The balance between labor and home

Working from home, whether you are a freelancer or a remote employee can be a wonderful thing, especially if you live alone. But what if you have a spouse or children in the house while you are working? In any work environment there are distractions, but those who work from home with their family there face a unique set of problems - and they need unique ways to deal with them.

How did this happen to me

A year ago, I returned to full-time employment after a long vacation to care for my little daughter. She went to prep school, and my husband repaired a room in the basement, making an amazing office out of him. A well-known company in San Diego, Monk Development , hired me for home-based work. Life was beautiful. After several weeks of work, I suddenly became very sick and could not continue. I quickly discovered that I was pregnant with twins, after five years of trying.
As might be expected, the “wonderful life”, although it has become even more beautiful, has changed a lot. Fortunately, I returned to freelancing. Having done this, I talked to people in a similar situation, and this article began to emerge. Here are some tips to not just live the day, but to taste it and want more.

Know your place

No matter what the rules are in a corporate environment - at home they should be completely different. The first rule is to have more - and not too much deprive the family of attention - to find your own working space. If this requires turning the garage into an office and parking the car on the street, this is a necessary compromise for fruitful work at home. If there is not enough room to retire, it does not mean that you cannot work from home, but get ready for great difficulties.
Many arrange offices in the basement, in the garage or allocate space in the living room, but what unites productive cabinets is a closed space. Although many people share a place with their spouse or work from the family bed, the general opinion is that you need a quiet place separated from the outside world in order to work best.
Readers who commented on Ben Benjamin's “ Cabinets and Creative Zone ” tend to agree with this. Some work in places named by one of the readers as “cubic farms,” where closed offices or high partitions are rare or nonexistent.
A well-known argument in favor of such an arrangement is that it stimulates communication and knowledge sharing, but in a family situation, I cannot imagine how the cry of a daughter at Conductor Dora can inspire me.
My office is a separate room in the basement, the door of which is locked and locked. Although a lot of work is being done at the kitchen table upstairs while the children are playing, my best work is done in the privacy of a quiet room.

Determination and neutralization of distracting factors

The most frequent complaints about work at home are related to the distraction of family members and distraction itself. However, the current distractions are so different from the office that sometimes seem even worse. If the office had to endure gossips and candy lovers (never put a bowl of chocolates on the table), children cry at my house and ask: “Mom, when will you finish, can I play on the computer?” The difficulty is in determining interferes with work and cope with this, until the work does not stop at all.
')

Family responsibilities

Maybe this item is different in men and women. I summarize, but many mothers have a stronger instinct at home, so it’s harder to separate work from family responsibilities. We see a bunch of dirty laundry and we feel that we should drop everything and quickly load it into the washing machine, gradually turning into a washerwoman. Also, when we hear the child crying, we rush to calm him down (even when he is with his father or nanny). It is not so easy to remain assembled and continue working when instincts are so strong.
Of course, many men are also distracted by this. Men whose wives stay at home with their children know that it’s hard to stay “at work” when you’re actually at home. My children are very distracting, so I do most of my work when my husband is at home and can take care of them instead of me.

Headphones and closed door policy

A good pair of headphones and some favorite music will protect against external noise and give strength to work.
There is also a “closed door” policy when relatives do not bother you if the office door is closed. The policy of James Higginbotham says: “If the door is closed, do not distract, if it is not a fire or loss of a limb,” which says a lot to his five-year offspring, like mine. But just in case, it does not hurt the lock on the door.

External communication channels

Some people are distracted by Twitter: it's like a chat window that has been open all day. Others are not allowed to work quietly constantly incoming mail. If you are working on something serious and are not tolerant of external stimuli, it might be a good idea to turn off Twitter or a chat client, and even close your email if you have a tendency to read and respond to emails immediately.
The phone also distracts me greatly. Although I am not against phone calls, when it is necessary, or when a client prefers, but in general I try not to call and not to pick up the phone at work. This does not apply to everyone, but I know myself well enough to be aware of my limitations. When distractions are known, it remains to temper those that distract most.
As for e-mail, it may be helpful to set the time for reading and writing responses. If you receive a lot of mail, you can even read and respond to letters at different times. It helps me a lot, as it gives time to think about what I read before answering (in particular, it is useful when it comes to blog comments).
The same goes for physical mail. I go to the post office, open and sort it when the children are around during the day, but I wait for them to fall asleep to read, answer, pay bills , etc. And preliminary preparation facilitates this night process.

