Working With Kids at Home
12 weeks ago I was signed off sick from work.
During that time I have begun to develop my own businesses.
The last 2 weeks though have been quite stressful - trying to maintain the balance between a healthy family life and getting my 2 babies off the ground.
Some might argue that they are both relatively new projects and therefore, what does it matter? Other people, entrepreneurs, may understand or recognise my craving to get these projects up, running and exploding! In 8 weeks, I have become a workaholic! Bizarre! And for the last 2 of those weeks our 3 children have been off school for the Easter holidays - is it Easter already? The businesses came about, literally because of my health problems.
I wondered how many people realised what help was out there for them following such a stressful event in their lives.
I decided to write an article, and then after a conversation with my wife, we conceived an idea to help others benefit from our experiences, and we literally have a never ending list of things to write about! Since then the business has gone from strength to strength and become more than we expected it to be, not only that but we have ended up writing articles on subjects we never would have considered were our subjects.
In order to keep running, we have had to continually improve our idea to make it better for our readers - adding all manner of improvements.
On top of all that, we realise that in order to maintain reader's interest we need to publish at least one good article every other day.
Additionally, we needed to gain recognition and visibility for our idea in order to get as many people to see it as possible I could go on, but basically this has turned out to be a non stop job!!!! Working the statistics, making it a quality reference for people and making sure the articles give some kind of help to those who are reading it.
I have gone from working an 8 hour shift 4 days a week to finding myself on here for almost 12 hours plus, 7 days a week.
And its not even paying any money at the moment - its more of a hobby.
So how did we cope when the children came home and there was to be no more school for 2 weeks? Badly, if I'm honest!! I have been panicking every day.
Worrying about how I am going to get the content written, how I am going to keep our readers happy, how I am going to keep the people coming etc!!! I have had to come to realise, that the business does not suffer too much as a result of me taking time off! My wife still wants attention and the children need to be kept entertained, given attention and time out.
The pets also need attention - we have a dog to be walked, and 2 cats to be attended to not to mention the rest! It comes down to a question of time management.
Unlike a lot of people that work from home, we do not have the luxury of a spare room that we can call a "study".
Our house has sufficient rooms to allow all 5 of us to live here comfortably, but there is not one of them where one of us could sit without being disturbed - I am currently typing this at the dining table in the kitchen, at one point it was just me, then it was tea time (grrr), then it was just me, then there were 4 of us, then a 7 year old giving me a cuddle - I love my family, and I have to do this around them.
What I have had to do is give myself time to do things - half an hour a day to do one thing, half an hour a day to do something else, less time promoting, if an article was needed then we wrote it after the children were in bed, then publishing kept to a minimum - and this has had to be strictly adhered to.
In this way we were able to take our children to the park, swimming, to meet their favourite TV characters in a local mall, museum for craft day etc.
We were also able to visit my wife's parents on my birthday weekend and have a great time, even though we still worked whilst we were away.
To sum up, I think it is possible to work from home and have the children on holiday from school and continue to grow your business whilst they are in your "space" at the same time as giving them the attention they need.
In order to do this you need three things - teamwork (with my wife), relaxation (being more relaxed about the business side of your life - just for the time the children are away from school), and time management (giving yourself deadlines, as oppose to meandering through the day at your own speed).
With these three things, not only have we continued to make a success of our business ideas whilst the children have been off school, but we've also become more organised in what we are doing and therefore more able to find the time we need, to do other things like enjoy our children and enjoy each other.
During that time I have begun to develop my own businesses.
The last 2 weeks though have been quite stressful - trying to maintain the balance between a healthy family life and getting my 2 babies off the ground.
Some might argue that they are both relatively new projects and therefore, what does it matter? Other people, entrepreneurs, may understand or recognise my craving to get these projects up, running and exploding! In 8 weeks, I have become a workaholic! Bizarre! And for the last 2 of those weeks our 3 children have been off school for the Easter holidays - is it Easter already? The businesses came about, literally because of my health problems.
I wondered how many people realised what help was out there for them following such a stressful event in their lives.
I decided to write an article, and then after a conversation with my wife, we conceived an idea to help others benefit from our experiences, and we literally have a never ending list of things to write about! Since then the business has gone from strength to strength and become more than we expected it to be, not only that but we have ended up writing articles on subjects we never would have considered were our subjects.
In order to keep running, we have had to continually improve our idea to make it better for our readers - adding all manner of improvements.
On top of all that, we realise that in order to maintain reader's interest we need to publish at least one good article every other day.
Additionally, we needed to gain recognition and visibility for our idea in order to get as many people to see it as possible I could go on, but basically this has turned out to be a non stop job!!!! Working the statistics, making it a quality reference for people and making sure the articles give some kind of help to those who are reading it.
I have gone from working an 8 hour shift 4 days a week to finding myself on here for almost 12 hours plus, 7 days a week.
And its not even paying any money at the moment - its more of a hobby.
So how did we cope when the children came home and there was to be no more school for 2 weeks? Badly, if I'm honest!! I have been panicking every day.
Worrying about how I am going to get the content written, how I am going to keep our readers happy, how I am going to keep the people coming etc!!! I have had to come to realise, that the business does not suffer too much as a result of me taking time off! My wife still wants attention and the children need to be kept entertained, given attention and time out.
The pets also need attention - we have a dog to be walked, and 2 cats to be attended to not to mention the rest! It comes down to a question of time management.
Unlike a lot of people that work from home, we do not have the luxury of a spare room that we can call a "study".
Our house has sufficient rooms to allow all 5 of us to live here comfortably, but there is not one of them where one of us could sit without being disturbed - I am currently typing this at the dining table in the kitchen, at one point it was just me, then it was tea time (grrr), then it was just me, then there were 4 of us, then a 7 year old giving me a cuddle - I love my family, and I have to do this around them.
What I have had to do is give myself time to do things - half an hour a day to do one thing, half an hour a day to do something else, less time promoting, if an article was needed then we wrote it after the children were in bed, then publishing kept to a minimum - and this has had to be strictly adhered to.
In this way we were able to take our children to the park, swimming, to meet their favourite TV characters in a local mall, museum for craft day etc.
We were also able to visit my wife's parents on my birthday weekend and have a great time, even though we still worked whilst we were away.
To sum up, I think it is possible to work from home and have the children on holiday from school and continue to grow your business whilst they are in your "space" at the same time as giving them the attention they need.
In order to do this you need three things - teamwork (with my wife), relaxation (being more relaxed about the business side of your life - just for the time the children are away from school), and time management (giving yourself deadlines, as oppose to meandering through the day at your own speed).
With these three things, not only have we continued to make a success of our business ideas whilst the children have been off school, but we've also become more organised in what we are doing and therefore more able to find the time we need, to do other things like enjoy our children and enjoy each other.
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