“How was your day?” my husband asked me at the end of another day homeschooling our kids. He asked it routinely, but this time, I suddenly became aware of my thoughts before giving my pat response. “Fine.” I was counting how many sibling fights had happened and measuring how clean the house was.
“That’s not what I want my days to be about,” I thought, realizing perhaps for the first time that what I consider “success” may not actually be what I want to spend my time on.
Begin with the end in mind. This is popular advice, but I hadn’t experienced what it means before in such a profound way. If your end goal is a clean house, you will spend the day tidying or fretting about messes, avoiding them, feeling overwhelmed by them. Begin the day hoping for peace, and you will likely spend the day focused on all the behaviors that threaten your calm—and kids have plenty of those.
This isn’t to shame stay-at-home parents (and especially homeschool parents) who are indeed in a period that feels like survival—those seasons truly exist. Rather, I hope to share a liberating framework that freed me from this pattern as a homeschool mom, and that has now become a valuable mindset as an educational entrepreneur.
Shortly after this awakening, I read the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. As the title implies, McKeown invites readers to consider what they can remove from their lives in order to focus more resources on their area of greatest contribution. He describes routines we often fall into in our lives that feel “productive,” but are in fact just distractions from our real goal. For example, I might have said, “If I could ever get my house clean, I would start doing those interesting hands-on learning projects with my kids.” Instead, McKeown suggests asking the question, “What’s the simplest thing I can do right now that actually moves the needle on what’s essential?” In this scenario, I might decide that the whole house doesn’t need to be clean, just the table, so that we can start the project there.
This framework opened my eyes to new possibilities. What had felt overwhelming (homeschooling my own three kids) suddenly felt not only feasible, but within a year of this mindset shift, I decided to open my home to other homeschoolers, starting my own microschool. At first glance, it might seem like I started doing more rather than less. But as McKeown teaches, “[Essentialism] is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at your highest point of contribution.” It means getting clear about what you really want, and then learning to say “no” to everything that doesn’t move you toward that end.
I have shared before how I “unschooled” my way to opening a school. It was a process of following curiosity, developing passion, and searching out resources to answer my questions as they came up. Now in my second year of running a self-directed learning center, I am observing a large number of kids in their own unschooling journeys as I continue my own self-directed path of sustainably growing a business. In this season, I am rediscovering the value of this disciplined pursuit of less, particularly McKeown’s invitation to make more space for reflection, pondering, and meditation.
We recently finished a season of productivity at our school. The kids built a community event including a haunted path through our yard, then produced a play for our first Renaissance Festival. The work has been invigorating, stretched them to keep commitments, inspired some new skills such as sewing costumes and making props, and has brought the kids closer together as friends. These things look good on paper and make great social media posts. It could be tempting to push the kids into the next observable productive project for the sake of impressing parents or creating great marketing material. Although we invited the kids into other projects, I noticed that the energy of the group naturally shifted for several days to more conversations, more play, and more time outside including visits to our state park. I watched this shift and was reminded of my own need to pause and reflect as I navigate decisions about the growth trajectory of the school.
Our children are bombarded by content. An essential skill in their adult life will be evaluating what is worth their time and energy, and then focusing on that chosen meaningful work. As I create that space for my students, I am reminded that in my own school-building journey, there are many things I could do. The question is which one is truly needed, and truly needed now, according to the specific end I have in mind.
