No matter how much you keep on top of everything, the balance won’t always tip in your favour. You may have everything planned down to a tee, with your checklist, schedule and working day set in stone, but sometimes, learning to balance both areas of work and being a parent can be the most overwhelming thing in our lives. We feel the pressures of having to be a great parent and being 110% professional all of the time. What does it really take to get the balance right?
Flexibility in Your Working Life
We still think that there should be no such thing as flexibility when it comes to working, but the reality is that even if we didn’t have kids, we should still demand it. When we are working with external stakeholders, when this is a digital agency or SEO company, you always feel we need to work around them. We always think that having kids is going to be to our detriment. But this means that if you are working with people that do not understand your predicament, ask yourself if it is worth working with them in the first place? Flexibility in your working life is something that you should demand of yourself, which means you’ve got to build your structure and stick to it.
Learning How to Do Things in Advance
Another way to make things easier on yourself is by learning how to prepare. The working week can be a nightmare, and we can be on the go from the minute our children wake up through to the time they go to sleep, and we’ve got to fit in the small matter of working at the same time! This means we’ve got to learn how to make things easier by doing certain tasks in advance. When we have a plan in place, we can prepare our minds and bodies better. As exhausting as it is to make a meal plan, it is a great way to make the most of family dinner times and can be the best way to reheat frozen meals you’ve cooked previously. You don’t want to add to your stress by thinking about what to eat after a busy day.
Limit Your Post-Work and Post-School Duties
If we are constantly running around dropping our kids off at extracurricular activities, and thinking that we need to maintain an active social life in order to feel the benefits, we could just be doing too much. It’s important to give our children the best start in life and expand their skills, but this can result in very busy schedules. Look at the things that are essential, things that would be nice to do, and the things that are not necessary, and remove the latter two. Should take your time during the week. And once you’ve decided on this, you’ve got weekends to actually spend proper time as a family.
It is not an easy thing to balance work and parenting and everybody’s got their own stresses. If we are to be effective in both, we’ve got to limit our stress, this means having that swift combination of being flexible, preparing things in advance, but also limiting the things in your life that are not essential.