Last July, as I was working figuring out how to better balance my life, I started interviewing other people who seemed like they have it all together. I always had the intent of sharing these interviews with you, so I recorded them for both video and audio sharing.
Seven months later, I’ve finally made time to commit to going through my work-life balance project interviews, and I’m excited to start sharing them with you. Check back here every Wednesday for a new interview video + transcript, and perhaps at some point in the future I will have a podcast you can follow too.
Introducing Meg Appleby of Bloom Online
The first interview that I scheduled with other business owners in the WordPress business space was with Meg Appleby, owner of Bloom Online. Meg is a web developer who largely builds websites for designers rather than for clients that she interfaces with directly. That allows her to do less project management during the initial build. In addition to developing new websites, Meg also offers WordPress support services, but hasn’t found that her clients have a huge number of requests.
Meg lives in New Zealand, so we connected late in the day for me and early in the morning for her. You’ll see that I had Addie, my interview assistant, in my lap (how tiny she was!) and Meg also had a number of kids pop in and out of the video. Meg is a single mom who lives in a multi-generational household with her father and her sister, her children and nieces and nephews. She and her sister have six children between them, so they have quite the busy house!
Interview Highlights
I’ll admit that the number of kids in her house was part of what made me want to interview Meg – I always want to know how other people make business ownership mix with parenting. Early in the interview, I learned that not only does she live in a house full of kids, she and her sister also home school the children too! Color me impressed.
I think the thing I most enjoyed about interviewing Meg is how clearly she understands what is important to her and her values. She talked about how she intentionally doesn’t take on big projects that will negatively impact her children and family life. She said, it’s ok to not build an empire right now – there will be time for that later.
That was my biggest take away from speaking with Meg: if you want work/life balance, you first need to know what you value most, and then you have to make plans in your business that support whatever that thing is being number one in your life. She spoke a lot about how important her children were to her, and I heard a lot of my own feelings in what she said, though I’ve had a harder time in the last two years figuring out how to live those values. It was wonderful to hear such a great, confident mom-preneur, and it really made me think about how my business might be impacting my girls.
Other key takeaways include:
Let someone else do the project management.
Working with other designers rather than the eventual website owners allows her to reduce the amount of project management that she has to do. Managing client expectations is a time suck and she avoids it whenever possible.
Know which projects to take on and which to say no to.
It’s a balance between taking on the projects that are super interesting/challenging and what is actually really valuable for her, which is time with her kids.
Don’t work on the weekend unless it’s an emergency.
Working on the weekend will not get you to some magic line where all the work is done. There is always more work to do on Monday. Spending two days away from work is not only better for family life, it also allows you to be mentally refreshed and able to do better work in the following week.
Having a strong support system is important.
This is especially important if you have kids – you need to know that they are taken care of while you’re working. Meg benefits by living with family – also, it may be that living in a country like New Zealand with a high number of social services makes it easier to say no if a project isn’t right for work/life balance.
Have a hard stop at the end of the day.
Going grocery shopping or running, or something that takes you away from your desk will actually make you stop at 5 p.m. Then, if you need to restart work later, you’ll have gotten up and moved around, and had a real break.
Schedule time for hobbies.
If you don’t put it on the calendar, it won’t happen (like my blog!) It’s important to have time for yourself that is other than your kids and your business, but you need to plan time to do it.
Resources Mentioned:
During the interview, Meg mentioned these two books:
- Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person by Shonda Rhimes
- The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months by Brian Moran
Watch the Interview
You can watch my full interview with Meg (it’s 30 minutes long) below, or if you’re more in a reading mood, I’ve typed up a transcript of the interview and posted it below the video. This is my first interview {ever} so go easy on me if it seems a little unfocused. 🙂
Interview Transcript:
Amber:
[baby sneezes] Oh, bless you!
Amber:
Hello?
Meg:
Yeah, can you hear me?
Amber:
Oh, Yep. Oh, you have a little person too!
Meg:
Yep. This is Isabel.
