Your Survival Guide to Working From Home With Kids
Working from home with kids certainly presents a unique set of challenges, but with enough planning and structure, you can still be productive and focused.
Your Survival Guide to Working From Home With Kids, Working from home, in and of itself, can present a series of challenges: new tech setups, difficulties in keeping focus and maintaining productivity, and communicating with team members, to name a few. When you add kids to the mix, the situation gets even murkier.
As a mom to three boys, who has also run a remote only business for the last 10 years, I know far too well those combined challenges. Here’s how you can make working from home with your little ones as painless and productive as possible:
Make schedules. You’ll need them to survive.
Many of those who work from home without kids describe rolling out of bed in jammies, sitting at a computer, and spending their day without much rhyme or reason for how the day starts and ends. If you’re looking to juggle kids at the same time as work, you need to have a routine and schedule- and stick to it.
Depending on your kids ages, writing out a schedule and putting it on the refrigerator can really help to explain to kids when you are working, and when they can expect to have snacks, lunch, or just a little quality time. If you’ve got younger kids, that schedule might revolve around naps or feeding schedule; for older kids, it may incorporate their own home schooling. Either way, having a plan outlined is key to success- and also means its less likely your kids will interrupt you or you’ll accidentally skip feeding the kids lunch.
Use a “digital babysitter” strategically.
The reality is, what a lot of parents assume is that they can use TV or i-pads as a digital babysitter. Besides the fact that this is often not a good idea for your little ones, it’s also not very effective.
The best approach: limit all kinds of devices apart from when you desperately need your kids to be quiet and fully occupied.
If I’m faced with a sick kid at home, or, in my current situation, am quarantined at home, the kids are basically on a full tech diet apart from when I have scheduled conference calls. That way, I can rely on them being entertained when needed. If you let tech invade the whole day, and it’s not a novelty, it’s harder to delineate time you absolutely cannot be interrupted.
