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Managing Your Office With a Child On Your Lap

© Bonny Albo

One of the unifying traits of most work at home parents is our drive and determination to try and get some work done in even the most challenging of situations. I have come across very little so far that has proven to be more challenging than trying to work with a young child.

In the quest for time management skills and the desire to still have some time with our families, I have come up with some practical ideas to help with the balancing act.

Some of my suggestions to make getting work done easier are:

- Time your phone calls when your child is having a nap. Even better, exchange childcare with another work at home parent in your area, and arrange your calls at this time every day. For example, one parent can watch both children from 9:00 to noon, and the other parent from 1:00 until 4:00. Of course, you can alter this agenda as needed.

- Arrange a play space for your child near your work space. My daughter just loves to type on the computer and play with the mouse, but she's only 20 months old. So we are now in the process of creating a "computer" station just for her, complete with broken keyboard and mouse. (My hubby is a technie, so we have a fair amount of computer parts around the house for this purpose).

- Take frequent play breaks. If you are surfing on the internet, have some of your child's favorite links bookmarked for easy reference. And if you need to be reminded to take a break (like me!) download a shareware copy of StretchWare to remind you periodically.

- Take time out for yourself. Women and Stress is a well written, easy to read article about how women's bodies react to stress,

- Join an email discussion group so that you still have some adult contact from day to day, especially if have little contact with your "customers" (ie: writers, internet sales people, telemarkerts, etc). Choosing a digested email discussion group will save you a lot of time (instead of receiving every email from all of the people on the list, you receive one email every day or so). Your email address is never made public unless you choose to, and you can read about other parents working at home and making it work. Try the mailing lists at WAHM.com, Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, or Women-Networking.com.

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