When nothing else helps, leave

It is important not to lock in the office for the whole day, especially if you have creative work. Even with more technical work, you need to be able to concentrate and if too much distraction, take a pause.
Leave the house. Go to the coffee shop, to the park, to the car, where there is nothing distracting and you can take a break. For me, it means to leave home and go by car, usually to the other end of the city. When I hear a baby crying, it tempts me to drop everything and calm it down. In the distance, you can better understand yourself, turn off the "mother" and turn on the employee.

Family phone

You can also think about installing a working telephone line at home if it is not there yet. You can also use a cordless phone if it works. Skype also offers perfectly working straight lines. This is the direct number of your Skype client , and with the help of a Skype phone you can get almost a real device that works through the Skype network.
There is also the Grand Central , which allows you to have a phone number that is not tied to any particular place. Instead, you can set up via the Internet forwarding to any phone that you are currently using or directly to voice mail. I use it because it allows you to calmly give out your number and mark advertising calls as “spam”, just like in the email. And I can configure the passage of calls from some people or groups (customers, family, friends) to mobile instead of voice mail, without giving them the mobile number itself (this works via the web, and it would not hurt to add a bit of security).
Michael Boynik works from a family home and recommends teaching children to answer calls, just in case. Who knows when they will have to give a home number to one of the clients and what he will hear (my daughter answers all the “Hello, Dad!” Calls because she usually calls.

Customer care

I would like to point out two things more important than everything mentioned earlier.

1. Be open : do not hide from clients how, where and when you work
2. Be picky . Choose your customers. Work only with those who, in your opinion, are compatible with your schedule and principles of work.

About openness

It requires attention. You shouldn’t pour out your soul to a potential client at the first meeting, talking about the whole family and the case when Susie poured juice on your keyboard, which stopped working for two days. At the same time, it is not necessary that he thinks that you are working full time in a brick office in the city center until the sunset.
Report that you work from home. Say that the family is at home during the day. In my case, I honestly told about twins and explained that my first priority is to be a mother during the day, but I also work only on one project at a time, so you can be sure that when I am “at work” their project is of the highest priority for me. Tell enough to be honest, but try not to scare them away.

Intelligibility

Look for people who understand your style and routine. Look for like-minded people who are not against unusual working hours and who do not insist on deadlines. I do not mean that deadlines should be violated, but in a house where a family blocks work, it’s more likely that family responsibilities will interfere. No need to pretend that it is not. Admit it, but get ready to work a little harder to catch up.
I have only one corporate client, the other private owners or fallen enterprises that are willing to work with me, despite family circumstances. I also do not take local customers. If I lived in a large modern city, everything could have been different, but, in my experience, local proposals are tough in time, creatively boring, and to a lesser extent allowed to do other things.
There is nothing wrong with intelligibility. We do this every day, preferring one brand of oil to another or deciding which channel to watch. You have the right to choose clients, and to accept all incoming offers is not fair with respect to both clients and yourself.

When everything breaks down (and you yourself are close to this)

Even if you managed to arrange everything - an ideal office with soundproof walls and a family of padineks for your support from the outside - something will still go wrong.

