PARENTING IN A WORK FROM HOME SETTING

I am sure that we have all seen the videos on You Tube of TV Interviews getting interrupted by children. If you have children, and you work from home, it is often hard to balance home life and child care.  

Stress, tiredness, pressure, and limited quality time for children, friends, partners, and hobbies, are what working parents suffer from due to the difficulty of balancing children and work. In the modern family where families have been quarantined, the typical way of doing things has changed and is continuously shifting. This change left us no choice but to adapt and get quickly  acclimatised to the new normal that the COVID-19 pandemic imposes on our society. 

Freelancing might seem the perfect fit for parents. After all, a freelance career can be done from home, where you’ll also get to spend more time with your child, but there are also a number of drawbacks. Juggling two things at once is difficult and expecting to be successful at both might be a daydream. To complicate matters, day care centers and schools were told to shut down, however, if you rely on freelancing to make ends meet then you really need to get work done in what little time you may have.

Many work from home parents successfully manage their time while running a business, doing work, and bringing up their child. With the right strategic planning, habit modification, and finding the right tools to help you ace your job, you can do it too.

Here are just some of the way you can successfully combine freelancing and parenting:

  1. Set realistic goals – list down all the tasks you need to accomplish in a day. Make another list of the average number of tasks that you can complete in a day. That way you know your maximum limit, so you do not over stretch yourself. For instead of expecting to get it all done, take satisfaction in each item you complete, and start your list again for the next day. To help you schedule time, you can use TeuxDeux, where you can manage your tasks with a weekly overview, as well as collect future tasks in a “someday bucket.” 
  1. Manage Expectations – before accepting a project, it is important to be transparent to your clients on what you can do and can’t do. Ask your manager what the priorities are, and discuss how tasks will get done. 
  1. Give kids something to do – the kids won’t be napping all day so having them do a task, challenge or arts and craft project  to complete. Get them working, whilst you work.  Bluprint (formerly Craftsy) is one of the more popular craft apps. It features a bunch of classes and tutorials on popular crafts and activities. 

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