Author of Career and Family: The Art of Having it All, Angeline Teng shared about the No.1 strategy to cope with the excessive demand from your career and family, especially if you are a working mother.
The most important strategy in helping you to cope with career and family demand is Time Management. Maximize your time with your family because when you are working, you have very limited time left to spend with them.
In order to maximize your time with your family, you have to limit your time for non-essentials. Non-essentials are certain things that people like to do, but are really not important in life like spending time on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Another example of a non-essential activity is watching T.V. If you do it too much, you will end up not having enough time with your family.
For some professionals, work time and personal time is very difficult to manage. For most of us who work in the corporate environment, we finish work at, for example, 6:00 P.M. But, for some, networking is important for your job, so even weekends are considered work because you need to socialize. You need to manage and control this. If not, all your time will be work time because work will always seem to be more important than your family. So, control your work time.
For employees, especially women who travel as part of their job, you have to learn to limit and plan business travel. This may sound unfair, but you also have to limit your accessibility during non-work days. Some people are on call all the time. This could be a difficult habit to break because your bosses think that they can contact you at any time. You have to be firm to say that on non-work days, “I’m sorry, I’m not accessible in those days. Please don’t try to contact me unless it’s really urgent.”
Another thing that is difficult for us working ladies is to NOT bring our work home. A lot of us bring work home. It cannot be helped, especially for teachers and lectures I know who definitely bring work home. You should not be doing that all the time.
Now, because you don’t have too much time with your family, you must maximize your time at work. Be highly productive, and be very focused. Don’t waste time on gossips and all those things we usually spend a lot of time on.
Finish your work, be as efficient as possible so that you can go home and enjoy your time with your family.
Be wary of office-provided tools. This is very popular benefit in a lot of companies. They always give you a lot of office-provided work tools such as smart phones so that you can check on your emails all the time. This is the trap that we fall into because we are so accessible. We check all our emails all the time which then actually eats up our personal time.
Plan to Leave Work on Time
Plan to leave work on time. This means telling your bosses or your subordinates that you have children waiting for you at home so you have to leave work on time. You have to manage your work around this.
Also, because you have limited time, you should maximize your breaks at work. For example, like most regular workers, you have a one-hour break in the office. Use this to manage personal stuff that you need to do. These could be online activities like paying bills, etc. Do it during your break, so you don’t waste your time at home doing all these. Maximize those breaks at work so that your weekends and after-work-hours are all for the family.
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