How do you balance work and home life?
Balancing work and home life is possibly one of the more difficult challenges I face on a daily basis. Although I consider my main role to be a stay at home mom to our children, my husband and I own a business that is ran out of our home. Needless to say, it can be very difficult to find balance between where work ends and home begins.
Here are some of the biggest challenges we face in balancing home life and work life. Plus some of the things we do to mitigate those challenges.
1) Know when to talk about work.
My husband is the worst culprit at not knowing when to stop talking about work. He has barged into the nursery while I have been settling our twins to sleep to try and discuss work with me. I have to shush him and tell him to send the information to me in a text, so he doesn’t wake up the babies.
I have the opposite problem. I get so absorbed into my role as “mom” that I lose track of time and start falling behind on my tasks. so it is important for me to review my tasks every morning and determine which two things are the most important to accomplish. I try and get those done as early in the day as possible, and then the rest I can do if I have time.
2) Maintain a predictable schedule.
This is especially difficult with three children under three. Explaining to a two month old why they have to wait one minute for me to finish sending an email is not effective, in my experience.
However, we can create a general schedule to follow. For example, since I am the primarya caregiver for our children, I work once all the kids are napping and then again once they go to bed. My husband works a more normal 9-5 schedule, but always gives me time to take a nap or a bath during a lunch hour. He loves this because he gets to spend time with his family.
3. Create work-free zones in your house.
My husband likes to pace when he talks on the phone. We have an office, but it doesn’t have enough room for his pacing so he ends up subconsciously wandering to other rooms of the house when on the phone. It usually isn’t a huge deal, but then we added a toddler into the equation.
At around 20 months old, my toddler decided she was obsessed with her daddy’s attention. Him talking on the phone was a trigger for her worst tantrums. It got to the point that if my toddler heard his voice at all during nap time, she would start screaming and flailing her body around and any hope of her taking a nap was shattered. So my husband had to start taking his phone calls outside, in the garage, or while driving around. He could not be in the house while he was on the phone.
Figuring out work/life balance is still a work in progress for our family. We have our good days and our off-days but over time, I know we will discover more ways to make this work for us.
3 versus Me 