Guest Writer: Raymond Chiu
Working from home may seem like a blessing at first, but as a parent, it looks like it brings about new challenges to how you work and how you manage your household. It can be a tough balancing act to manage, so there’s no shame in needing some help. That’s why these tips below are here to help work-from-home parents find some more control over their situations.
Check the tips out!
Create a Flexible Routine
When you’re working from home, it’s challenging to stick to a rigid schedule when there are too many variables at play. However, this doesn’t mean that you should live your life on the wild side. You still need to have some semblance of a structure regarding how you manage your workdays. Otherwise, you won’t be productive.
Therefore, you should create a daily schedule around your work that leaves enough room for extra things you might need to do throughout the day.
One way to make this effective is by chopping up work tasks into small tasks to not need hours straight of concentration. Chopping up your major work tasks will make it easier for you to understand how to work it out while taking care of things at home.
Experiment With Time Blocks
Sometimes, there are sections of work that you can’t get away with chopping up. If there are work tasks that you can’t chop up into smaller time sections, you can instead have time blocks in place. Time blocks aren’t strict hour-by-hour schedules. Instead, they’re blocks of hours where you focus on general work activities.
For example, you can create time blocks to communicate with people through emails, calls, and messages during the mornings. After that time block, you can have a different time block for an additional general task theme.
This type of routine is a lot more flexible than creating a daily schedule.
Add Non-Negotiables To Your Calendar.
When you’re working from home, for some reason, people think that you’re free to do anything at any time because you’re not in the office anyway. However, that’s not true at all, and you shouldn’t make people think that of you.
You have to set boundaries by ensuring that you block off times when you’re not unavailable and make it an almost non-negotiable fact. If you don’t start thinking about creating non-negotiable unavailabilities in your calendar, people are going to believe you’re at their beck and call subconsciously.
Give yourself a chance to build up boundaries so that you don’t stress yourself out from being available to people all the time.
Separate Your Roles
As a work-from-home parent, you’re juggling many things at once, all in the comfort of your home. However, if you don’t want to run yourself ragged and burn yourself out, you must learn to delegate roles within the household.
If your partner is doing more of the housework than you are while they’re working, you should also take an equal load away from them as someone who’s a part of the household. If you’re the one doing a lot of the work, you should have a relationship with your partner that lets you be comfortable enough to split the housework with them.
However, it isn’t only the parents that should be managing the household in some way.
For example, cleaning your home should not only fall under the parents’ responsibility. According to Maid Sailors’ commercial cleaning service New York, cleaning tasks are a lot easier to do when everyone else is in on it. Plus, the build-up of dirt in the house will be fewer since more people are responsible for its cleanliness.
Plan What You Can In Advance
As much as possible, you want to prepare yourself for each day you’re working from home. Although the environment that comes with working from home often makes you want to take it slow, you’ll start regretting it when you find yourself having to play catch-up with your work all the time. That’s why it’s better to have a plan.
Every week schedule which major work tasks you need to do and on which day. This schedule should help give you a general idea of what to do during these specific days. That way, you’re not idling away when you forget what tasks need doing.
Having a schedule will bring some semblance of a structure back into your work life, so it’s going to be much easier to work productively and efficiently.
Cut Yourself Some Slack
Working from home and being a responsible and caring parent is a tough thing to do. You want to do an excellent job at both without having to spread yourself thin, but that’s a tough job on the best of days. Thus, it would help if you didn’t stress yourself out about having to be perfect all the time.
Cut yourself some slack and be more understanding of your situation. There are going to be days when the balance is off. You spend more of your time working than being a good parent or vice versa. That doesn’t make you a bad worker or a bad parent. For the sake of your sanity, give yourself a bit of compassion and understanding while you try to navigate this new life.
When you’re a work-from-home parent, there are hurdles you have to get over before you manage to find your groove. With these tips, it should be a lot easier for you to figure out how you want to go about your work-from-home situation while still managing to be a good parent.
Taking the time to plan it out will make it feel more manageable and less overwhelming, so try these tips out, for your sake.
