Working from home and family: how to find balance?

Work and family are two of the most important areas in every person's life. If everything is good in the professional field, then the relatives are well off and do not need anything. And, on the contrary, when the family gets on, everything goes smoothly at work, because there is motivation, positive energy inside to reach new heights. It is very important that these 2 directions "live" in harmony with each other. And if it's work from home, how can you achieve Zen in both directions? If you approach this issue correctly, everything will work out.

Content:

1. Planning work, household activities and family lifestyle

2. Fixed working hours and work schedule

3. Organization of a workplace at home

4. Using a convenient time tracker is the key to successful work from home

5. How to choose a time tracker for your requests?

Planning work, household activities and family lifestyle

The first thing that every remote employee needs to do is to create their own CONSTANT work schedule that will not get lost. As if you go to the office and there, far from home, distance yourself from what is happening within your own walls.  And only returning back, you begin to deal with household activities and family. It is difficult, but necessary in order to be able to complete all tasks in a day. Otherwise, you may encounter the following problems:

• lack of sleep, due to the fact that you have to work at night when all family members are already asleep and no one will need anything from you;
• headaches, as you have to "vacillate" between things, running here and there, often jumping from one type of activity to another;
• concentration is lost. Then a bright thought appeared, which needed to be written down in a business notebook, but suddenly the children asked to cook something to eat, the dog wanted to take a walk, and the phone made a loud "beep", notifying that a message had arrived. Distracted, and the thought fled, dissolving in space;
• irritability appears. This cannot be avoided if you do not find a way to limit the family and your obligations, even on days when the spouse and children are also at home;
• discord in relations with a loved one and children. This happens when the profession is put in the first place, displacing the family. There is not enough time for walks together, weekend getaways, family dinners, and even attending your child's school activities.

This is why it is so important to establish a routine and stick to it every day. This is a direct way to save time, because tasks will be completed faster and delivered on time, and free minutes will be spent for leisure with family.

Fixed working hours and work schedule

Combining business, responsibilities to management and family is not so difficult if you correctly distribute hours in a day for each of these areas of life. To do everything, you can use the following effective tips:

1. Consistency. You should plan your day according to the following scheme: set a goal, create a system, put it into operation. This is what will become the very key to success in any business, either for a professional activity or a family. First, a working system is created, and after studying and understanding, you can transfer it to other spheres of life, like raising children, solving everyday problems, and others.
2. Take advantage of flexible hours. For example, those who go in for sports can go to the gym during the day, when there are fewer people there, and transfer a certain load, on the contrary, to the morning and afternoon. Then the evening remains for the family.
3. It is not necessary to maintain balance. If earlier it was considered correct to devote more time to activities that were at a low level, today this method is outdated. In this case, what the person did best was not improved, because all the forces were put into other things. Now experts say less is better.
4. It is important to prioritize correctly. It is necessary to expand your space, giving yourself the opportunity not only to perform work duties, but also to be creative, spend time with loved ones, and be alone with yourself. If you prioritize correctly and allocate a certain amount of time for each task, you can find harmony in life.
5. Schedule. If the limiting concept of "discipline" is translated into the concept of "schedule", it will become morally more comfortable to work. It is worth creating to-do lists and dividing them into important and minor ones. It is better to perform the first ones that fill with energy, give strength and confidence. So work will go much faster, and there will be much more time for the family.
6. Get rid of ballast. If there are many tasks scheduled for the day, you can remove minor tasks from this list, such as cooking, and use the home delivery service, etc.
7. Rest and freedom are important. It is necessary to allocate at least 20 minutes per day for yourself: sports, massage, meditation. This will help to save resources, stay happy and not get frustrated with family after a hard day.
8. Learn how to concentrate on current tasks. To follow the advice, you need to allocate a specific time period for each item on the list: preparing for a project - 1 hour, washing dishes - 10 minutes, main work - 3 hours, rest - 40 minutes, correspondence and checking letters - 20 minutes, etc.
9. Negotiations. It is necessary to learn how to negotiate with relatives in order to find mutual understanding. Talk with family members about what time it is convenient for each of them to come home for dinner, or plan a weekend trip to the countryside so everyone knows what to prepare for and does not require much attention from you.
10. The development of psychostability. It is important to develop, improve yourself in each of the areas: to become better as a spouse, parent and employee.

These tips will seem incredibly difficult to somebody, but only until they take root in life. After that, these rules will begin to benefit you by helping you combine work, household and other activities.

