For those of us who work from home, it’s essential to balance both work and home life. But if you are a new work-at-home parent, it may seem like quite a challenge to take care of your family while focusing on your home-based job or business simultaneously.
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has forced thousands of parents to work remotely. If you’ve never worked at home before, you need to learn some essential tips to create a more productive workspace inside your home.
That way, it will be easier to care of your children and maintain the productivity of your job or business at home.
Below are the top 5 easy hacks for work-at-home parents to balance work and home life.
Create A Daily Schedule
You may feel tempted to get out of bed every morning, walk to your home office in your pajamas, and get to work without any structured plan. However, it is much better to create a daily schedule of your hourly activities for each day of the week.
For example, you could write down when you wake up, eat breakfast, get your kids ready for school, and work in your home office. Time management is an important skill to learn if you want to succeed at working from home.
Otherwise, you will drive yourself crazy managing your kids and work together.
Create a Home Office That is Free of Distractions
A home office is where you will do most of your work from home. It is the place where you will have your computer, printer, business phone, webcam, filing cabinets, paperwork, and other essential business equipment and accessories.
The biggest challenge of working in a home office is avoiding distractions, such as noises coming from the nearby rooms in your home. Some people create home offices in sections of their living room or bedroom.
But if you have kids nearby, it won’t be easy to get any work done if they are noisy.
Try to find a location in your home that is far away from visual and auditory distractions. For instance, some parents will build a shed or install a small trailer in their backyard and turn that into a home office.
Another idea is turning your garage into a home office too. And if you need to monitor your children in the house, you could set up webcams that stream live video to computer screens in your office.
Use Daycare or Babysitter Services
Working at home is an actual job. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. It is difficult to be a perfect parent who can babysit their kids and work a full-time job from home.
Therefore, consider using a daycare service or babysitter to watch your kids as you work. If you have a parent, friend or close family member who wouldn’t mind watching your kids, you could ask them to help you out too.
You will also be supporting other people that work from home. There are websites like Care.com and Sitter City where you can search for sitters.
Take Care of Your Health
It can be easy to neglect your health as you work from home. Since you will sit down for most of the day, it won’t give your body a chance to move around much. For this reason, you should add an exercise routine to your daily schedule of activities.
The exercise routine doesn’t have to be anything extensive. You could simply walk around the block for 30 minutes per day or do a home cardio workout by following along with your favorite fitness guru on YouTube.
Also, keep nutritious foods in the house only! Throw out all the processed foods in your cupboards. This will prevent you from developing an urge to eat junk foods that ruin your physical health.
Outsource Your Work
Don’t feel pressured to accomplish too many tasks by yourself. Many new entrepreneurs fall into this trap, and it becomes overwhelming for them.
One great thing about working at home is that you can outsource your work to freelancers on the internet. There are plenty of reputable freelancer websites like Fiverr.com and UpWork.com, where you can hire virtual assistants on a contractual basis.
That means you don’t have to hire them as employees and pay them benefits. You just have to pay them for every job they complete for you.
Outsourcing can reduce the number of tasks you need to get done per day. Then you can devote more time to your family and other personal responsibilities in your life.
