Working From Home With Kids
Finding meaningful work-family balance and making it work
Some love working remotely, others can’t imagine working from home. This year many of us were thrown into working out of office expecting to learn to swim along the way. Add a pandemic and kids at home 24/7 and no you can’t get a babysitter, do playdates, or ask your in-laws to help out. It’s just you and your kids and tons of work that can’t wait. How do you handle it, aside from taking irreversible drastic measures, or loosing yourself in a bottle of whiskey at 8am?
Good news, this scenario while realistic, is not so bad for many of us and is totally doable, given right attitude and planning. I’ve been working from home for the most of the past decade, first as a single, then married and last few years as married + kids.
Before going into unique challenges of people who all of a sudden became workers from home, let’s briefly look at different types of remote workers that were becoming popular in their own right in pre-covid19 world.
Digital Nomads
These are adventurers who love being untethered to a single location and want to combine seeing and experiencing the world while working remotely at the same time. There are a number of catered programs that offer 6–12 month packages that include accommodations in picturesque locations with Internet access and likeminded people as your neighbors.
Side note: digital nomad lifestyle is most suitable for singles and couples, can’t imagine doing it with kids, although I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if someone successfully tried that.
Location Independent
A closely related group of remote workers to the one described above are people that identify as ‘location independent’. Usually they are referring to their willingness to relocate anywhere the job takes them at a fairly short notice. This implies having a passport that provides easy entry to many countries with or without a need for an entry visa. This option is also not very child-friendly, although it can be more accommodating for kids for long assignments in one location, usually a year plus.
Expats is another group that is often included as a separate remote worker group, although they can be a bit of everything, leaving their home country semi-permanently mostly for work related reasons.
Remote Workers
This leaves us with a final and largest group of people who are working from home, who are simply called remote workers, although at a current rate the ‘remote’ part of the name might get dropped when it becomes a new normal. Some of us had a few years to prepare for this eventuality, to others it came suddenly. Boom and you are no longer spending hours in traffic listening to personal growth podcasts, instead figuring out how to have multiple video streams going at home at the same time, so you can have a slack call with your team, while one of your kids is having a zoom class and the other is watching YouTube Kids all at the same time.
Singles and couples without kids may not identify with challenges of managing a small home office with little dictators frequently interfering with their work. On the other hand they have their own list of distractions that can take a toll on productivity stealing their attention with new Netflix series, games and everything else aggressively competing for attention while they should be focused on work tasks.
Work from home is not for everyone and if it is harder for you to stay focused without outside supervision that is usually present in the regular office, adjusting to self-supervision may be tough.
Here are a few tips to help you stay focused
- Write a list of top suspects for your attention and think of ways of blocking them out during your normal work hours.
- Turn off all non-work related notifications.
- Designate social media to kitchen area, so you are I. not mixing work with constant social updates and II. you have a good reason to stand up from your desk every so often to stretch your bones, get a new cup of coffee and check your social.
Enter Kids
With kids, if you are not a master of your time, forget about it. Kids hate rules, but rules are helpful and as long as they are consistent and reasonable, kids get used to them and hopefully will not constantly test their boundaries, although ymmv. The younger the kids, the more they want your undivided attention and the more you run away from giving it to them, the more they will find elaborate ways of getting it and in their minds any attention is good attention, like with ads, any ad is a good ad, as long as people talk about it.
Be warned, screen time is not a substitute for a one-on-one with your kid. Placing your child in front of a screen is certainly handy and can act as a ‘mute’ button for awhile giving you uninterrupted work time, this option however should not be overused, or it will no longer provide desired benefits.
So how do you make it work with kids at home?
First of all I have to give gratitude to my wife, who is a big part of making it work. When my dear beloved is at home, she helps with the kids so I can dive into my tasks on slack and trello. When I’m on my own, I give my kids undivided attention, we play, read books, I prepare something to eat, we talk a lot and watch stuff on YouTube Kids. Another thing that helps a lot is taking daily walks. If you live near a park, or have a nice outdoor area at your place, use it, even when it rains. In return for giving them good connection they go do their things allowing me to focus on work in 30–60 minute intervals at a time. In advance of my daily meetings I give them tablets or a craft activity, go to my home office, close the door and have my calls. Rarely they enter the office during my calls and when they do, most of the time it’s fine and when it isn’t, I mute myself and apologize for the noise. Kids are part of life and it can’t always be ‘kids should be seen, but not heard’.
Work is important, but so is family, even more so and as long as we have our priorities in check and know why we do at work what we do, we should be able to balance work duties with family affairs. To help balance things out, here are a few tips in no particular order:
- Update your slack status to reflect your present availability, don’t leave it always on. If you’re online, but don’t want to be disturbed, write a custom status to reflect that, if you’re on a walk with a kid, mark yourself away and add walking with kids emoji🚸.
- Use smartphone as a webcam: if you don’t have a good webcam, no need to invest into buying one, most likely you already have a great camera in your smartphone. Use an app, like DroidCam to connect it to your PC and use it as a webcam in your slack, zoom, or any other video call. The free option is pretty good, can also get a pro version to unlock full functionality, here is an an article on how to set it up.
- Work in a room you can lock. It’s not always possible and I’ve worked both from the living room and a dedicated office, it certainly helps having a place you can close and have some peace and quiet.
- Related to above, make sure to leave the office every 30–60 minutes to stretch your muscles, get a snack and see what’s going on and potentially help out as much as you can before going back to work. This way you send your family a message that they are important to you and even though you’re working, since you’re physically present, make yourself mentally present as well and not just locked in your office space the whole time.
- Backup your power, storage and Internet. Setup a UPS device under your table, plug in your router/modem and PC to it and no longer worry about minor power outages. For storage, there are plenty of online solutions, like: iCloud, Dropbox and Google One that let you sync up all your devices and make it less of a hassle in case something happens to your phone, tablet or PC. Internet, if your main network goes down, make sure you can switch to using your cellular connection as a mobile hotspot, until your main connection is restored.
This was a lengthy article, congrats on making it this far. I’d love to know what are the things that work best for you and what is your ideal work setup?
