Paying other freelancers to take on what I wasn’t doing during my leave and reduced hours didn’t only emotionally detach me from the work, but also drained my bank account. I love nerding out about sex and relationships but I found myself completely and utterly bored.Īt the same time, the business was struggling financially. I had even less time to dedicate to input mode, which meant I was scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas and I was extremely lacking in inspiration or motivation. The content was suffering and I was running out of steam. Initially I loved coming back to work part-time, but all the cracks from before were showing and getting harder to ignore. To prepare for my new life as a working mum I also expanded my team to help take some things off my plate. It was the longest I hadn’t posted anything on my YouTube channel in more than 10 years. There is no blueprint for freelancers, creators or small business owners for what to do about parental leave, so I made up what I thought would be the best balance between me getting “time off” to look after the baby and not letting the business suffer too much. This is where you get to learn, explore, refill the well, take care of yourself and nourish your curiosity. And the problem with being in constant output mode is that you never get a chance to be in “input mode”. The pressure to always be posting is real.

The fear is that if you dare take a break, people will forget about you, the algorithm gods will punish you and your income and career will inevitably suffer. Creating regular YouTube videos, podcast episodes and social media content puts you on this hamster wheel where you always have to be creating. For the past decade I had been in what I call constant “output mode”.

Life wheel printable