Many people find it hard to successfully juggle their business and family. Sometimes they fail to handle these two aspects of their lives for objective reasons and some other times they’re just badly organized.
If you make a proper deal with your partner about your goals and properly assign your tasks, it’s possible to become a productive businessperson and a committed parent.
In the next few paragraphs, we’ll discuss how to reach that goal and take the best of both worlds.
Table of Contents
1) Separate work hours from leisure
No matter what you do, it’s recommended to separate work hours and free time.
Now that many workers and executives work from home due to the Covid pandemic, this is not always easy to do.
For starters, isolate the working area from the rest of your home. If both you and your partner work from home, give each other enough physical space and time to handle your business tasks.
Parents and partners whose parents don’t go to the kindergarten aren’t able to work at the same time. If you belong to this group, regularly revise your priorities and deadlines. That way, the partner with close deadlines will be able to complete their tasks while the other one spends more time with kids.
If your kids go to the kindergarten, write down your daily schedule, don’t procrastinate, and finish everything before you pick the kids.
By completing your business tasks on time, you’ll spend more quality time with your family members.
Additional two cents: log off after your work hours and don’t response to emails after a certain time.
2) Set the strict bedtime hours
Parents and children who don’t have regular sleeping routines struggle with their careers and education, respectively.
What’s more, a lack of sleep can ruin relationship between partners. If your kids don’t sleep properly, it will affect all relationships within your family.
Because of that, it’s important to set some strict bedtime rules and stick to them.
For starters, test several bedtime options. Write down how your kids react to each of them and insist on the bedtime that has proved to be the most efficient one. Roughly speaking, toddlers and younger kids should be asleep by 9 pm. That way, they’ll sleep long enough to ensure proper development.
Parents, on the other time, will have enough time to do the chores, run some errands, and get some sleep, as well.
Once you’ve imposed sleeping order on your kids, you can adjust your daily schedule and do some additional work if necessary late at night or early in the morning. Perhaps those additional few hours a week will improve your promotion chances without compromising the time reserved for your family.
3) Distribute duties and responsibilities
Parents pursuing business careers know how important it is for companies to adequately assign tasks to their employees.
The situation is similar in family life, as well. If we imagine that every family is a small business unit, it requires proper distribution of duties to function without any glitches.
For starters, parents need to see who will be responsible for what tasks. If one parent always goes shopping, the other one can take out the garbage and vacuum their home.
Children need to get their share of duties, as well. Toddlers usually like to wipe things and play with water. Let them help you tidy their room or clean the table.
Preschoolers can help you load and unload the dishwasher, do the laundry, and carry out any other activities in your household.
When everyone knows what their roles are, it’s easier to run a home efficiently.
4) Don’t waste time on cooking
Cooking is nice and purposeful, but only when it’s justified in terms of time. If you are a master of cooking and your cooking is just like a pro than it’s okay to cook at home.
But if both parents gave demanding jobs, they won’t have enough time for cooking.
In that case, on some days you can cook and on other occasions, you can order prepared food.
Takeaways have become even more popular during the pandemic crisis. Also, many people started businesses in the catering industry during the pandemic. This has led to a more diverse offer and affordable prices.
All this means that working parents can plan in advance what they’re going to order from what restaurant on what day. It will add to the diversity of meals and healthier nutrition.
Of course, you can prepare meals at home when your workload is lower. It can be an activity for the entire family. On such occasions, sit down with your children, see what food you can make together and enjoy those moments.
5) Ensure backup childcare
You won’t succeed in juggling a career and family without backup childcare. This is something you should consider even if your children go to the nursery or kindergarten. For instance, when your kids are sick or when you want them to stay at home, it’s important to have a childcare professional by your side.
The negative aspect of such additional help is that this nanny or governess could have different educational methods from yours. If so, listen to that person and see what they have to offer. Sometimes experienced governesses bring a new quality to a family where they work. In such situations, even opinionated helicopter parents could learn something from such childcare pros.
If your or your partner’s parents live nearby, include them in your kids’ lives, as well. That way, you’ll have several options in case you need to run to an important meeting or meet a vital deadline at work.
Being a successful businessperson and a committed parent is something you should always work on. Both your business and your kids demand constant presence and improvement. The tips shared above should help you improve your time management and efficiently handle your professional and private obligations.
