3 Tips for Working at Home with Young Children
Working from home comes with a number of advantages, but it isn’t always easy if you have a baby or toddler in the house. More people than ever are working at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, and keeping your work-life balance in check can be surprisingly complicated when you’re working out of a home office.
In this article, we’ll cover three tips for taking care of your baby or toddler while managing a job and maintaining a decent work-life balance. While that might sound impossible at first, you can care for a child of any age while working at home.
1. Share Responsibility with a Partner
Multitasking is sometimes inevitable when you’re working from home with children, but trying to focus on two things at a time often results in doing them both poorly.
In order to stay productive, you’ll need to set aside some time where you can prioritize work without being distracted by your child or children. This may mean working in unconventional hours or slightly adjusting your child’s routine to be more congruent with your work schedule.
If you and your partner (or roommate or family member) are both working from home, consider switching off so that both of you can get time to focus. Use that interval to make progress on complicated or urgent tasks while leaving low-impact work for your multitasking time.
2. Wear Work Clothes
Working in pajamas may have sounded fun for the first few weeks of the pandemic, but people often find it easier to separate their work and home lives when they dress up for work.
When you’re done for the day, change back into something cozy. Try to avoid checking emails or handling any other work-related tasks after you’ve “clocked out.”
3. Give Yourself a Workspace
Occasionally people can get things done on the couch or even in bed, but most often you will get more done if you have a separate work zone. Many of us don’t have a dedicated home office, but you may have trouble focusing if you don’t set up a separate workspace.
Like wearing work clothes, this will help you mentally separate work time from personal time. It will also give you the opportunity to create a distraction-free space where you can give work your undivided attention.
You can include a space nearby to keep young babies occupied, safe, and happy. Add favorite toys, gear like swings, and a few snacks. Having the right space for both you and little ones will set you up for success.