Amber:
Hi Isabel. This is Adelaide. She is brand new.
Meg:
Isabel just turned five last week.
Amber:
Oh Wow. That’s exciting.
Meg:
Yeah.
Amber:
So she was sort of my impetus for this little project. I will admit, because she was born on May ninth. I checked emails later that day and then I proceeded to walk at least five hours a day for the next two days. And I was like, I cannot take maternity leave. I feel like there must be people out there who can teach me something.
Meg:
It’s a big thing. Having kids makes you think twice about how you organize your life.
Amber:
Yeah, no kidding! So I have just a few questions and then I don’t know if you have any thoughts or anything you want to share. Um, but to get started, do you just want to introduce yourself and then tell me a little bit about your business and what you do and how long you’ve been doing it?
Meg:
Okay. Well, I live in a household with my sister and we have six children in between. Between us and we homeschool. I am a web developer so I help people with WordPress websites mostly. After my husband left and I needed something to do to earn some money and um, so yeah, I taught myself how to do that. I had a few people that ask me how to do stuff and I said I can figure that out and that sort of went from there. I taught myself to code and build and do that kind of stuff. So yeah.
Amber:
Yeah, that’s kind of how I got into it too. I was like, sure, I’ll learn about do that.
Meg:
It can’t be that hard, other people do it!
Amber:
I know. Right. So, so how do you do, how does that work with homeschooling? Do you also homeschool or primarily your sister?
Meg:
Um, it takes a bit of juggling. She does a lot of the moving children from place to place stuff. So that, I don’t know, although I have massive amounts of data that I – mobile data – that I pay for so that I can work, if I have to take the kids somewhere I can work from wherever I am. Which isn’t ideal. It would be nice to take them and enjoy watching them doing the thing that they are doing and be able to participate and talk to the other parents and stuff rather than just having to work.
Amber:
Just sitting there on your laptop. I’ve had the same experience at like dance classes and stuff. Do you have like a specific schedule that these are the hours you always work in or? Not really.
Meg:
I try to keep it between nine and 12, but lately it always goes over. My plan is four hours a day. The reality is I work at least eight hours a day and maybe more.
Amber:
And you’re a freelancer, right? There’s no one else on your team or anything, so it’s pretty much just you?
Meg:
No. I do hire contractors if I need to to get stuff done, but yeah, that’s just me.
Amber:
As far as like communicating with clients and stuff. It’s just you?
Meg:
Yeah. Although I do actually run two businesses. I run my own one where I do web development for designers. So if designers need someone to code up their designs, I do that, but I also have a partnership with a friend of mine who is a designer and we have our own business where we make websites. She does the design, I do the development.
Amber:
Okay. So does that mean then if you’re doing the design for designers or the development for designers that you’re not really interfacing with the actual business that’s getting the website as much? You’re just interfacing with the designers?
Meg:
Yeah.
I find it really hard to manage client expectations. They suck a huge amount of my life away. Part of my deciding how I wanted my business to run and how I needed more time was they had to go because they’re a huge, huge time suck.
If you’re managing a whole projects like that and you’ve got to manage client expectations and liaise between all the different people, it’s really hard. But I kind of use the designers…they kind of project manage for me. So I need to manage my own part of the project. I do consulting with them at the beginning to make sure that the designing good stuff for the clients from a development perspective, but I don’t manage the client until afterwards. I quite often take new clients on at the end in maintaining websites and keep in touch with them that way, but it was one of those things I have to think about what can I actually do? Because I can’t do everything and I have all these children, and they’re much more important than anything else, you know.
Amber:
Yes. So you kind of…so you got rid of the whole project management piece during projects, but you still do ongoing support afterwards?
Meg:
Yes.
Amber:
Do you have like set hours for support or do you find that with the support it’s okay… Clients, they understand about your schedule or not really?
