Is Balance an Illusion?

Nov 10

Written by Ashley Sterken

Aim For Focus Instead with Emily Fortune

Listen on Apple | Listen on Spotify

Emily Fortune, family photographer from Asheville, leaning against wall holding camera in hand

Links mentioned in today’s episode:

Connect with Emily on Instagram

Visit Emily’s Website

Check Out Our Asheville Studio on Instagram

Work during nap time. Get up at 5am before the house wakes up. Answer emails in the car line. We’ve all heard that advice before, but what does that actually get us? Most of the time, you can’t fully focus on work because you’re thinking about your kids, and you can’t one hundred percent focus on your kids because you’re thinking about the work you didn’t finish.

In this episode, I sit down with my friend Emily Fortune, a family photographer, studio owner and mom of three. We talk about whether balance is even the right thing to chase, and what it looks like to build real systems of focus instead, one for your work and one for your kids. Emily shares how she grew her business slowly alongside her family. She explains why advice from people in a different season of life didn’t fit hers. She also walks us through her “Keeping Business and Kids Alive” journal, including the simple list shift that changed how she sees her days.

We also get into capacity planning for moms, the small buffers that help you actually be present at home, and why sustainability might be a better goal than balance ever was.

If you’re an ambitious mom building a business, you’ve probably heard of the “nap time hustle” and some days, that really is the gig. But nobody tells you how to use that time. Nobody tells you what to do when the nap you planned your whole afternoon around doesn’t actually last as long as you planned for.

This is the exact conversation that my friend, Emily Fortune, and I were having recently, so I invited her on the podcast to dig in on this topic even deeper. Emily is a mom of three, and a family photographer specializing in newborn, family, and maternity sessions. She also owns a studio space that she rents out to other photographers and creatives called Our Asheville Studio.

Building a Business That Works For Your Season of Life

Most people have a goal when they start their business, to grow as fast as they can. Emily did the opposite. Her whole business started by taking photos of her own kids, which led it to doing sessions for friends and family and eventually grew beyond. The entire time, photography was a creative outlet for Emily – which by turning it into a scaling business can sometimes threaten the joy it provides – so she scaled slowly and continued to grow her family at the same time.

Finding balance while building a business as an ambitious mom is an illusion. Emily can attest to that. She also shares a mistake that she made early on in her entrepreneurial journey – Emily was taking advice from photographers who weren’t in her season. A wedding photographer without kids can build an amazing business, but that doesn’t mean that her structure is going to work for a family photographer with a toddler at home. The capacity that you have after kids is just different: physically, emotionally, and mentally. Receive advice from women that are in the same season as you.

The Business World Was Never Built For Us

When I started my first business, I brought every system and process from my years as a COO. None of it worked. It took me a while to realize why, but the truth is, most business best practices assume someone else at home is taking care of the house and the life. If the systems aren’t working for you, it may be because they were never built for you.

Nap Time Splits Are Not Sustainable

Emily describes the nap-time math that so many mompreneurs know by heart. Maybe you have ninety minutes. In that time frame you need to eat, shower, answer emails, do some work, update your website, and clean the house. Obviously, there’s not enough time for all of it, so which one gets sacrificed? As Emily shares her example of this, one day she chose the shower, and that’s when it hit her. Nobody should have to choose between eating and working, showering and answering emails. That isn’t sustainable. Rather than sacrificing every free minute of the day to work, Emily started seeking a way to create real space for herself.

Aim for Focus, Not Balance

Balance assumes everything gets an equal share every day. That’s never going to happen. Some days the baby doesn’t nap and the business gets nothing. Some seasons the business gets more of you, and that’s okay. Instead of chasing balance, start by looking for your collisions. What are the things that keep breaking over and over? Reduce the collisions and you’ll find longer, more predictable pockets of focus.

Keeping Business and Kids Alive Journal

Somewhere along the journey of entrepreneurship and trying to figure out how to keep bother her business and her kids alive (not in that order), Emily started writing in an old-school lined notebook. She would write down what was working, what wasn’t working, and brain dump whatever was in her head. Some days it was actual processes that are working and so she can now go back to look at and try that same process again in the future.

A few other ideas that came from this journal include:

The “what I want to do today” list. Rewording your “To-do” list can create a whole mental shift around the task itself.
The “what I did today” column. Write down everything you did during the day and it’s a visual reminder that you’re doing far more than you might feel like you did.
The “at least” method. Write one small thing to get done each day. Everything else is a bonus.

Building Systems of Focus that Support Life AND Business

In the corporate world, you plan a project around your team’s hours. As a mom, you’re one person, and you have to subtract time for the unexpected. I try to leave three to four unclaimed hours each week as wiggle room.

Letting go of perfection, redefining success for your season, and building at a pace you can actually keep will take you further than balance. Emily’s advice for the mom in the thick of it is to figure out when you function at your highest capacity. For years she worked after bedtime before realizing she’s a morning person. Build your focus time around your strengths, not around the time you have left when you’re already depleted.

If this is hard, it’s not because you’re doing something wrong. It feels hard because it is hard. You can absolutely build a business in the pockets of time you have. You just need a system underneath them.