How to survive working with kids around.
If working from home is new to you, trying to work with kids around can be challenging at first. When I first tried working from home with my son, I felt like I never got anything accomplished on the homefront or work-wise.
One of the best things to do if your kids are little is to set up shop in a child’s bedroom or play area, so you can keep an eye on them. Designate special toys or activities that they only get to use during your work time. If your kids take naps, try to do all calls and high brain power activities during rest/quiet time if possible. Getting a headset with a noise-canceling microphone and mute button is helpful to block out testy children and dogs during calls. If you have older kids and the noise cannot be avoided in the house, try doing calls in your car, garage, closet, or outside.
Time Blocking and Pomodoros
This technique can work even without kids around to increase productivity. When planning out your day, find the best times for activities and block time out and focus on one thing at a time. Pomodoros can help increase productivity as well and can be combined with co-working to add accountability.
Brain Power
While planning out your day with time blocks, make a list of things that need your 100% brain power and only do those activities in the blocks where you can focus 100%. Then make a list of things that you can do with kids around, but don’t need to be fully engaged in using your brain. The last category is the things that you can do without much brain power and might even have the kids help too. This is crucial to allocate the tasks in the appropriate time blocks.
If you own your own business, then you might want to consider hiring your kids to work in the family business. This is a great way to teach responsibility, budgeting, and saving on your taxes. Ask your tax professional how you can set this up.
If keeping up with the kids, the house, and work gets to be too much to keep up with, consider hiring help. To do this effectively, you need to calculate the average amount of income you earn per hour. Then see if you can hire help for less than that amount. If you can, then you will save money hiring help. This can be for household tasks, caregiving, or to help with your business tasks. If you have family or friends nearby, consider having them spend quality time together or if they are distant, have the kids do video calls with them while you work on something needing more focused attention.
I once heard an expert say that kids had two buckets that needed to be filled daily, power and attention. Kids will seek both positive and negative ways if their bucket isn’t full. Spending quality time with your kids on your breaks and downtime will help fill the attention bucket. Visual cues are helpful to minimize interruptions. Make signs or have a signal that lets your family know that you are working and not to be disturbed. Set kids up to be independent during your work time. But food and snacks that they can fix on their own safely. This also helps build independence. Assign age-appropriate tasks they can complete helping with managing the household.
Having a daily routine helps kids know what to expect and gives them a sense of security. They will know the flow of the day without having to ask you constantly. Overall, kids do better with a more structured day. A routine gives a rhythm to the day but doesn’t have to be so rigid that it needs exact times of the day. Set the appointments and activities that have hard dates and times and then let the routine flow around those.