Meg:
To be honest, I manage about 50 websites at the moment and I get very little support requests here. I have a set schedule of checking in on the website, making sure everything’s working. If I anything that looks a bit odd, I’ll get back to the client and say, “Look you’ve but some content in and that doesn’t look so good.” Or if I notice they haven’t put any content in for awhile. I send out a monthly newsletter and I send out a personal thing every month. Then I’ve checked it on your website. This is what I’ve done. This is what I’ve noticed, this is what you can do next month to make it better, so but, I don’t get a lot of, even though I offer it and I’m available for it, I have very few clients take me up on the support thing. So it’s, it’s a feel good thing, but they don’t actually need me.
Amber:
So most of them add all their own content and are kind of self sufficient?
Meg:
Some of them do. Most of them actually don’t do anything with their website. I’ve noticed with small businesses that people have this thing, maybe it’s a New Zealand thing or I don’t know if it’s global, but people have this thing where they build a website and “Oh, I’ve got a website, I’m done. I want to get all this business and that’s going to be great.” I mean two years later they’ve added no content and they haven’t changed anything and everything’s out of date.
Amber:
Yeah, that’s. We have that same experience with our clients, which prompted us to be like, we’re going to offer a plugin updating service for you because otherwise your website will get hacked.
Meg:
That’s the awful thing of going into a website two years after you’ve built it and nothing’s changed. And then having to update it and everything breaks and it was like, I’d rather just do it every month. Rather than going to have this horrible experience after two years when it’s like, “Oh my God, that plugin hasn’t been updated in two years. This one doesn’t even work anymore.”
Amber:
Yes, not supported by the developer. Like, yeah, I totally know what you’re saying. So that’s kind of interesting with the homeschool. So, um, do your kids, like when you’re working, do you have your kids at home, like in the same room as you or do you try and like delineate that for them as well? So now it’s like there’s the balance side of clients and clients understanding family. But then there’s also. So we have three kids and I’ve been feeling sometimes it’s challenging for me to have the kids understand, oh, if I’m on a conference call you can’t. Like you probably saw that BBC interview where they came in, and I’m like, that’s totally my life.
Meg:
Most of my clients, I’m pretty good. But um, my kids have grown up with being shunted out of the room when I’ve got a call on because it’s really hard to concentrate on somebody if you’ve got somebody asking for a sandwich, you know. And I like to give my clients my full attention. So my kids are used to it. I used to live next door to my other sister and my kids would just go, if I knew I had a call coming my kids would just go nextdoor when they were little and it was, it was good. But um, my sister’s little kids, I’m still training them.
Amber:
They haven’t figured it out yet?
Meg:
Yeah. But um, for the most part I’m in a mad house and I have, I try and have times where the kids know that it’s not cool to come and ask mum for anything right now because she’s working and I do occasionally yell a bit. “Get out of the room, I’m thinking, do not ask me for anything!” But um, for the most part they’re pretty good. But I have other developer friends who cannot understand how it is that I actually function to get anything done because it is constant interruption. Even I might get half an hour of no one asking me for anything, but you know, there’s always somebody who you hear an argument on the other end of the house or something. You’re constantly thinking about what I’m doing here, but I’m listening out for there because when you’re a parent you know.
Amber:
Oh I know. It’s really hard to turn it off. Like even, we have a nanny who comes from nine to two and if I hear our middle daughter has a very strong personality and if I hear that going on and I’m like, okay, I know that the babysitter’s up there, I will just like, wait… but I mean, she’s a college student, you know, she’s not like super expert, you know. So I’m like, okay, I have to turn it off and just ignore it, and know that she will resolve it even if it’s not exactly the way I would do it.
Meg:
Yeah. There’s one cleaning windows. [laughs]
Amber:
How old are all the kids in your house?
Meg:
We’ve got the twins that are five and then we’ve got two nine year olds. Erin’s next one up and my youngest are both nine, and then the two oldest are six months apart. So at the moment they’re are a few months apart, but we’ve got a 12 year old and an 11 year old. They coincide for a week with regards to, we have two five year olds, two nine year olds and two 11 year olds. And then one of them has to go and have a birthday and ruin it all.
Amber:
I bet that’s a fun house full of everybody. As long as there’s other adults there during the day when you’re working with the kids too. So
Meg:
Yeah, if I have to get work done, I quite often go to the library and I’ll hire a meeting room in the library and amazes me that when I leave the house I can go to the library for two hours and I get so much done. I forget how distracted I am when I’m at home.
Amber:
So do you feel like you have a good balance or do you feel like there’s still room for improvement?
Meg:
I think there’s a lot of room for improvement and a lot of it centers around… Like, I took on a project recently and it’s been a huge growth thing for me as a person and a business owner and a developer and all of that kind of stuff in it and it’s been great, but it’s, um, the reality is I work in a very distracted environment, my kids and their education, are actually more important to me than anything else. You know, I’ve got to money to pay the bills, but actually my kids are big responsibility and something I take very seriously and I don’t really have the huge space to manage big projects like that. Now maybe in a few years when my kids, the kids are older and they’re all a bit more self-managing themselves, but right now I need to remember that I can’t take on projects like that because it’s really not fair to my kids
It’s not fair to my kids because I will do the project and I will do a good job for my clients, but the people that miss out are the ones at home. And it’s, you know, three months of mum saying, “I can’t talk to you right now. I’m sorry. You can’t ask me that question right now. I don’t have time for you.” And it’s not actually how I want things to be. And it’s my business, I should actually choose to take on the work that I want.
So it’s, you know, it’s getting the balance between taking on the stuff that is interesting and what is actually really valuable for me.
What I really value in my life right now is bringing up kids that are happy and centered and they are loved and cherished. Eventually I’ll be able to do the things I want to do, but you can’t do both.
I can’t have the really interesting and, yes, exciting work, AND exciting family life because they clash and that doesn’t work.
Amber:
Yeah, I definitely understand. And like I feel like that’s something that I have struggled with a lot because I was for awhile a stay at home mom and all the time I keep thinking why did I grow this business? Because that was so nice. I like went to the library to story hour and I did all this fun stuff and now I feel bad sometimes when they’re like, “Boy, you work all the time.” You know, it’s like okay, I take a little break in the evening for dinner and all that stuff and then I’m back at work late at night. Like I know I emailed you once it like one in the morning and I was like, wow, this is great. I’m emailing you about a work life balance survey at one in the morning. Clearly I have none.
Meg:
I don’t work in the weekends anymore. Well, actually, that’s a lie because the last three weekends straight I have through them, but for the…it’s kind of my rule that I try not to break is that I have to have that time. And I noticed actually that I’m not only a better mum, which is good, but I’m much more creative and I solve problems quicker, and I have better weeks at work if I have that time where I don’t work.
If all I do is work, I just get sluggish. My brain gets tired and I find it harder to solve tricky problems. Whereas if I take those two days off but come back for Monday, I’m like, oh cool, I can do that. I’ve had time to percolate through the ideas and the things that I need to think about and come back to it fresh.
But I think that it’s easy to get caught up in the stress and anxiety of “Oh my god I’ve got all this work to do” But the reality is,
If you don’t stop and breathe sometimes for an extended period of time, the work just doesn’t get done anyway because you haven’t made that space for it to happen.
So the whole work life balance thing, it makes you better at everything. If you could just take a little bit of time to not be.
Amber:
Yeah. Which I think a lot of too is just about, right, setting the client expectations and they know that. Okay. Unless everything exploded, I will not respond to this until Monday morning.
Meg:
Yeah, I had a client on Friday. He was like, “We’re at this point with this website and we need to do this, this and this.” It’s like I’m not working over the weekend, I will start again on Monday. And they ring me on Monday, and it’s like, “Well, where did you get up to?” “We’re exactly where we were on Friday afternoon because I didn’t work in the weekend, because I took the weekend off so I could be better at working for you this week.”
Amber:
And were they upset or did they understand?
Meg:
Uh, they were fine with it. It’s just, you know, they forget, I think… I read something actually recently, I can’t remember, I think it might have been, Shonda Rhimes’ book, A Year of Yes. She said something about how she used to work all the time and she would work all through the weekends. And then she got to the point where she realized that it actually didn’t make any difference because the work was always there on Monday morning. There was always more to do.
Amber:
Yeah. It’s not like she was able to just be like, I’m done with everything.
Meg:
Yeah, and I would do that too.
I would work on the weekends and I think I’m going to catch up. I’m going to catch up, but you don’t. And there’s always more to do on Monday. So it’s like, well, unless it’s really urgent and really, really needs to be done on the weekends, I can actually choose to keep my weekends to myself.
I try and make sure that I go somewhere with my children and actually pay them my full attention for some time because it means that my family life is easier on the week too because my kids have had some serious mum time and that makes a difference for them, for them feeling settled and loved and able to function for themselves in the week when I’m a bit more distracted and a bit less available.
Amber:
Yeah. Yeah, that totally makes sense. Do you get, so have you been able to take vacations like a whole week off or anything or have you pretty much just restricted it to the weekends for now?
Meg:
The weekends are my thing for this year. I would like to actually take an actual holiday when I don’t work for an entire week and it’s a lot to do with thinking you’re ahead in your business and I’m not, I haven’t been very good at that. Saying, I want to take a holiday at this time so I need to make sure that I don’t take any projects on from this time to this time and saying to clients won’t be available in this time.
Amber:
Yeah, I think they’ve tried to do that and then it always ends up that like things run over schedule. Or, like, we get a client who wants a project and we’re like, oh, we don’t want to say no or this. So then we ended up booking it in the time that we like on our calendar, literally said book nothing. But we do it anyway. Which is total self sabotage, I think.
Meg:
Yeah, I do that a lot as well, you know, I’m not gonna do this, I’m going to have this time off. And then that’s like, I don’t feel I can say no to things and I think that’s cultivating that feeling of enough. That, actually, I don’t have to take on all the work. My clients probably, they might want to have this project done but they actually can wait for a week. Quite often I find that my anxieties are not the same anxieties that my clients have. So if I can ask them a few more questions, I probably could negotiate these things better.
Amber:
So that it would work better for everybody.
Meg:
Yeah, but you sort of get so caught up in that “I need to work and I want to do this work,” rather than thinking, well, how could we all win?
Amber:
Yeah, I think it’s hard when you like it. That’s the only thing, like it’s so easy. If you’re an employee for a company and you don’t super love your job, you’re like, all right, 5:00 PM peace out. Right? But when you really like it and you think it’s fun or interesting and engaging and then it makes it more challenging I think to stop it or turn it off. Yeah. Do you have any other thoughts? I mean this is all really useful and interesting. You mentioned Shanda Rimes, A Year of Yes. Is that what that book was called? I should check that out. So what’s it about? She says yes to everything?
Meg:
She had a conversation with say sister, and her sister said, You don’t do anything and you say no to everything and you don’t take up any opportunities. And she thought well year, that’s actually true. So she decided she was going to go and spend an entire year saying yes to all the things that scared her. So she just went and did all this cool stuff for a year. But a lot of it made me think.
There was one chapter where she said about saying yes to play and playing with your kids. She was going out somewhere and her kids wanted to play and she was like, “Ah I have to be somewhere” and then she decided that she was going to make it a new rule that when they asked her she would stop what she was doing and she would play because nothing else is more important. And it made me think a little bit about how I do things with my kids.
My oldest daughter loves playing board games and she asked me to play Yahtzee the other day and I was going to go back and do more work after I put the other kids to bed. And I thought, no I need to say yes to this, because I don’t get a lot of time with her. She’s going to be 12 this year and I’m going to be totally uncool in a year or two.
Amber:
I know, that’s what I keep thinking with our… We have a daughter is almost eight and I’m like, there’s only so much like right now she’s really into, we read chapter books together and she always wants to put on shows for us and I was like, man, we got to really absorb this because it’s going to go away soon.
