If you are like most single parents and couples who have successful careers, balancing work and family is one of the skills that you should learn. The big irony of work is that you do it for your family but find out in the end that you are a stranger to your children because of spending a lot of time at work.
How do you balance your time between work and family?
You can delegate time-intensive tasks both at work and at home to others so that you can have more time to spend with your children. You can hire a household help to do the laundry, cleaning and marketing so that when you get home, especially the mothers, all these time-intensive tasks have been done already and you can just relax with your children or help them with their homework.
Prioritize your goals and create your schedule around your top priorities. For most of you, the top is of course family and the second is career. But look at your schedule. If your family is your top priority, then you should schedule time to actually be with your family and not just do things for your family. When your children are grown up, they will remember the things you did together more than the toys that you gave them.
(SEE ALSO: Office Stereotypes)
Free your weekends. If your work including transportation takes almost 12 hours of the day, you have very little time in the evening for family. Weekends are the only time when you can have a big chunk of time without work. Don’t accept work on weekends. Make it your rule to make Saturdays and Sundays your family days.
We cannot extend our time everyday. We are only given 24 hours in a day and we cannot ask for the time to stop or for the 24 hours to extend to 30 hours so that we can work long hours and still have time for the family. We only have limited time everyday and balancing work and family is all about delegating menial tasks to others, prioritizing goals and setting up days for work and days for family.
