily posting on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads
...and that doesn't include the "content" created by responding to posts and DMs in The Lab.
It would certainly be possible to get ahead, but you can do the math and see just how much production output that would require!
So here's what I put in place for leave:
- No scheduled calls/meetings for ~2 months (mid-Sept)
- Set expectations for slower response times in The Lab (72-hour turnaround)
- Scheduled weekly member-led sessions in The Lab
- Hired a fractional COO to help me identify and delegate more tasks to my assistant
- Elevated my audio engineer into a podcast producer role
- Contracted two separate short-form video editors to help me produce some short-form vertical video (both new and from existing assets)
Outside of those parameters, my biggest goal has been to keep up with my long-form publishing schedule (newsletter, podcast, YouTube) by creating content whenever I'm able to find time (with Mallory + baby being the priority).
Two weeks in, I'm more familiar with what that "time I'm able to find" looks like, and it has me thinking a lot about leverage. I'm constantly asking myself two questions, which you can read about here.
