Work from home may sound cool and exciting, but it could become complicated if you have to work from home when you have young kids. It is quite challenging to manage the daily task along with your kids. If you believe that kids will not disturb you, then your myth can stay for one hour. But it’s not a heavy task or an impossible thing. Smart management, techniques, and ideas can help you with this.
If you want to be the most productive employee of your office when you are working from home and want to make good relations with your children, then definitely read this whole.
A Fixed Schedule
It is the most crucial thing, create a proper schedule for yourself. You should have a set defined off schedule for you, your work time, and your children. Schedule out breakfast, lunch, playtime, activities, movie time, screen time, etc. and if possible, write it and stick it at a place where it is most visible. It may be boring, but your kids can’t be going free-for-all with no schedule or no plan. If you don’t have a schedule for you or your kids, nothing will happen, and you will be incredibly frustrated. You can make out what you are going to do for work during each one of those time blocks.
If you have a schedule of things that you are doing, it’s going to help make things much smoother. This plan is just to make you know what to expect so that you are not frustrated with random things.
Another significant advantage of scheduling with kids is that they learn very fast. If you tell them that from this time you will do this thing every day with your kids, they will automatically ask for the same next day. As time will spend further, you can multitask. Further, your kids will do the same activity without your help, and then you can utilize that time to complete your task.
Create Your Own Home Office Workspace
In the universal language, the home office area means a private place in your home, where you can carry out your work efficiently just like you do at the office.
At your offices, you can efficiently work because there is no one to disturb or interrupt you. You can put your files and documents anywhere on the desk of your office. But this is not the case at home. If you are working from home, there may be some situations where you need to be strict on your family members and tell them not to disturb until its too urgent. Having kids at home and working around them is a huge task because they may interrupt you.
For avoiding all these things, one must have his/her own home-office or your private workspace, where kids must not be allowed to enter as there are many essential documents of yours. Because maybe for them, those documents are just pieces of paper that they can use to show their creativity.
By creating a private workspace, you can easily protect your documents, files, and computers from your kids. Without a permanent workspace, you will spend time finding a proper place and preparing it, to work in your home. Therefore, a private workspace will save your time by skipping the workspace formation time.
Wear headphones so that sound must not interrupt you, as it may break your work concentration. Therefore, Work from home is not difficult until you have your own private space for carrying out your work at a smooth pace.
Wake up to Take up
If you wake up early in the morning, this will provide you with some healthy hours in which you can concentrate on your work. Generally, young kids sleep till 7 or 8. If you wake up at 5 am or 5:30, you will get 2 hours easily. And when your kids wake up, then you can do breakfast, etc.
Don’t Gamble With the Afternoon Nap
Maybe the early morning wake-up plan doesn’t stick with you, so you thought for an afternoon 1 to 3 pm plan. Mostly, kids will be napping, and you can get more work during that time, but there is a strong probability that your kids will wake up in the afternoon, which may affect you a lot. You will have to leave your work and handle your kids. So, placing important calls may not work at that time. The perfect time for important meetings, calls, and virtual official get together is when kids are engaged with someone else in your home. They will handle your kids until you complete your important calls or meetings. During an afternoon nap time, you should do a work which is on number two in your priority list because it is also possible that your kids won’t wake up.
“You Do Yours, I Do Mine” Formula
You can do some discontinuous concentration works like emailing, texting, assigning the task to interns, etc. when you engage your kids in studies, indoor games, video games, etc. When your kids will do or play something at the same time, you can send emails, etc. This formula is perfect for applying when your kids wake up from a long sleep. You can also use this formula when your kids are eating and going to sleep.
Exercise
Exercise is the most beneficial thing for your work from home schedule. There are direct and indirect benefits of exercising. The immediate benefit of exercising includes the fit body of yours and your kids. Exercise will reduce your anxiety, and it will make you and your kids fast and flexible. Another direct benefit includes a strong grip over your schedule.
The indirect benefit includes the tiredness of your kids. If your kids do exercise for the ideal time, it will make them tired at the end of the day as they will play a lot during day time; they will sleep earlier, which means more time to invest in your work.
Avoid Multitasking
If you want to be productive, working from home when your kids are around, then you can’t always be switching from doing email, a significant process of checking social media to playing with your kids. That is not going to be a good use of your time, and at the end of the day, you are going to be so frustrated because you didn’t get anything done. So you need to focus on one thing at a time.
Whatsoever be the reason you have just put your phone in the other room turn off the TV, so you can just focus. This will help increase your productivity.
Find Your Kids’ Interests
If you figure out what your kid likes the most, then you can use it as your shield. Let’s suppose your kid loves the puzzles with attractive colors and cartoon characters, then giving the same may provide you with an hour or more when your kid will be engaged in solving that. List the things which your kid likes and put a little creativity of your into it so that it becomes more exciting and time-consuming. You can make your kid do such activities for a while, and you can do other important tasks.
Be Gentle
The situation which you are facing now has never rung your doorbells. So, neither you nor your kids are used-to this crisis. And above all, you are not prepared and don’t even know how to react to it. So, there are obvious reasons that one may lose his/her temper many times. But this is the only time where you need to keep yourself calm and have patience. In this wrong time, it is only your family who is with you, and you must not let them down or feel bad through your behavior.