Sound effects

One day, during a discussion with an important client of a fast-spending budget (which will energize anyone), a blood-chilling cry from the next room suddenly rings out. What to do?
I would be open to the customers from the very beginning (well, in most cases) and he would be ready for this scream. Plus, I would choose time for this call, free from maternal duties, so I would not have to run to the rescue. What would I do? She laughed, apologized, and would have gone into the garden to end the conversation in silence, simultaneously offering to phone next time.
When this happens, it is embarrassing, and can create tension in the family, if you get angry at them for the interrupted work. But imagine that you work in an office near a railway. You report that the passage may travel during a call, you are motated to take into account the train schedule when you plan calls. But this time the train and the bell matched. This happens.
Apologize and assure the client that you are there and the conversation continues. Do not snap or shout at your husband or wife to have your baby’s throat covered. Just keep calm, as if it’s just a part of life - indeed it is.

Sick children and other obstacles

Thank God, my children are pretty healthy, but they get sick about once a year and the deadlines break down. But we all get sick. Computers break down. Come creative crises. Whatever we do, it is not always possible to catch the deadline. Life goes on and our attitude towards it is more important than the observance of any deadline.
One thing I learned from my own experience and from helping young designers: it’s better to miss deadline and finish the project than to present an unfinished project just to be on time . Many clients will appreciate your sincerity regarding dead dates, if you have the strength to complete the project.
That and deadlines do not just exist. The lives of clients are equally important and their professional success often depends on whether our work will be on their desk on the appointed day and time. What could be worse than having to tell the client that this did not happen on time, as the children got sick with the flu. But, as a parent, you must be responsible for the children in the first place, even at the cost of a relationship with a client.
These relationships can be maintained through creative pre-planning. Here are some tips that I primarily use with clients:

Have support

I have a large list of colleagues who can be contacted when I need someone to make up for deadlines or when family responsibilities conflict with deadlines. In fact, I am in the process of creating a kind of designer cooperative or partnership with a woman in a similar position (she herself will soon have a child). We often sew up with projects, so it is nice when there is someone to rely on from time to time. We did one project together and it turned out quite well: the deadlines were met and she was ready to start working any day.

Work ahead of schedule

In many cases, I have a small idea of ​​what the client needs before it even starts, so I start making sketches. By the first payment already have some results. I'm also starting to encode some things before the final approvals. It helps to plan and partially implement some things as soon as possible, just in case. In some cases, this is extra work, but over time, intuition develops and there is an opportunity to have time to do the project and translate the spirit - or in between cases take care of the family.

Personal responsibility

Even if you have a boss somewhere, at home you are your own boss. You are responsible for carrying out the work, no matter how distracting or interrupting you may be.

Time tracking

An important aspect of personal responsibility is keeping track of how you spend time. As an accountant takes into account money, you must consider time. If you work by the hour, this information is needed for invoicing - but it is important to know where the unpaid hours go.
There are a million programs for time tracking - local or web applications . It is important to have a way to keep track of what you are doing and how long it takes.
I started doing this not only for robots, but for the family. It turned out to be very useful to see: what did I have time when I did not have time to wash my laundry or wash the dishes. Sometimes I found that I spent too much time on Twitter or on the phone and corrected it the next day.
Write down the case is very useful. If you notice that you write “I went on blogs and answered comments” instead of “I finished this big project,” you might want to postpone blogs and get back to work.
I started using Dave Sy's Printable CEO forms, but eventually I started using self-made ones, which are much simpler. At the same time, those forms are useful for self-organization (if you are fond of it).

Pull in with the seven

Being responsible is easier when comrades remind you not to go astray. They are colleagues in the office, but there are people at home who are ready to help. Tell your spouse e), and the children, that they need their help to stay “at work”. Ask them to remind you about work if you are wandering around family living quarters.
Some of my interlocutors said that loving husband forbids doing work in family areas, such as living room and kitchen. If they complain that they cannot do anything, the spouse a) says: “You have your own space, we have our own. And you are now on ours. ” My daughter is the same. She is also not in kindergarten, but sends me to the office when I say that I am trying to work.

Walk the tightrope

Working from home is a constant balance. But pre-planning, arrangements, flexibility and protection — and, of course, quiet time — everything that is needed to deftly balance between work and home.

upd Thanks for the karma, transferred to the "Freelance" blog.