Balancing Work and Family

When your home is also your workplace, it may feel like your family is forever in your face – or vice versa. Without the usual partition between your work and family life, it can be difficult to strike a balance. Even if you want to find a way to balance your at-home work with your family, it’s not something that happens overnight. You need to be able to identify your most common distractions and remedy them. Striking that balance is about trying out different strategies and finding out what works for you when it comes to getting done everything you need to do. The following questions can help you to reflect on some of the larger issues that you might be dealing with when working at home.

Do You Need Childcare?

Just because you work from home doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look into childcare. The truth is that when you work from home and your kids are home, you can never completely turn off. Even if your kids are older and more self-sufficient, they are likely to interrupt your work from time to time. Whether or not you need childcare will depending on several factors. Firstly, what are your work conditions? Do you work part-time or full-time? Is all your work done from home or do you go into the office when required? You may find that you need childcare to cover part or all of the time you spend working from home. While this may be limited by your budget, keep in mind that it may be difficult to work from home as much as you’d like to without childcare.

Turning Off

Studies have indicated that one of the things telecommuters struggle with is finishing up at the end of the workday. Working at home differs significantly from working in an office in this way – on a day where it would be unlikely that you’d make the trek back to the office to finish up, you could easily justify an hour or two of work after supper or once the kids are in bed. This can be dangerous, as you will see it become harder and harder to separate your work from your personal life. Creating a schedule for yourself and sticking to it as best you can is the only way to ensure that your work life isn’t taking over the rest of your time. While it may be difficult to justify not working when you’re at home, you owe it to yourself to take a break every now and then.

Multitasking

Multitasking is a great way to tackle both home and work priorities. However, it is important to realize when multitasking when it can help you and when it can hurt you.

Some tasks, such as writing and reading, require your complete and undivided attention, while others, such as talking on the phone, require less. Still others, such as exercising, are a good opportunity for your mind to relax. Combining complex tasks with physical tasks is one way to multitask. For instance, you might talk on the phone while washing dishes or listen to a brief while taking a baby out for a walk. Combining two complex tasks, on the other hand, can often lead to disaster.