Happy Mother’s Day! If you’re a mother and considering working from home, this blog post is for you. In this post, one work at home mom and one work at home dad will share a little bit about themselves, and also share some of their tips for success working from home.
| westcpw |  Christopher West |
I worked at home for nearly five years doing online marketing. |
|
|
 Laura_Rike
|
Q. How long have you worked from home?
A. Laura Rike (Pinterest Marketing Expert)
I have been a stay at home, working mother for over 8 years. I have successfully started my own company and bring in enough money monthly to not worry about ever going back into the corporate world.
A. westcpw (Former work at home dad)
I worrked for a digital marketing company for Nearly five years. In that time I learned a lot about managing time itself. You have treat it as work. Have set working hours. Set tim e for lunch and breaks. If you need to take a few hours off then be sure to make it up
Q. How many children do you have, and how old are they?
A. Laura Rike (Pinterest Marketing Expert)
I have one boy and he is now 8 and a half if you ask him. He is the entire reason I started working from home, because as a single mom I didn’t have the funds even working in corporate to make ends meet with daycare and all the other expenses.
A. westcpw (Former work at home dad)
Two children. Now twelve and eight years old. Bothe were in kinder or primary school when I started working at home. So had to juggle work with school drop off a and home work and any extra activities.
This is usually the area that attracts parents to work from home as they can have a balance
Q. What obstacles did you face when you started working from home?
A. Laura Rike (Pinterest Marketing Expert)
The biggest obstacle was organizing my time to ensure I was able to not only market myself, but keep up with my client’s work and find a healthy balance between work and home. Being a full-time working mother can lead to feelings of guilt and stress because of divided attention between work and family. The key is to focus on a plan, get organized, and find the right balance between profession and parenthood.
Avoid starting the day on a frazzled note by getting organized the night before. Pack the kids’ lunches, lay out their clothes (plus your own), and have everyone shower. We found a happy balance together. My son has a morning chart to help him remember what he needs to accomplish each morning before school and I also have a morning routine to create a checklist for the day broken down by “school zone” and “home zone”. School zone is when my son is at school and what I need to get done for work, then home zone we work on together once I stop working and get him from the bus. Creating lists and enforcing a hard stop has made it super easy to stay on task AND I also get to choose how much time that day I spend on marketing myself or working on client project with the lists I create.
A. westcpw (Former work at home dad)
Major obstacle is balancing time with everything else like taking the kids to schools making lunches and dinner cleaning and washing and General house choirs. Another big challenges is forcing myself to shut off when I had “finished” work. That is one of the bigger challenges as when you work from home you are never really home from work.
Q. What tips do you have for mothers who want to work from home?
A. Laura Rike (Pinterest Marketing Expert)
I would suggest to set up a seperate area for you to work at home and make sure you set boundaries with yourself and your family. When will you stop working for the day? When will you start? If you need to take care of things with a younger one during the day come up with a plan on when you can work around your child’s nap schedule. Once you have a structure in place you can start to organize your work time in blocks. So if you have two hours in the morning use one to market yourself and the other to work on client’s needs. I call this the power hour strategy. No matter what you get done what you can to build your empire in one hour and when that time is done you stop where you are and move on to what needs to be done next.
A. westcpw (Former work at home dad)
Plan your week a head of time. Choose a day like a Friday and plan the following week.
In this calendar you have to include all your house chores well as all work items. Use some kind of time managing or calendar app like Google calendar or the one on Microsoft outlook.
Set reminders. And also set the time that work ends. This is highly important as you don’t want to suffer burn out.
Leave a Reply