When leaving my job to set up my growing business I never really thought about the impact that working from home would have on me, my family and my business.
For over a year I had got used to working around my part time job. Covering emails and so forth on bus journeys to and from work. Writing blog posts on a phone during lunch breaks and writing plans and meeting deadlines in the evenings.
That 18 months of having two jobs impacted on family life a fair bit. My husband losing his wife for many hours at a time.
Working from home sounds great doesn’t it? That is until it is your only place of work. Organisation becomes paramount. Time with family more precious. Yet it is so easy for work to overspill and create a negative impact of your life.
Each growth of my business has had an impact on the balance and I can see Fizz getting unsettled at home. Clingy at nursery drop off, telling me to put down the ipad. Work spills into home life and vice versa. It is a difficult balance to get right and take a lot of work to maintain a balance that works for home and the home office.
Working from home comes with other difficulties – One thing that really annoys me is that because I work from home it implies somehow that I can be more flexible or that I am a housewife playing at ‘working’. In fact it needs more strategic planning that I had ever imagined. Working from home is tough. It wasn’t until last month that I decided to outsource a chunk of work and set boundaries on working time. My daughter Fizz is in nursery 3 mornings a week, I run my daily task list on an app that alerts me to the next job and keep my head down until it is done.
I found at first that it is so easy to get distracted to do a load of clothes washing, some housework or catching up on whatever series fix I need to have (I often have Buffy, Angel or some 90′s series on the TV planner). But if I don’t get the work done…well an angsty mama also means an angsty child and husband. It is no good for anyone’s relationship.
Do you work from home? How do you set up your day and do you manage a good work/life balance?
About Chelle
Chelle, mum of 1 gorgeous redhead, lives by the seaside. All of Chelle's family are redheads apart from her. She's a little jealous.
Funnily enough I’ve just blogged on this too. That combined with the whole mumpreneur thing. We’ve had to get an office for at least part of the week due to my inability to switch off/need to be ‘involved’ if I’m in the house when the kids are….
I totally agree regarding the challenges and difficulties – juggling all those balls and getting the right balance is a huge challenge to me too.
“Going” to work is so much easier as your hours and roles are defined.
Working from home everyine expects you to be everything at once.
I have just set myself a timetable of when to be mum and when to be “at work’. Hopefully I can stick to it and it will make all our lives easier.
http://www.ablissfullife.co.uk/2012/10/scheduling.html
Great post. It does change the nature of ‘home’ when you’re in it working all the time. And it is difficult to challenge people’s views that you just drift about all day making coffee – especially if you’re a mum too! When in fact it’s far harder than working in an office away from the distractions.
I found disciplining myself to reach targets, then looking forward to treats for achievements helped. I had our children at home full time home educating which presented a double challenge! But rather than always separating work and home life, I tried instead to see it all as an integrated lifestyle – a way of living productively and lovingly. A good example for the kids too as this day an age they will need to adapt to different working lives.