Organization of a workplace at home

The good thing in remote work is that you can work at your own pace. If you need to work faster so that you can go to rest with your family early, you can “leave” work early, increasing your rest time. In a real office, this will not work, because there the schedule is standard and you cannot leave your office earlier, for example, at 5 or 6 p.m. And in order to carry out professional tasks easily and the set pace was maintained throughout the entire working period, it is important to create the right atmosphere. So, the task number one here is the competent organization of the workplace. The following recommendations will help to cope with this:

• two desks – to distinguish between work and rest, many remote employees install two computers in the room at once on different desks. They use one for the performance of duties, the second for personal leisure;
• textiles – a soft carpet under your feet, a warm blanket on the armchair, stylish curtains that let in a lot of light into the room, but make it much more comfortable – all this fills the room with warmth, makes it more comfortable;
• good light – if there is little natural light in the office, you can use additional lighting devices. Today blogging circles with backlighting for several modes are in vogue;
• cute accessories and decorations – you can put photos of your relatives on your desk. So, they will always be there. Complement all this with your favorite flowerpot, an aquarium with fish that soothe, a vase of flowers or several at once, but whatever, because there are no rules, you are at home!
• style and interior design of the office – if a creative person is in a gray, dull little room, his productivity decreases and the muse rarely visits him. It is not for nothing that in many well-known corporations like Apple or Google, offices are equipped with either entertainment centers, or relaxation rooms, or coffee zones. This all encourages the employee to take action, inspires. It is necessary to transform the room, create an atmosphere suitable for the type of temperament, type of human activity;
• the presence of upholstered furniture – when you want to relax, it is better that a sofa or an armchair is located a couple of steps away so that you can lie down. After all, if you go to another room to your family, a lot of things will surely arise that urgently need to be sorted out: wash the dishes, make oatmeal for the child, walk the dog, clean the cat's tray, water the flowers and much, much, much more;
•     nothing extra – candies in a vase, your favorite parrot in a cage or a cat that simply cannot be alone, a TV – you don't need all this in your office! It is distracting and makes you waste precious minutes.

And another important point is to organize a workplace in the farthest room of the house, in order to abstract completely from household activities and eternal "want", "is it possible", "I need" from family members.

Using a convenient time tracker is the key to successful work from home

Time trackers for remote work have a lot of advantages, among which it is worth noting a clear understanding of professional tasks, completed projects are immediately noticeable, which increases self-confidence, motivation, cost reduction, both material and time resources, flexible schedule, responsibility solely for their own obligations to the bosses, and not for the whole team, a minimum of accounting work.

In order for planning household activities to be combined with work moments, remote specialists need to use special applications, programs for tracking time, scheduling professional and personal tasks. Platforms for competent allocation of their capabilities are also suitable.

Using a convenient time tracker will allow you to close projects on time, find time for loved ones and save your energy resources. Here are the TOP Best Remote Worker Apps:

1. Toggl is an easy-to-use tool for tracking time spent on work tasks. It can be used in online / offline modes. Even the free version has all the time tracking tools you need.
2. Checkiant is a simple time tracker for tracking working hours and wages. The uniqueness of this time tracker is that by setting the rate per hour of work, on the main screen you will see not only the number of hours worked, but also the amount of money earned.
3. TSheets Intuit is a cloud-based application that can be used to spy on remote company employees. You can perform specific actions depending on the functions of the platform through any device: desktop computer, tablet, laptop, smartphone.
4. Hubstaff allows the remote technician to basically keep track of working hours. Integration with over 30 business applications.
5. TimeCamp is a tool more suitable for self-employed telecommuters. It will help them organize their time, strengthen discipline, that is, to maintain self-control.
6. TMetric is a suitable tracker for remote teams of 2 to 100 people. With its help, you can track the time spent on labor, breaks, each individual project. Additionally, the platform helps to make financial calculations.
7. Clicktime contains a wide range of functions and tools. It allows to keep track of time, expenses from a computer or smartphone.
8. EverHour manages tasks, monitors labor hours, helps to organize the whole day in a quality manner.
9. Harvest is two in one, i.e. tracking and application for sending invoices to clients.
10. RescueTime is for analytics of hours spent directly on work tasks, rest, tracking processes carried out on the monitor.

Among these trackers, you can find a suitable option for any case: a remote worker from a company, a team of remote employees, or a person who works from home and is not tied to any company. They will make much easier combining professional activity and family, because motivation and discipline are significantly increased.

How to choose a time tracker for your requests?

When choosing a time tracker for yourself, you need to focus either on the preferences of the company, if you are not working for yourself, or on your personal needs, provided you are completely autonomous. If we talk about the standard, most important parameters that any time tracker must meet following parameters:

• availability of a function for processing schedules;
• time tracking option;
• reports;
• project management;
• integration.

It is quite possible to achieve harmony in life by successfully combining work with household responsibilities with your family. You just need to organize for yourself a comfortable workplace with a positive, inspiring atmosphere. You should not be distracted by secondary matters as well, you should correctly prioritize, learn to "negotiate" with your family, be able to relax, and most importantly – use useful programs and applications.

See also:

Distance work

Top 15 reasons why we don't have enough time for everything

Procrastination! What’s that in simple terms?

Top 10 self-control skills to defeat procrastination

Top 10 ideas for office organization and effective team management