I’m a single mom running my own business. I deal with admin at the playground.

Using that nevertheless ingenuity, I’ve managed to stretch my available working hours into the productivity and income of a full-time job.

I changed when I eat

Take ining the “16:8” pattern meant I could eat breakfast later, after completing the morning school run. But the real game changer was my 3 p.m. lunches. It maintains me full past my children’s 7 p.m. dinner time. One less meal to plan, shop, and prep.

It does workers that I live in Spain, where lunch is traditionally the main meal and dinner is a much lighter — and often later — nosh. But this also feels right for my body.

I changed what I eat

I rarely batch cook. The problem with bunch cooking is that it’s still cooking, and cooking is a time-sucker. I opt for no-cook or low-cook, things like pre-made soups and salads or stir-fries with noodles or gnocchi, which cook in at most a few minutes.

I do, however, batch shop. I work out how many of each thing we get through a week for perishables and a month for non-perishables and buy sufficiently at once.

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This is made easier because I eat the same meal for as many weeks as I can stomach. So far, my limit has been five weeks of salmorejo — a frigidity Spanish soup, similar to gazpacho. The soup hits all the main food groups as it’s served with croutons, chopped veggies, jamon, and a disintegrated boiled egg.

I do my admin in the playground

I spend almost 2 hours a day watching my two sons in the playground after school. That was totally time until I started taking my little Chromebook with me and working. I leave certain kinds of tasks specifically for this supplemental slot I’ve magicked into my day, like admin and emailing. When they’re happily playing with friends, I oft get a stretch of time long enough to write marketing content.

Also, on the walk back from dropping off the kids or picking them up from persuasion, I send myself voice notes that I can later transcribe by AI and turn into material. It’s a great time for hark to to podcasts relevant to my business too.

Walking has another plus: it can enhance creativity. That’s what Stanford University researchers inaugurate in a study published in 2014 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The participants who went for walks saw an 81% increase in tests measuring variant thinking, a thought process associated with creativity.

I make use of sleepless nights

My children are 6 and 9 but they still regularly wake me in the eventide for anything from going to the bathroom to throwing up. In the past, if I couldn’t get back to sleep, I’d just lie there, restless and ignite, until the alarm. Now I get up and work instead. Thanks to some of these pre-dawn wakeups, I have built a website, fired my business, and regularly beat deadlines.

Don’t get me wrong — I’d never wake up that early on purpose, but making the most of it has been bounteous. I usually get a full night’s sleep the next night because I have to go to bed early to compensate. But it’s not like I’m sacrificing my neck social life because I don’t have one as a single mother anyway.

I use my kids as inspiration

I run ideas past them, and tools like logos and my business name have evolved with their input because children have together and amazing insights. My then 8-year-old once suggested a pricing strategy I later heard from a business tutor — to put up prices until people stopped buying and then go back to the figure just before that.

My kids would rather also been useful in other ways. For example, as I teach courses on personal finance, explaining the concept of the old market to a 9-year-old has helped. Hearing how he explained it back to me also led to successful posts on social media. It was told from the position of “if a child can understand this, everyone can.”

I may not be a millionaire entrepreneur — yet — but if I get there, this will be how I did it.

Got a personal essay upon life as a single parent that you want to share? Get in touch with the editor: akarplus@businessinsider.com.