Most people understand how difficult it can be to balance their work and home lives once they start having children. Somehow it seems that work life or home life is always encroaching on the other and causing problems at work, at home, and many times both. But it doesn’t – and shouldn’t – be like that all the time.
Here are five tips to help with balancing work and home life:
Get into a good routine
One of the most effective ways to help balance work and home is to make a schedule – if you know how much time you have and schedule your work time and your home time you can plan around both and try to get that all-important balance.
Putting your routine in paper will help you work out when you need to schedule work and home events. This will make your life significantly easier and you will know which activities are coming up so you can put the necessary childcare in place, or take time off work to fit in important dates for the children (school plays, PTA meetings etc).
Leave work at work and the kids at home
Balancing home and work can be difficult because it is so easy to take work home. If you really want to balance work and home then you will always leave work at work and keep home a sacred place for your family. If you’re stressed at work and have a bad day, find a mechanism to deal with it so that it doesn’t spoil your mood at home and make you turn into a grump.
Likewise, keep your home life as separate from work as possible. It’s nice to mention funny anecdotes about the kids from time to time, but don’t turn into an office bore who constantly talks about what baby Billy has done every second of the day…you’ll start to irritate your colleagues.
It takes two to tango
Many times work and home responsibilities can become overwhelming because one spouse – usually mum – is handling more of the responsibilities than the other. So, learn to share the responsibilities at home to lessen the load and stress on one person. Also, older children should have some responsibilities as well – it’s good training for their future independence.
Dedicate your weekends to family orientated activities
A great way to keep your home and work separate is to always focus on home activities during weekends – or at least on days off from work if you happen to work on weekends. When you make sure that certain days of the week are home days and other days are work days it makes balancing work and home considerably easier. It gives everyone something to look forward to, a d you can then focus your time properly on your family, which helps to reduce the guilt of working so hard.
Fail to plan, plan to fail!
The best way to balance work and home is to make a plan. All the best tips in the world won’t help you if you don’t make a plan of action and start to do something about your situation.
It might be difficult in the beginning – especially if you’ve never done it before – but if you give it a try and get things going you’ll be surprised how easy you can find a balance.
