How Mindset Adjustments Can Affect Work-From-Home Parents

Earlier this week, we talked about the struggles of working from home. But if you are a parent and you work from home (raises hand) that’s a whole other ball game. It’s a situation that can seem, on some days, to feel like a privilege, and on others to feel like pure torture. Just parenting on its own can be stressful, after all, but having a career to juggle on top of that (and without a distanced space to escape to) means a lot of hard work of many, multiple kinds. One of the biggest helps for us was to adjust our perspective for what a successful day would look like while working from home. Because the truth is, it just isn’t going to look the same as a successful day when working from out of the home. Here are some things we did to get our head in the right space where we could be productive while still being present - for the most part.

Keep The Stress Low

In whatever ways you can, you should aim to keep the stress as low as possible. Being stressed means that you are going to struggle to keep your child happy and your work complete, so both aspects of your life are going to struggle if you are not careful. Find anything you can to keep the stress at bay, and you will also be less likely to make simple mistakes. If you are stressed out however, you might make errors such as giving them the wrong formula - check out these baby formula lawsuit lawyers for information on why that can be deadly. Managing your stress really could be life-or-death.

Prepare For Interruptions

Just expect interruptions to happen frequently, because they will. This is true no matter what age the kids are, although the older they are the less of an issue it might be (maybe). If you are thinking that your home office will be distraction-free, then you’ll probably be as disappointed as we were initially. But if you are at least psychologically prepared, however, you are going to be a lot more likely to be able to keep your wits about you, which is clearly crucial for everyone’s sake. Just make sure to be realistic and to expect such interruptions to occur, otherwise you might struggle when they do actually happen.

Schedule Everything

Having a schedule really is a lifesaver, and you need to make sure that you are doing all you can to keep this in mind. As long as you have a schedule that includes everything, you are going to find that it is so much easier to be able to keep on top of everything, so this is something you should think about. For many parents who work from home, drawing up a schedule is one of the most exciting and useful things they do each day, so this is something that you will want to consider if you are not yet doing it yourself. You’ll find that it helps in keeping yourself on track with both your parenting and your work.

Ask For Help

It’s not a fail if you need some help. And when you do, it’s important that you ask for it. If you don’t ask for it, you are going to struggle to get it, and before you know it, everything might seem like too much. As long as you are asking for help, however, you are going to find it’s a lot easier and simpler to be able to carry on. That help can come in many forms - it can be a friend coming to help you, for instance, or it might even be that you get help from the children with housework and so on. Whatever form it takes, however, it’s important that you are getting it when you need it.

And last tip - remember when they said sleep when the baby sleeps? Yea, we’re still laughing too. For us, nap time is crucial to catch up on some work. We like to use this period (as well as a chunk in the morning) for more of the deep work or deep focus type work, as there are more likely fewer interruptions. Of course, taking a break is also pretty important, so we like to balance ‘deep rest’ with ‘deep work’ whenever the schedule allows…