When you have young kids at home but you have to work to make a living, it’s hard to find balance. If you ask working mothers all over the world what’s the one area they struggle with the most, they’ll more than likely answer “balancing mother life and work”. This is because it’s not easy to do! The thing is that when it comes to balancing work and parenthood, it may be more about scheduling than it is balancing.
Today we’re going to show you how you can adjust your life to feel more balanced between family time and work. This will allow you to enjoy the best of both worlds, without feeling guilty or giving up time with work and family.
If you work from home or outside of the home, doesn’t matter! These tips are going to help you learn simple ways to adjust your current busy, on-the-go lifestyle so that you’re better able to meet the needs of your kids, work, and self!
Be Adaptable
Let’s face it, being a parent is all about learning to adapt to new situations. These kids can have you running in circles just with the simple act of being children. This means you’ll need to learn how to be more adaptable with your work and life schedule. Consider being more open-minded to the fact that every day may look and run differently than the day before. Be okay with having to adapt things on a case-by-case or day-by-day basis with work and kids.
Make a Schedule
While being adaptable is important, you’ll also need to have some sort of schedule. You can’t go all willy nilly on your boss and flake out of work because your kids want some time with you. You must make a schedule that will help you balance mother life and work. Review how many hours per week you must work and what hours you need to be at your job. Then you’ll take some time in between work and adult responsibilities to spend some quality time with your kids.
Create a Work Space
This is a very important part of being a work from home mom! If you work from home, then please create a work space. This should be an area that you can set boundaries up around. Maybe a home office space, or just a corner in a specific room. The location doesn’t matter as much as the privacy you can have during your working hours. Have a space that you strictly use to get work hours done, and don’t visit this area when you’re off the clock!
Set Auto-Replies
Now that you have everything else lining up good to balance mother life and work, it’s time to work in some automation. Technology is a wonderful tool that you can use to respond to people, without interrupting your family time. Create auto-replies for emails and text messages so that you’re better able to stay focused on kids during their time and work when it’s work time. This will help you work on the next step of balancing mother life and work.
Set Boundaries
Last, but surely not least, boundaries are very important for work and life balancing! You’ll want to set boundaries with your kids so that they don’t call you while you’re at the office or interrupt you when you’re working from home. Make sure everyone in the family, and extended family, knows when your work hours are so that you can keep a strict ‘work schedule’ and ‘family schedule’ in place. This will help you remain productive while working and more mindful while you’re spending time with your family. Also, setting boundaries minimizing stress!
There you have it, some easy steps to take if you truly want to start balancing mother life and work. We all need to have a good financial standing to be good parents so learning how to balance your two necessary duties in life with our simple tips to balance mother life and work will surely help you achieve all that you need to this year.