Time Management for Working Parents

Raising a family & working full-time can be almost impossible.

Many working parents I know talk about feeling like they can’t succeed in anything. They can’t truly excel in their jobs, because they have to stop and pickup the kids or they have to go home to cook and clean. They equally feel they can’t truly commit to their kids because they have to go off and work. Someone else is raising their kids. HAVE YOU EVER FELT THIS?

It gets so frustrating sometimes, because you get teased by both, to fulfil your desires in either area – career or family. To further compound the stress this causes is when you have both parents doing this. You often feel that it’s a fight between your career or mine!! Who’s going to win? Neither Mum or Dad really wants to chuck it all in and raise the kids, but of course eventually, and ultimately, someone has to. YOU CAN’T HAVE EVERYTHING.

If you’re trying to do all this while building your online business, it can truly seem like there aren’t enough hours in the day. So what’s the secret to building a functioning online income without staying up all night? Time management. And if you think about it, if you cultivate a full-time income at home then there is no doubt that this is going to make this whole time management matrix work so much easier. When you have a win like this, all sides of your life will improve.

So lets follow the path to freedom. Build your online business. Plan your day.

Try these simple time management tips to get the most out of your work day, while still leaving time for yourself.

1. Set a schedule.

For working parents, it can be difficult to find time to devote to your work-at-home efforts. With so much to be done, a few minutes worth of work can sometimes stretch across several hours. It’s not just how long you spend but also how it’s spent. To help combat this, set a definitive time, each and every day, when you’ll work on building your income. Many working parents find that the very early morning hours or late evening hours work best. The key is consistency. For me, my whole online business started to move when I decided to get up at 5am and work for 2 hours every single day. This is before my children or wife are up. It has allowed me to make my time I devote to business to be my most productive. I have just woken up so my mind is rested and ready to fire.

2. Plan your day.

Before you begin work on your home-based business each day, make a brief plan for what you’d like to accomplish. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, however having a firm idea of your goals can help you get there more consistency. When you plan your day, consider doing so in a small notebook or calendar, creating a written record of all of your efforts. This record can be useful to review every now and again, to evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, and priorities. You can write a list of tasks for the next day at the end of every session of that day and rank them in order of priority. Tick them off as you go the next day.

3. Treat your online business as a job.

Most people start their quest to work from home with the goal of quitting their desk jobs; however, it’s counter-intuitively even more important to stay task oriented while focusing on your home-based business. Take care of urgent tasks before you begin, and resist the urge to break away from your work for personal matters like phone calls, snack breaks or Facebook. Staying focused and treating your work at home business as a “real” job will help you achieve your goals.

4. Eliminate distractions.

Unlike at a brick-and-mortar job, distractions abound when working from home. While you’ll never be able to perfectly replicate the working conditions of an office – nor would you want to – it’s important to do as much as you can to eliminate life’s many distractions. Create a quiet, dedicated space to work that’s only used for that purpose. Leave your cellphone in another room, and turn off the television. Create total focus. If you can have a desk or office at home for your business that will be superior, but if you are like me, I have my laptop and workbook in a foldout package that I unfold and work at a desk next to the window. This happens to be the dining room table. But it works. I wrap it up at 7am when I hear the family rising, and then prepare the table for breakfast. The beauty of the laptop.

Time Management for Working Parents

The whole key here is organisation. For me its simple. I get up at 5am and go hard at it for 2 hours straight and then I let it all go and go about my day with my family and day jobs.  The feeling of knowing that I am getting the best 2 hours of my day -pumped into my business and that very soon, this will allow me to quit my other jobs. So peaceful to me and the stress just dissipates. I tried to doing it at the end of the day, but then I get distracted if one of my children has not gone to sleep on time or if my wife wants to talk…etc. The only downside is that to get 8 hours of rest I need to turn in at 9pm. Sometimes 10pm, but then I get only 7 hours of sleep and this can catch up with you.

Set a structure that works for building your business and stick to it as if your life depends on it. Plan your day. And to some extent it does, but know that this super focussed and super busy life style is not forever. After a year of this, you will be able to quit that day job that is not getting you or your family anywhere. However if you don’t take this online thing seriously, then you are doomed to give-up and never fully emancipate your life as you set out to.

Time Management for Working Parents

Gil Balfas