Balancing Family and Work Commitments with a Home Business
Although many parents feel as though, after the birth of a child, that it’s their duty to stay at home and leave the world of business behind, many other parents feel like part of the role of a parent is to be able to be financially successful, enabling their child to be who they want to be and to do what they want to do.
Despite this, the idea of leaving your child at home while you go out to work is too much for some parents, and so a great middle ground might be to run your business from home. This means that you’ll be able to earn money while taking care of your baby. SO, how do you set up your business at home and how do you balance your work and family commitments?
Creating a Work Space
The first thing you need to do is locate a space in your home where you can work from comfortably, in piece and quiet, but that is also close enough to your child so that you can attend to their needs. One of the main problems with working at home is being able to define when it’s work time and when it’s play time with your child. A way to get around this sort of issue is to create a “work zone” – essentially your home office – where you can do you work without distractions.
Play Time
Of course, the idea of a work zone isn’t to necessarily lock yourself in your room without distractions, as this defeats the purpose of moving home to look after your child. To ensure you spend plenty of time with your little one, have regular intervals of play time – perhaps once an hour or longer ones every couple of hours – that allow you to take a breather from your work, but also to dedicate yourself to the wants and desires of your little boy or girl.
Adapting Your Business
You might find at first that running a business from home isn’t the easiest thing in the world to adjust to. This is because there could be a reasonable number of elements of your workflow system that you’re going to have to re-configure for your home setting. This includes small tasks like changing your business address and your bills over to your home address, to larger tasks like figuring out how you’re going to ship products to global locations across the world.
Thankfully, on the topic of delivery, there are a number of large courier services such as TNT Direct that can collect your products from your home address and ship them across the world in a timely fashion, so this obstacle doesn’t need to worry you too much. With more and more of the population shopping online, it’s now more important to be able to take advantage of those customers, from the UK or from around the world. This good news is that with some minor adaptation, your business can be selling to customers across the world – all from the comfort of your home and within the reach of your child.
So there you have it: how to balance your family and work commitments with a home business.
