What If You’re A Night Owl? Sleep as a Parent and a CEO — Shama Hyder

#219 [REPLAY] — What if you’re a total night owl? For today’s guest, she loves to stay up late. Her best hours of work are often in the wee hours, often way past midnight. “I love sleeping in until 11 am or 12 pm or even later,” she said, and she built a very successful 30-person, award-winning digital strategy organization company this way. Then she had a kid.

Most parenting blogs will tell you that kids are early risers, that you’ll never sleep again, and that you have to become a morning person.

Sure, most kids wake up early. That’s pretty solid in the literature – the majority of kids wake up somewhere between 6 am and 8 am. But what’s not talked about is how the heck to deal with this, and how you can get more sleep, especially if you’re a night owl.

That’s why today’s guest is so interesting—she went against the parenting trends and decided that being a morning person wasn’t going to work for her. She didn’t give up sleep, either, and she kept working into the wee hours of the night.

Shama Hyder is a digital strategist, speaker, and bestselling author. She is the CEO of Zen Media, a global marketing and digital PR firm. She has been named the Zen Master of Marketing by Entrepreneur Magazine and the Millennial Master of the Universe by fastcompany.com. She has been honored at the White House and the United Nations as one of the top 100 young entrepreneurs in the country. She has been named one of the top 25 entrepreneurs by Businessweek, one of the top 30 Under 30 Entrepreneurs by Inc. Magazine, and to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of movers and shakers in 2015.

Listen to hear how Shama Hyder figured out a different way to do the parenting morning, childcare, and run her successful media company—and yes, she kept sleeping in until 11 am most days—because she knew she could make a schedule that would best fit her, rather than trying to force-fit her work and parenting schedule into the 9-to-5 model.

Here’s how she did it.

This episode was originally recorded in July 2020 and published as Episode #163.