EP 316: Planning For Parental Leave With Startup Society Founder Gillian Perkins

In This Episode:



* How Startup Society creator Gillian Perkins prepared for her recent parental leave* What her normal 20-hour workweek looks like and how she adapted that as she was working toward her leave* Why she describes her process as “batching chaotically” and how making that process what she plans for has made things easier for her* What she’s learned from taking time away from the business over the years





There are a lot of folks out there telling you how to get your work done.



There are planners, apps, frameworks, and methods. And there are even more messages about delegating, time-blocking, batching, and fitting a whole year’s work into just 12 weeks.



It’s easy to think that the “way you work” works for you—and maybe it does. But it’s also easy to believe, if you let yourself, that the way you work has been shaped by the “shoulds” of an entire industry devoted to the capitalist pursuit of helping you produce more, be more efficient, and crank out more value for every hour of labor you put into the world.



How would you structure your work if you didn’t constantly feel the need to fit more work in? How would you approach your tasks with intention instead of obligation? How would you create plans with stewardship instead of urgency as the motivation?



This month on What Works, we’re tackling the topic of how we work our plans. This is a topic near and dear to my heart because I’ve spent years trying to squeeze myself into all the “right” ways of working and planning—only to discover that I really had to make it mine to make it work. I needed to rebuild my understanding of my work and accountability from the ground up to realize just how powerful I could be with how I create my work and use my time.



In the last episode, I shared a bit about that and quite a bit about how I’m planning for What Works and YellowHouse.Media. And, I mentioned that one of my commitments for 2021 is Adapt & Emerge.



So I want to apply that lens to the conversations I’ve had for this month’s episodes. I want to explore how business owners find the curiosity to question how they “should” be doing something or what they thought the plan was going look like and, instead, find their own way by intentionally adapting as they go.



This week, my guest is Gillian Perkins—a YouTuber with over 450 thousand subscribers, marketing expert, business strategist, and the creator of Startup Society.



I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Gillian through YellowHouse.Media, where we produce her podcast, Work Less, Earn More. Gillian is a disciplined, rigorous executor who is no stranger to making a plan and working it.



And there are plenty of conventional ways that Gillian manages the work to be done—for instance, she loves Asana!



But there was a really intriguing part of our conversation where I learned that Gillian’s found her true way of working on big projects—like planning for her recent parental leave—doesn’t necessarily fit the way we think it’s supposed to be done. She calls it “batching chaotically” and it’s a mode of operation I can definitely relate to!



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