You need to fight this difficult situation with patience as your armor. In this lockdown, behave nicely with your kids and teach them the virtue of patience.
There are many ways in which one can master patience. One way is to meditate regularly so that small issues might not create chaos in your mind. A study published in a journal NeuroImage, researches and reports that certain regions in the brain of meditators were larger than in a similar control group. Hence the fact is proved that meditation with scheduled and regular exercise increases the concentration power and makes the body more healthy. A healthy body and stress-free mind can manage the work with kids better.
Keep Kids Entertained
Maybe, your work drives you to just think about your work. Perhaps you are busy in completing daily targets. But amidst all these chaos, you forget that the small children are suffering both mentally and physically. Kids get irritated by following the same routine over and over again. In your daily routine, you forget to think about kids who are also a victim of boredom, including you. As they are not allowed to go outside, they miss their daily playing sessions, which affects them physically, and above everything, they are mentally disturbed as their daily routine of going to school is hampered.
To make them recover from all this stuff, you must keep them entertained by playing with them. You can play board or indoor games with them. Playfully teaching them good habits will be the most fruitful. Help them to discover their skills and their true potential, show them those essential but impressive skills which they can use in their daily life. Watch movies with them. Tell them about space and universe, ignite the curiosity and give them related books or encyclopedia. Give them positive vibes amidst all the negativity.
A major profit of their engagement will deliver to you. You will get enough time for your tasks like emailing, drafting, or writing when they are engaged in reading or doing some creative work.
Use Online Support
In your workload, one of the things which are at most risk is the education of your kids. The syllabus for any school or college is designed in such a way that the children may not feel a burden in finishing them, along with they learn a lot of things. In your engagement, the course of your kids may lag. Parents should keep an eye on their kid’s education. Parents must start spending little extra time on their children’s studies as this will give you two pearls in a single shell. Your kids’ syllabus will complete, and you will get more time for your work when your kids will be engaged in studying. By making, explaining, and sharing a timetable with your children, you can make it possible.
There are many sites like
- BYJU
- topper.com
- Unacademy
And many more, where your kids can get quality education, test your kid’s performance weekly or monthly by providing test papers and rewarding them.
Studies will engage your kid better than anything, and by the time they are engaged, you will get time to work efficiently.
Setting up standards for yourself and your work will always benefit you in some or the other way.
But setting them while working from home is a challenging task as while you are at home, you only know how to relax and chill as the house is a place to do so. But while you have to work from home, this flexibility and laziness will not allow you to work properly and meet your daily targets.
So, to avoid any such kind of negligence towards work, one must set basic rules which must be followed not only by the person himself but also by the entire family, including kids. Before expecting the kids to follow those rules, you must explain them nicely, tell them the importance of those rules, and convince them this is what people call parenting. There are no specific rules, as they may vary from person to person and depend on their work. But the one most common thing is setting up a timetable, a daily routine which will also include meeting daily targets.
Be Realistic
Not all kids are perfect to understand your work and the rules regarding it. After all, they are kids they may not understand sometimes. It’s not at all an issue. Sometimes it is okay that your video calls get interrupted, it’s okay because you must be realistic and ignore such issues. What you need to do is talk about your situation with your colleagues. They will understand it. It may be possible that they are also suffering from the same issues. Instead of hiding and telling some other excuse, being realistic is a better option.
Accept Help From Elders
Now is the time to take help from your relatives. In this digital era, ask any of your relatives or their elder children to take charge of your kids. You can make a virtual call with them in which they may talk or teach your kids but engage them for a while. Let older children help younger ones. You can also enlist high-school-aged cousins, neighbors, or responsible ones to assist with homework through video conferencing.
Find Online Help
Another option for which you can opt to is online tutors or baby sitters. You can also check for online resources offered by your local library. If you can afford it, consider hiring an online tutor for just an hour or two per day. That’s an hour or two that kids will study or engaged with virtual babysitters will provide access to the workspace.
Accept Help From Children
If you want to a little help in your work and at the same time, you also want to engage your kids then combine both sentences. You will get a hint of possible support, which is, “your kids helping you in your work.” Assign some small tasks to your kids, which they can do. It will engage your kids and possibly help you a little. But this idea will surely give you some more time to work with a concentrated mind.
When working from home, you just need to realize that your working schedule is not nine to five, and you can’t just sit on a computer or do whatever you are doing for 8 hours and assume that the kids are okay. You can’t think that when you work, your kids will not interrupt you. They are going to come all time. What you have to do is to manage both wisely. Make a schedule, put priorities, escape from problems, engage your kids in activities, spend time with them too, to work productively.
You can do exercise with your kids, and you can play with them by sending some informal emails. Avoid making excuses with your team. Tell them about your situation in a funny way, if needed. Ask help from your relatives to come to the virtual platform and teach them or play with them. You can also hire an online tutor or babysitter. Share your plans with your kids. Be realistic and realize the reality that everything cant goes perfect. Set a daily task, deadlines, limits, etc. Be gentle with your kids and ask them to cooperate with you.
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