How to juggle your home business and your Family

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There is nothing much harder than balancing a family and working, but it’s far more complicated when you work from home. Every single article and blog post tells working parents not to blur the lines between home life and the office, but it’s not always as simple as that – especially when you’re a mother running a home business. Easier said than done!

Your natural instinct when you’re supposed to be working is to see what the children are up to, engage with the family and generally face a whole new set of challenges. Trying to balance both sides is the hardest part of it all – something I know only too well – and yet we must create a healthy work-life balance.

The best thing that any working parent can do – even when running a home business- is to get help. Whether you choose to outsource work to companies like Ignite Digital to get your SEO strategy on point, or you want to hire a virtual assistant to answer the calls and act as a gatekeeper to your business, you need a hand. You also need to be able to juggle the commitments to your work with the commitments to your family. Below, you’ll find a few ways to ensure that this happens easily.

Create Rules

It is not possible for a parent not to wander in and check out what the kids are up to, so instead of banning it entirely, you need to give yourself five minutes. Five minutes per hour where you can go and check on what the family is doing, can be all you need to remain productive. Give yourself some ground rules of “delay, don’t deny”, and you’ll feel the difference in yourself when you get to work.

Give Yourself Goals

It’s important that you have something to aim for, whether it’s a financial goal or the goal of opening your own office at some point. Breaking your goals down into a set of smaller goals is going to be a good motivator.

Stay Organized

You are running a home business, you need a tight routine to keep working towards the goals that you set for yourself earlier. Create systems and routines that will work for both your family and your work, with dedicated time carved out to spend in the home office. You need to think about the ways that you can implement new ways of working to keep the kids happy as they grow.

Embrace Change

This one can be hard. You need to ensure that your system of routine is effective, but you have to embrace the rigid timetable that you have set won’t always remain rigid. Professional and personal lives change and evolve, and you mustn’t fight this if you want success for your home business and for your family.

There is nothing easy about balancing family life and work. When you are working from home, you must make a concerted effort to split your focus – without compromising any of the commitments that you make. Take the help where you can get it and embrace working for yourself as a challenge!

Do you run a home business? Do you find it a challenge finding a balance between focusing on your business and your family? Do share in a comment below.

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One comment

  1. Some great tips here Talya. It takes a lot of discipline for the two lines not to blur and is a popular topic in our household as we both work from home and it takes effort to ensure family time is kept separate. Hope you are keeping well. x

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