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Working From Home
Prevent a war of the worlds with these sanity-saving tips.
Your office phone’s ringing, your home phone’s ringing, deadlines are looming and the kids are arguing about which TV program to watch. What’s a working-from-home mom to do to keep her work life separate from her home life — while keeping both sets of plates spinning?
Define your workday. “Realize you can’t work eight to 10 hours a day, keep the house clean, do the shopping, make playdates and volunteer,” says Carla Alvarez, owner of Legacy Marketing Services, an online development and marketing company. “Determine how much work time you actually have each day,” Alvarez, a mother of three advises. “Get a weekly calendar and fill in all your obligations. Once I did that, I saw that I really only had five hours of uninterrupted time each day.”
Take mini vacations. When you work from a home office, it’s tough to take a week or two off at a time, says Diana Ennen, president of Virtual Word Publishing, an online-marketing and book-promotions company and mother of three. “Plan a Friday-Saturday-Sunday vacation,” Ennen says. “This really helps you feel like you’re not always working.”
Accept that you’ll need child care. Many women think they’ll work while the baby’s napping or while the kids are playing quietly in the next room. In reality, child care is a necessity for proper work conditions. Hiring a babysitter can give you the peace of mind you need to be able to close the office door and get cracking. To save money, Alvarez suggests swapping babysitting hours with another mom who works from home.
Guard your evenings and weekends. True, most work-from-home moms end up getting work done the kids are in bed, but try to take back your evenings and weekends, says Ennen. “It’s so easy to get caught up in working 24/7,” she adds. “However, when you take this time off, you feel so much more energized, and you connect more with your children. I will often work Saturday mornings if I need to and then work again Sunday night. That leaves me with a lot of uninterrupted time not working, and that feels good.”
Enjoy the ride. “No one’s perfect,” says Ennen. “I no longer beat myself up so much. So what if I didn’t do it all today? So what if my house wouldn’t pass a white-glove test? I really enjoy my business and I really enjoy my family. And I feel that as long as I set a good example for my kids and keep my clients happy most of the time, I'm a winner.”
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I love to work from home ,have no job right now ,and its hard to out to look for one at age 55 ,i have two older sisters to take care of and my grandsons needs me right now.