Whether you’ve transitioned from an office job to at-home work recently, or you’ve had one of the many online jobs for stay at home moms for some time, you’ve probably discovered that working from home with kids can be a challenge!
There are a lot of benefits to working from home. You can save on childcare costs for younger children, and don’t have to worry about your schedule not working with school hours if your children are older.
But making working from home with kids successful does take a bit of planning! Check out these tips to help you balance work and family successfully.
Getting Paid
Once you’ve found the perfect at-home job and lined up your first few clients, you’ll need to consider how you will be paid. Creating separate invoices for each client or job can be fairly time consuming, which is why using invoice templates from freshbooks.com can be beneficial.
Finding ways of cutting down on the amount of time that invoicing takes you, and using templates that you can quickly edit and send out, means you’ll have more time to focus on work, thereby potentially increasing your income.
If you’re feeling lost, there are plenty of financial professionals dotted around Canada that can help simplify everything. In the United States, you have the option of speaking to an online CPA or tax expert right from your home in Baltimore, Tulsa, Eugene, or anywhere else in the country.
Designating a Workspace
While working from home can offer a lot more freedom than most jobs, it can be difficult to focus with so many distractions around you. Something as simple as working with the television on can seriously harm productivity.
That’s why setting up a home office is so important. Even if you don’t have a whole room to dedicate as a workspace, try to choose a space in your house that has minimal distractions, natural light and a comfortable setup. Keep the area just for working, and teach your kids that they should only disturb you if they absolutely must while you’re in that space.
You may also want to consider investing in a standing desk and comfortable shoe insoles if you want to take it easy on your back and improve your posture while working.
Balancing Work and Family
For almost every work-from-home parent, the biggest challenge of working from home with kids is balance. You may find you end up working for longer overall, simply because you keep putting tasks aside to meet your children’s needs.
Finding tips and tricks that allow you to complete your work while still putting your children first can go a long way towards helping you to remain relatively unstressed.
Consider paying an older child to watch younger siblings for an hour or so, to help you do some uninterrupted work. Spend a day on the weekend meal-planning to eliminate the daily stress of worrying about supper. Or, start setting your morning alarm a half-hour earlier so you can quickly run through daily tasks before the kids are awake.
No matter what tricks you use to maximize your productivity, working from home with kids does take a bit of extra work! So, make sure to give yourself down-time too, even if it’s just stepping outdoors for a few minutes for some fresh air and a stretch.
Working from home isn’t for everybody, but if it’s something that appeals to you, there’s never been a better time to see about making the move to at-home work.
And once you do, you may find that just a little bit of planning and flexibility is all it takes to ensure you can thrive both at your job and as a parent!
These are awesome tips There are a lot of distractions to work at home