Finding the Sweet Spot: How to Balance a Career and Kids Without Losing Your Mind

We’ve all heard of "work-life balance." It’s basically the Bigfoot of adulthood. Some people swear they’ve seen it in the wild, but the rest of us are highly skeptical. Is it actually real, or is it just an urban legend designed to make us feel bad?

Because for the skeptics among us, the math just ain’t mathing. Let’s look at an average day: you drag yourself out of bed, scrape the kids together for school, pack lunches, and pray everyone ends up at the correct geographic location. Then you work a full shift, rush home, whip up dinner, play homework drill sergeant, chauffeur everyone to extracurriculars, and tackle the bedtime marathon. If you’re lucky and the stars align, you might get exactly one hour to yourself before you pass out and do it all over again.

So, how do we turn this glorious, mythical dream into an actual reality? Grab your sanity, because we're about to find out.

Log Off

I’m not talking about logging off your social media accounts. Sometimes you just need to numb your brain and scroll for 20 minutes while staring into the abyss. No judgment here.

I’m talking about your work accounts.

When the workday is done, let it be done. Turn off your email notifications. Don’t spend your evening rehashing every misadventure from the day. And, unless it’s genuinely necessary, don’t volunteer for extra work that’s going to eat into your personal time.

Work at work. Home at home.

This is especially important for those of you who work from home. Just because your office is twelve steps away from your kitchen doesn’t mean you need to be mentally clocked in 24/7. Your laptop does not need to become a permanent roommate.

If you have a side hustle and you’re working from home after already working somewhere else all day, you really need some routines. Otherwise, every evening can quickly turn into a vague, never-ending list of things you should be doing.

Block and plan your week using whatever works for you—a calendar, notebook, planner, workbook, a series of increasingly aggressive sticky notes… whatever keeps you organized.

Break your tasks into a few categories:

• Must-Do: The non-negotiables. These are getting done.

• Would-Like-to-Do: Things that would be great to accomplish but have some wiggle room. 

To Further your day planning:

• Break Down Activities: Break them down into categories for the time-of-day Early morning, Mid Morning, Afternoon, Late Afternoon, and Evening

• Home Tasks: Pick 2-3 tasks that need to get done around the house

• Plan Goals: Write down your work/personal goals for the day.

• Include Needs: Make a list of immediate needs that your family has to deal with that day. This could be practices, extra reading time for the kiddos, etc.

• Check In With Yourself: Write down how you feel today. Don’t hold back. Reflection can give you cues on what you need or are missing.

You can download a free copy of my Daily Time-Management Planner here. I use this to help keep my mind and my day organized and on task.

Once the tasks are complete, stop. Done Means Done. You don’t get bonus points for staring at them longer or creating more things to do.

Try to tackle the hardest or most important things first, then ease up as the week goes on. Give yourself a realistic amount of time for each task, block it into your schedule, and when that time is up, you’re done.

Sometimes good enough is good enough.

Not everything needs to be polished until it sparkles. