How I Homeschool 5 Kids and Run a Business in 10 Hours a Week

No, I don’t have a nanny, and yes, I’m tired. Let’s get into it

Before I say anything else, let me be clear about something: I did not wake up one morning with this life humming along like a well-oiled machine. This is zero percent a flex (hang with me long enough, and you’ll see for yourself). This is the result of years of getting it catastrophically wrong, a near-death experience that rewired my priorities (I keep it casual, I know), and a level of pruning that made me feel like I was voluntarily dismantling my career with a butter knife (wildly unpleasant).

There are no productivity hacks here, but if you’re looking for someone who restructured her entire life around what actually matters while somehow finding her profitable sweet spot… we should talk.

Also, little preamble that shouldn’t be necessary to say, but just in case – this is MY life in THIS season. This is not prescriptive, a template, or an “if she can do it, what’s your excuse” kind of thing, because… ew. This is just what it looks like for me with five kids, homeschool, caring for my dad, a book that won’t write itself, a business I stripped down to its studs, and a husband who is building something of his own alongside me. Take what’s useful, leave the rest on the table.

Okay, now that the disclaimers are out of the way (my inner attorney is satisfied), let’s go.

It isn’t a time management issue, it’s a pruning issue.

First, let’s cut to the chase… the real reason most driven people “can’t” work fewer hours isn’t a time management issue, it’s a pruning issue. They’re still saying yes to things that are good but not right, profitable but not congruent, productive but not purposeful – you get the picture. And every yes to the wrong thing is a no to something that matters more, which I’m sure you already know in your conscious brain.

We all get the premise that we need fewer yeses, which sounds simple until you’re staring at a $120,000 contract and having to say “this isn’t mine to carry anymore” while your brain screams about the mortgage, and your ego screams about relevance, and your body just screams because the baby was up approximately 46 times last night.

After I gave birth this last time, I decided I was going to take a real maternity leave, but when I came back I knew I didn’t want to jump back in where I had left off (in chaos). So to shift that, I had to get my business down to what I call my sweet spot – me only the work that I was actually designed for, that doesn’t drain me, that produces real, unproportionally positive impact without requiring me to be plugged in like a human charging station eighteen hours a day. For me right now, that’s three things: writing (the book, Substack, emails), advising a small number of founders privately and my team, and YouTube. That’s it. For this season, that’s literally and intentionally the whole business.

Everything else got pruned. Huge contracts I released because they were paying well but costing me peace, focus on the things that would launch me into my own personal Big Next, and my capacity. Masterminds I’ve run for over a decade we put on sabbatical. I retired profitable offers. I lit my entire identity as a “business coach” on fire and narrowed my focus directly into the calling God has placed on my heart in this season – as an advisor – in my home, and in my work. If you’re trying to do seven things in ten hours a week, you’re delusional (been there, tried that).

So what do my days actually look like? Buckle up because it is deeply unglamorous.

Morning… I’m up before the kids, and I’d love to paint you a picture of me journaling in golden hour light with a matcha latte, but that would be a bold faced lie. Truth is that I’m running on very little sleep because our baby has apparently decided that rest is for the weak. So it’s coffee (you can keep your matcha), prayer, Scripture, a specific journaling process (download my Founders Prayer Journal here), and some kind of intentional quiet before the circus beckons. I’m calling it an “intention block” because it sounds more official than “I sit in silence and beg God to give me patience for the next fourteen hours.”

Then the kids are up and we ease into the day together. That’s a big thing that we’ve abandoned over the last year or so… hurry. We make a hardy, healthy breakfast together. We read aloud together. We do a little morning devotional time that is sometimes really charming and sometimes a total cluster depending on who stole whose seat and whether the dog got into something.

Let’s talk homeschool days, because it definitely adds a level of nuance that non-homeschoolers don’t have to juggle. We have our kids with us ALL. OF. THE. TIME. Does that need repeating for those of you who are not fully grasping the profundity of that statement? ALL OF THE TIME. Even if you don’t homeschool, track with me through this part because I want to paint a picture of possibility – meaning, even when you have kids alongside you and a lot to juggle, you can still make it work and make it work well.

I’m not interested in recreating the system I pulled my kids out of, so we personally don’t try and recreate school at home. We do maybe one to two hours of focused academics, but it’s built around who each kid actually IS, not a standardized workbook.

For example, instead of giving them a spelling workbook, they write heart-felt letters to people who need encouragement. Real letters, to real people – what a novel concept! They get excited to write a letter to a neighbor who’s been sick, a grandparent, someone at church going through a hard time, a cousin whom they miss. Then the misspelled words in that letter (that we ultimately correct together) become their spelling words for the week. So they’re learning to spell AND learning to think about people other than themselves, which, frankly, seems more important than getting a 100 on a worksheet that goes in the trash.

Our approach is homeschooling formation, not just information.

I want my kids to learn how to think, how to love people, how to work with their hands, how to steward what they’ve been given. The academics matter, but they’re woven into something bigger. If my kids can solve an equation but can’t look someone in the eye and have a real conversation, I’ve failed them.

Sometimes we’re learning math through cooking, or angles via a building project, or we’re doing some reading or actual book work, too.

Midday, the kids go outside and they go outside a LOT. I could go off on a tangent on this ideal, but I’ll save it for a future piece. While they’re out there doing whatever slightly feral children do in the yard (I try not to micromanage the chaos), that’s often when I’ll do some writing with a laptop on the back patio as they play within earshot.

Afternoons are what I call our “life labs”, which is a fancy way of saying they explore whatever they’re interested in and I try to let them lead. One of my sons taught himself leather working and made an actual wallet. My daughter learned to crochet. My son built an entire wooden shoe shelf for my mom so she had a place to put her shoes. They write plays and act them out. They pick an experiment and walk through it together. My daughter is learning the full process of writing and editing a book right alongside me.

They deep-dive into whatever’s captured their imagination – how to start a business, how to invest money, what it takes to build a treehouse. We volunteer at the local nursing home. Some days are wildly productive and some days we intentionally ditch all means of efficiency and I’m (slowly) learning to be okay with both.

Here’s what I always get asked about – when do I actually work?

Two days a week, my aunt comes to the house. She’s with the little ones while our older kids are at co-op, and THAT’S when I schedule my YouTube filming, client calls, and anything that requires me to be a functioning professional adult without someone asking me for a snack mid-sentence.

Because I have a small window of time to laser in, I utilize my CEO Schedule process to only do what will produce the most powerful, disproportionately positive results. That means I spend almost the entire time in my sweet spot versus time in admin, social media, or reactivity. Every other week rotates with one of the two days being my call day where I connect with team, and have my private client meetings, and the opposite week that call day is for interviews or partnership connections. The other day is dedicated to recording, more writing, and ongoing projects like finishing touches on Your Big Next (my book) and prepping for book launch.

Side question: Do you want a play-by-play on my work days? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll do an entire article with a full breakdown of how I’ve become insanely efficient on my most profitable sweet spot. Things are tweaked depending on the season we’re in, but staying focused on what only I can do is something that we protect in every season work wise.

Now, I know that not everyone has that built-in village, and that breaks my heart. We literally moved across the country to reestablish our village, and I know how difficult everything can feel when you feel like it’s just you against the world. But I’m sharing my version of this story, and remember that you may need to put it through your own filter into what will work for you – a babysitter, a friend, working at night, using the childcare at the gym, whatever aligns for you.

Other than that, later in the day when the kids are reading, I write some more if it works out. They’re on the couch with their books, I’m at the kitchen table (surprise, surprise) with my laptop. There’s something about being in the same space, doing our own things, that feels great for us. I talked about this in a recent piece about proximity versus quality time, and this is a living example of it – I’m working, but I’m HERE. If someone has a question, needs a hug, wants to show me something, wants to hear what I just wrote, I’m accessible.

The evenings are all family time, going for walks and bike rides, prepping dinner together, cranking the music and enjoying our time together instead of trying to rush through it. We power-clean the house as a team because nobody is above picking up their own (or someone else’s) socks in this family, I don’t care how old you are. After dinner we read aloud together and then we go through our prayer list – praying for people by name, which we all look forward to. We talk about what God might be up to in our lives, what’s weighing on us, the lessons of the day.

Like I said… not glamorous, but it seems to work for us these days.

Now I know some of you are reading this thinking “cool, cool, but how did you actually get HERE?”

Point blank: I had to give things up. Not hypothetical “someday I’ll simplify” things, like real, big things.

It’s been a reckoning of sorts for me, to be transparent. Mostly because I was put in some incredible rooms over the last few years that I had fought tirelessly to get into. It was a “hard work paying off” season for me, both financially and in terms of feeling like… finally, I’ve made it happen!

Which sounds great in theory, until God challenges you to put some of those lucrative, ego-stroking opportunities down to follow Him. Yeesh… that’s somethin’, let me tell ya.

I had to let my team carry things I used to take pride in doing myself, which sounds easy and is actually excruciating for a control enthusiast (recovering, thanks for asking).

Delegation isn’t a strategy for me, it’s actually now a form of spiritual discipline.

Every time I hand something off I’m practicing trust, which, it turns out, is the entire point of faith, even when applied to business. Who knew?!

I had to accept that this season is about depth, not width. I’m not scaling right now – that’s not my goal. I’m not trying to reach a million people. I’m trying to go deep with the right ones and do work that I’ll be proud of when I look back on this season, and that is a fundamentally different metric than revenue. (And weirdly, the revenue has been strong. That deserves its own letter at some point because the economics of alignment are way more interesting than anyone in the business world is talking about.)

Your calendar is a confession, you know? It tells the truth about what you actually value regardless of what you SAY you value. I got real honest with mine a couple years ago and the confession was ugly. My calendar said I valued client revenue and productivity, but my big mouth said I valued my family and my faith. The gap between those two things was where all my pain, constant striving, and exhaustion lived for me.

Closing that gap is what this whole season has been about. It’s not done and I’m still in it.

Here’s what I want to leave you with…

You can’t build a life you love inside a reality that feels completely off.

I don’t care how many productivity systems you buy or how early you set your alarm or how perfectly you batch your content, if your calendar doesn’t reflect your calling, something (probably of a lot of somethings) has to go.

Productivity culture will tell you to optimize your business, but I’m telling you to design your life. A life where ten hours of the right work feels more full (and thankfully, useful) than sixty hours of the wrong work ever did.

I’m not “there” yet, but I’m closer than I’ve ever been. And the view from here is something I wish I could bottle up and hand to every exhausted, overwhelmed, painstakingly-questioning-everything entrepreneur I know.

I don’t think you need more hours as much as you need fewer yeses and a longer table to hold the calling on your life.

Love + prayers,

Liz

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