I saw a couple of colleagues post a link to this article on Fast Company this morning. It talks about how those of us that work from home struggle to stay productive when we share the office with our small children. The answer given in the article is working the night shift. When the kids go to bed, go back to work. Do split shift hours to make up for lost time. I am one hundred and ten percent sure that’s not the long term answer.

Don’t get me wrong, the struggle is real.

Last week on Tuesday, I spent the hours from 8am to 5pm in the office and got 1.5 hours of actual, real work done. I was tearing my hair out.

When it’s the last work day of the week, I spend the last hour of work with antsy children literally crawling all over me waiting for the time in the office to be done.

But I still avoid working night shift when I can.

Why is working night shift the answer?

I dream of a day four years from now, when both kids are in school. The office will be quiet, calm, and serene. Night work brings a little preview of that. My husband works evenings right now, so if I wanted to when the kids go to bed, I could have a few solitary hours of complete uninterrupted concentration.

It is so satisfying when you can sit down and focus on your job 100%, when projects just hum along quickly and quietly. When you can code a website for a couple of hours straight without exposing yourself to a hungry baby in your lap.

Hey, you asked.

For some people, specifically folks with a side business, it’s the only answer.

But why am I always looking for another way?

Because I am a mom.

And I am tired.

Joy is doing so much better with sleep than she did when she was a newborn. But she still gets up multiple times in the night, and she’s just shy of 8 months old. I’ve been getting broken nights of sleep almost constantly since March 21. And I am tired.

I get up anywhere between 5:30am and 7am, and between the kids, work, and chores I am going almost nonstop until everyone’s in bed around 8pm.

That’s when this taxi lights up the “off duty” sign and cruises towards the couch for a break. While stress-eating a huge bowl of popcorn. That break lasts just long enough for me to crash out in a dead sleep during the episode of Alias I’m trying to rewatch because I fell asleep trying to watch it last night.

I do have to work at night sometimes, and when it happens repeatedly, night after night, I’ll be honest. I am not a happy camper. I become less than jovial. Sometimes I’m a straight up jerk about it. When you get up early, work super hard all day, go back to work at night, and fall into bed… Life starts to feel like it never ever slows down for one single second. It gets a little depressing.

I avoid working night shift because I can not go nonstop 24 hours a day 7 days a week, and it’s unrealistic to think that’s a long term solution.

Because we all need a break.

So what are some of the ways around working night shift?

1) Productivity tools on your phone are your best friend.

If you’ve got a few minutes of downtime, check your email via your phone and answer one or two of them. Don’t let them pile up.

I’ve also installed the WordPress app on my iPhone, and sometimes when I’m rocking Joy to sleep I’ll bust out a fast blog post. It’s not super optimized for search engines, but it puts fresh content on my site.

I use a Google calendar app to figure out my projects for the week, and I schedule them out into chunks of time. This one I do on my desktop pc as well – there I can keep a task list going of current open projects, as well as color code my chunks of time throughout the week.

And don’t even get me started on Evernote.

2) Raise your prices.

This is a tough one, but if you’re a small business owner, and the goal is to work a few less hours for the same pay… You have got to examine your business and raise prices here and there where you can. If you’re doing quality work (like our own award-winning web design services, ahem), you won’t run into much opposition.

3) Cut costs.

One of the major differences between my own business and the Fast Company author’s is I’m not making six figures, and I don’t care if that happens. (Sorry, Josh.)

Sure it’d be nice if I was pulling in a huge paycheck. But my goal isn’t to roll around in a pile of money Scrooge McDuck style – it’s to keep our super reasonable house payment current. We’re living within our means, which sometimes means ditching things we don’t need. We got rid of cable television I think about six months ago, which is going to save us $1200 a year.

Think about ways you can get by on a little less income. Of course you’ll make more money if you’re working at night, too. But maybe you can get by without that cash.

4) Set limits.

I keep close watch over my project calendar – my nights are my nights, and I get surly when I start to miss out on em. Saying no is hard, but working nights is harder for me. So setting limits became a huge necessity.

One thing I’ve had to let go of when Joy was born was saying yes to free projects for my friends. I used to do those All. The. Time. I had to start realizing that I am only one person, and if I need a break in the evenings, if I don’t even have time to work on my own personal art projects right now, I have got to stop saying yes all the time.

Which is really, really, hard to do.

But omg guys, we all just need a break. I promise, your family will thank you for it when you’re relaxing at the end of the day instead of going back to work.

Talk to me – are you working night shift?

What works for you, and what doesn’t? What are some ways you keep going if you’re a night shifter?