Lauren Hintz hadn’t even started her maternity leave, and she already couldn’t wait to get back to work.
“I was having the most fun I’d ever had,” says Hintz, director of strategic projects at Notarize, an online notarization company that saw massive growth during the pandemic. “I was working on such dynamic projects and solving big problems, and just loving it."
Of course, once her son was born in February of 2021, Hintz and her husband had a brand-new love to nurture and care for. Notarize provided 12 weeks of fully-paid leave, and when Hintz returned to work in April, she was ready — though apprehensive.
“I think that’s normal for most new parents,” she says. “I was just worrying about how my brain could hold all of the mom stuff and all of the work stuff at the same time.”
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Now that she’s been back at work for a few months, Hintz credits her employer with making the transition more manageable than it might have been at a less-flexible workplace. Prior to the pandemic, Boston-based Notarize supported remote work for about 10% of its staff, including Hintz, who’s based in Indianapolis. In a post-pandemic world, remote work has been embraced company-wide, making it even easier for Hintz to work and parent from home. Generous vacation policies — including unlimited vacation and a company-wide weeklong shutdown called “Operation Chillax” — have helped the new mom find a balance that works for her.
“Notarize is very pro-parent and pro-family,” she says. “The leadership has really identified ways to invest in employees to keep us happy.”
Hintz shared some of the ways she (with the support of Notarize) has figured out how to efficiently pack a day with work, parenting — and even some time for herself.
The (early) morning hours
Hintz’s first alarm of the day goes off long before wake-up time. “My son is still a baby, so he’s still nursing once overnight,” she says. From there, it’s back to bed for a couple of hours, and up at 7 a.m. Hintz tries to squeeze in a walk in the morning before the official start of the day, and enjoy some quality family time over breakfast.
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“I’ll have a couple of hours with him in the morning before he goes to daycare or the babysitter gets here,” Hintz says. Splitting child care — three days a week her son goes to daycare, and two days a week he’s at home with a babysitter — has helped her to find a balance of responsibilities, and to embrace the benefits of remote work.
“The flexibility of that combo, which means that I don’t have to pump so much, is really nice,” she says. “Being able to work from home has been such a gift, especially the first six months when he was at home the whole time.”
Hintz’s child care kicks in between 9 and 10 a.m., and she heads to her at-home office and starts her work day.
Multi-task through meetings
Hintz says her day is about 50% independent work, 50% collaboration. “I’m definitely not one of those people that has back-to-back meetings,” she says. That affords her the freedom to take “walking meetings” when she can, and, when her son is at home, find time for nursing sessions.
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“If he’s at daycare, I’ll sign off for 20 or 30 minutes a few times a day to pump and replenish that supply,” she says. “And I have also been known to take a Zoom call, not be on video and use that time to pump. I feel zero awkwardness to say, ‘Hey, I’m going to pump during this call.’”
Finding flexibility and juggling responsibilities
On the days that her son goes to daycare, pickup time is 4 p.m., a responsibility that she handles, as her husband, a healthcare worker, has a less flexible schedule. “That was true even before we had a kid — I would be the one to go get the car fixed in the middle of the day because I could,” Hintz says. “So I certainly bear the brunt of doctors appointments and pickups.”
As the day winds down and comes to a close, Hintz has developed habits to help her separate work from life. “I physically close the door to my office at the end of the day and during the weekend, which creates a nice mental barrier: I am no longer doing work,” she says. She’s also turned off Slack notifications on her phone, and has instead given her cell phone number to close colleagues so that they can reach her after hours in the event of an emergency — a rare occurrence.
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“That all just creates a better balance for me, even though I’m always happy to help and troubleshoot,” she says. “But I have found that it is very, very, very rare that anything at work is actually on fire, so to speak.”
Still, the nature of her job and life means that nighttime work does, on occasion, have to take place. “There are still deadlines, and that means I have to work sometimes when the baby’s asleep,” she says. “But I still lean on those boundaries to achieve that balance.”
