Work at Home Tips: How to Separate Job and Family Time

Working at home is a great way to spend more time with your family. The problem is, you have work to do. Kids can be demanding sometimes and for good reason. You are their world. Enjoy it while you can. They'll be teenagers soon. How do you balance work and family when you work at home? You can't leave your job at the office. You can't leave your kids home with a sitter. So how do you draw that line of separation between working at home and being at home?

Set up an office. Even if your job gives you a laptop, don't roam the house with it. Have a place you go to work where everyone knows you're working. Dress for work too, even if you have no clients coming to the house. It puts you in a professional mode. I write for a living. I rarely leave the house during work hours. Yet I still get up and get ready for work each day like I was going to the office. At the end of the day, I get into my comfy clothes. Not only does this separate work from home in your mind, It separates it in your family's mind too. It also helps you stay on track with your work.

Work when others are not at home. Do your job while the kids are in school and the hubby is at work. Give yourself weekends off. There's absolutely no reason you have to work weekends, except in your head. When the kids go on summer vacation, consider hiring a babysitter for a few hours a day so you can work. You don't pay one all year so maybe you can find the money in the budget during the summer.

Treat your work at home job like any other. When you're working, close the office door. Put a sign on it if you have to. Have a set schedule. Post it on the door so everyone knows this is work time, not family time. Take scheduled breaks and lunches. Give yourself a yearly vacation. You may have to work harder to accomplish this, but the time with your family will be well worth it.

Know when to quit for the day. This is probably the hardest thing for work at home parents. You can't keep running into the office when you're supposed to be spending time with your family. If you have extra work to do, try tackling it while they're asleep. You'll get the work done without taking time away from those you love most.

Complain to your co-workers, not your family. When work and home life happen in the same place, it's easy to merge them into one. Don't do it! Got a problem at work? Leave it at the office, just as you would if you had a conventional job. I'm lucky to have a grown daughter in the same profession. When something's bugging me about my writing, I call her during my work hours to hash it out. Or, I hop on facebook to consult my fellow writers. It really helps me keep work separate from home by cutting stress levels before I leave the "office" for the day.

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