Meg:
It’s really hard to remind yourself that that time is so short and so precious and believe other things feel like they are really important, but these things actually are.
You know, I can go without creating an empire for a few years. I have a family size of business that works for the kids.
Try the other things later on. Actually there is no rush and I just need to.
I think the whole thing about work life balance is really having a strong sense of what it is that you actually value. I find that when I lose it, when I forget, when I don’t pay attention to the things that are actually important to me than my business takes over and it’s fun and I like it, but the other things that are actually really important to me are the ones that suffer and I don’t want that. So, I have to keep that – what is it that I actually value – front and center when I choose what work I take on and how I management my business and my life.
I’m by no means means particularly good at it. But it is a thing I have realized that when I keep things that are important to me at the front of my mind, my business works better because it fits into my life better. I take on work that is within my capabilities to manage and do, and do in the circumstances that I currently living in. I think that it’s maybe my answer to how to maintain some sort of work-life balance most of the time.
Amber:
Do you have… So I guess I would assume then you have some degree of financial flexibility enough that if you’re like, okay, I could just be okay with making less money right now that that’s okay.
Meg:
Not really. I am the only breadwinner for my kids. But in New Zealand, we do have a good social support system and I am lucky enough to be able to benefit from it. It’s not that we could, we would starve if I didn’t work, but
Amber:
Yeah, you guys don’t have to pay thousands of dollars a month for health insurance like we do.
Meg:
Yeah. I mean we’re so lucky living in the kind of country that we do. As much as I read this politics and Americans who don’t want big government and don’t want this and don’t want that, the fact that you can have your husband walk out on you and your children and I had a chronic illness. I was really sick, and I didn’t have to worry about money. It’s not that it pays for you to live a lavish lifestyle, but nobody’s going to starve and not have a roof over my head. Even if I never got better and wasn’t even able to do anything else, my kids would be okay. That was the main thing and so I am hugely grateful that we have, that I live where I do and then I’m fixed. So it does give me a bit more freedom and, of course, I live with my sister and I lived with my dad. He moved into as well.
Amber:
So you have multiple generations in the same house.
Meg:
Yes, there is real support. I am very well aware that while I am a single mom, I’m not a single parent. I have two other adults in the house who are interested in my kids and have their best interests at heart and if anything happens to me, my kids are taken care of so I could struggle a lot more. It could be a harder.
Amber:
Yeah, it’s definitely nicer even I think too, just thinking about having someone else that’s in a family role when you are having to work that you know your kids aren’t like in daycare or something like that. Right?
Meg:
Yeah, because that – I would have very, very strong feelings about the education system and daycare, and all of that kind of stuff, that it would break my heart to have to send. I actually sent my kids to school a couple of years ago because I needed to. Um, I just couldn’t do it all and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve just, honestly, I spent the first little while everytime I dropped them off, I’d sit in the car and cry. You know, it was awful. And my youngest daughter just, she didn’t adapt. She hated school. She lasted a year and then I brought her home and my oldest when she finished primary school, she’s back at home again. So it was really hard and I am glad that I have the freedom to choose, to not have to do something like that. I really, really deep down in my soul don’t agree with.
Amber:
Yeah. The big things that I’m taking away from talking to you is having a strong support system is good and really knowing what your values are and figuring out how to make work and family and whatever those things are that are part of your life fit into those values.
Meg:
Yeah.
Amber:
At least for you, right? Like it’s not always about the work and the money. You have to remember that so that you can have a good balance.
Meg:
The other thing that I find really good, actually, is I find that trying to make sure that at the end of my day I have some hard stops.
