How have you managed to work from home – with kids – during the pandemic?
To help your family manage working from home during the pandemic, we asked work from home parents this question for their best advice. From changing up your work schedule to leveraging your childcare resources, there are several tips that may help you manage working from home with children.
Here are 12 ways families are managing working from home:
- Change Your Work Schedule
- Out of Sight, Out of Mind
- Organize Each Day’s Schedule the Night Before
- Monitor Screen Time
- Tutors and Housekeepers
- Set Up a Home Office
- Avoid Interruptions With Shared Home Calendar
- Shorter Concentration Span but Longer Hours
- Start the Work Day Earlier
- Live in the Moment
- Longer Deadlines For More Flexibility
- Leverage Your Childcare Resources
Change Your Work Schedule
When the pandemic hit I just started my own business, and I had just become a mom. It has been one of the most challenging periods of time in my life, but I found my way to cope with it, raise my daughter and earn a good income at the same time. One of the things I changed quite rapidly was the idea I needed to stick to regular working hours. I worked when my child was sleeping, and when her dad came home from work. It wasn’t easy, I have to admit, but we managed to do it this way.
Angie Makljenovic, She Can Blog
Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Managing the separation between work and home is as big of a challenge as it comes, especially with kids who don’t see a divide. The best strategy is to be out of sight, and out of mind for kids – when possible. Closing the door can sometimes send the message to kids that dad is unavailable. When that doesn’t work, communicate like kids do and post a sign (handwritten with crayons for emphasis) on the door that reads, “Dad only. Kids not allowed.” By staying out of sight, out of mind, parents can sometimes manage to get some work done without sacrificing sanity or copping out with iPads.
Brett Farmiloe, Terkel
Organize Each Day’s Schedule the Night Before
It all comes down to time management and proper planning. What challenges working from home with kids has brought is a balancing act between being a parent and an employee. To be able to do both well takes proper planning for each day in advance. Post pandemic working from home with kids means no two days are the same. Kids have school, appointments, extracurriculars, etc. that they need to attend while you’re still working full time. This means you will need to organize your day around all of your responsibilities. I’m a single parent, so I organize my day around being a full-time dad when my daughter is not in school. I focus on my work during the time she is in school and late at night while she sleeps. This allows me to spend more quality time with my daughter without multi-tasking work at the same time. I find this balance to be successful in allowing me to be the type of parent I want to be while still achieving great success in my career.
Mark Smith, University of Advancing Technology
Monitor Screen Time
We planned child screen time around our meetings. This way, the children during meetings are able to be occupied for the blocks of time that we were in meetings. It helps regulate how many hours they were on a screen and helped maintain focus during important meetings for work.
Olivia Young, Conscious Items
Tutors and Housekeepers
I absolutely do not want to sound pretentious with this answer, but tutors and housekeepers have really helped throughout the pandemic. I live with my girlfriend and her son, and when schools went remote-only during the pandemic, he struggled with the transition to virtual school.
At first, we tried helping him ourselves and balancing our workday around supporting him. However, when it became clear that he needed a lot more help than we can give we hired a tutor who could walk him through various topics twice a week. We also hired a housekeeper who came three times a week to take the household tasks off of our shoulders so we could focus on our work and grow my company to be able to afford the new expenses.
Wesley Jacobs, Apollo Medical Travel
Set Up a Home Office
When the pandemic first hit I went from working maybe one day a month from home, to working entirely from home. I have two young school-age children. It was quite difficult at first as my workspace consisted of having my laptop connected to a spare monitor on a table in my living room.
The best thing I ever did to become more productive with working at home is buying a work desk and designating one room in my house as my home office. I’ve instructed my children to not disturb me anytime I am in my home office room unless it is is an emergency. This has worked well for me and has allowed me to become much more productive while working from home. Fortunately, starting in 2021 I began working back at my office, but I still work from home about once a week. Working from home in my home office has been a game-changer.
Tate Meagher, Meagher Law Office, PLLC
Avoid Interruptions With Shared Home Calendar
Once you have scheduled your work meetings for the week, add them to a calendar that is shared with everyone in your home so they know not to interrupt you during your meetings. When working from home, kids and spouses can often cause distractions, interruptions, and loud noises during your business meetings which can be frustrating and make you look unprofessional. A shared calendar will remind others in your home that you are not to be disturbed. This will give you peace of mind when going into a big meeting and allow you to focus on work without worrying that someone will walk into your home office. Not to mention this will give your kids some quiet time to work on homework or other school projects without any distractions.
Jason Brandt, Podopolo
Shorter Concentration Span but Longer Hours
I’m still mostly working from home, and my kids stay often too when their class is isolated. to say the truth, working with kids at home is very difficult. Mine are still rather young and I need to prepare food and help them set up their laptops for class and school. I end up having to interrupt my workflow twice an hour and sometimes more. It essentially means that I and my partner are unable to work ‘only’ 8 hours, we have to spend some 10 or 11 juggling work with our kids.
Bartek Trzmielewski, PhotoAiD
Start the Workday Earlier
It’s best to start the workday a few hours earlier in the morning before the work and school day becomes hectic. Any urgent or time-consuming tasks can be finished first thing in the morning before the rest of the household starts their day. The tasks that require minimal focus such as emails, phone calls, or daily projects can be carried out during the rest of the day. The additional time you allow yourself to hone in on the more important assignments is essential to a work/school balance.
Lance Herrington, UNICO Nutrition
Live in the Moment
Working from home with kids can seem impossible for hybrid and at-home employees but striking the right balance between a routine and living in the moment can be highly effective. Instead of stressing if enough work is being done or attention is given to your children, opt for maintaining a regular workday while at the same time taking advantage of the moments when your children crave your attention the most. When working parents prioritize individual moments, then it allows for the rest of the day to be more productive and delivers more opportunities for creativity.
Adam Shlomi, SoFlo Tutors
Longer Deadlines For More Flexibility
We are a mission-driven team and we make sure that every employee fits in our culture — and that often means allowing some scheduling flexibility. We try to provide long-range deadlines so that people can coordinate their schedules more easily. Parents take their children to school and others home school. Children’s extracurricular activities differ from little league games to piano lessons, so it would be foolish to expect any sort of 9-to-5 schedule to work for everyone. Sometimes the heart of a parent’s workday is mid-morning while their children are at school. Sometimes people do most of their work in the evenings while their children are doing their homework. That variation makes daily deadlines difficult, so most tasks are laid out days or weeks in advance so that employees have enough time to work around their family schedules.
Patrick Samy, Span
Leverage Your Childcare Resources
Leverage your resources–if your company offers backup childcare, where a nanny comes to your home at a subsidized rate, utilize this resource on a day filled with meetings. If you have a babysitter, see if they can come for a few hours on a Saturday, which will give you time to catch up on work from earlier in the week. If that is cost-prohibitive, connect with a mom friend and offer to watch each other’s children on a weekend day. Stock the lower shelves of your fridge with snacks your kids can access by themselves. Have a lower kitchen cabinet dedicated to your children, filled with art activities such as water art (painting with water); play-doh; jewelry making; stickers; scratch art, etc.
Crystal King, Amazing Baby
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