It’s like I have to finish at five (and this doesn’t always work). That’s a great idea in theory, but most of the times it’s not so good, but I’m trying to make sure I have hard stops at the end of my day. So I either go out and do the grocery shopping or go for a run. Something where I have to get up, leave my computer, so I’ll go out for a run. And then by the time I come back, it’s like I can’t face my computer any more, I’m so exhausted. Or I go out and do the grocery shopping. Something where I actually have to leave the house and my day is over, you know, it’s like it’s a real break and even if I’m do go back to it later on at night, I’ve actually had a significant break and change of pace between working and not working. It’s really helpful.
And making sure that I’ve decided to learn to play the piano this year. So making sure I make time to do things like go for a run and play the piano. I draw in and schedule in the reading time and the learning time. So I’ve got these things in my day so that I’m not just working, I am doing these things that make me feel good. Even if they’re scheduled in like they are work, you know, it makes me do them because otherwise –
Amber:
Otherwise you wouldn’t do it if you didn’t schedule it. Yes, that’s me. I keep thinking, I used to blog and I keep going, “I want to blog!’ But I don’t put it on my calendar so it probably never happened because then I’m like, well, it’s not doing something with my kids and it’s not doing something exactly for my business. So it’s like this weird, like how do you make that happen? But I guess you’re right. You just have to literally put it on your calendar and be like, this is a day and time when I do this thing.
Meg:
I read The Twelve Week Year recently.
Amber:
Sorry, what was it? The 12 Week Year?
Meg:
Yeah, I think it’s Brian Moran. I think it’s Brian but I can’t remember his last name, but it was, like, it had some really good ideas. It’s nothing ground shaking, you know, but it’s like you’re reading any productivity books. That’s kind of the same sort of information, but it was hitting setting goals over a 12 week period. So you – and really focusing in on what is important to do for that and keeping them done first. So these are the things that I want to achieve in the next 12 weeks in. So I put them first on my day, even if I’ve got other work to do that’s really important that people are waiting for, it’s like, if I don’t do these things, everything else is going to fall apart. Anyway, so you know, I have to schedule an hour in the first part of my day to get these things done. Maybe that will make the most difference.
Amber:
All right. I will have to look for it. Well, I don’t know if I have any other questions. I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to. Otherwise I will let you get on with – I’m ending my day, but you’re just starting yours so I’m sure you have lots to do.
Meg:
Okay. I probably have lots I could talk about but it doesn’t occur to me at the moment.
Amber:
Well thanks so much for taking time to chat with me, Meg.
Meg:
That’s all right. It’s actually quite nice to say, you know, when you think of stuff to actually say it out loud and saying, “Oh yeah, I do that. I need to do more of that. Oh, I haven’t done that in a while.”
Amber:
I know. Well, just hearing you say somethings, it made me be like, “Oh man, I really do need to schedule a hobby on my calendar or something.”
Meg:
It sounds sort of tedious when you have to schedule it. But honestly it’s the only way it’s ever going to get done.
Amber:
Yeah, thanks. I’ll uh, I’ll let you know when this is, when I have stuff up and I’m giving my talk at Word Camp Denver, which is at the end of August. So if you’re interested I’ll share it with you.
Meg:
I would love to see is. I’d really to hear what other people have to say because I’m so open to hearing what other people’s ideas are because you know, like I said, my system is fairly imprefect and often falls by the wayside. So any new ideas that exciting.
Amber:
Yeah, yeah, I’ll definitely, I’m going to post this. This, at least, will make me do at least one blog posts post. So yeah, I’ll let you know what everybody has to say and it’s been interesting watching the surveys come in. I’ve had about 63 people taking it. My goal is 100. We’ll see if I get that many. So share it if you know anybody that would be interested in. Um, but it is interesting and then I keep trying to go like I’m just starting to look at are there correlations between things like Oh, if you have kids you’re like less happy, you know what I mean? Like it’s harder or you know, that sort of stuff or, or maybe the countries will be interesting to see too, like you were saying, you know, some countries have better support systems and stuff then we have here in the US for sure. So yeah. So interesting.
Meg:
Okay, cool. All right, well you enjoy the rest of your evening.
Amber:
Yeah, you have a good day.
Meg:
Alright, bye.
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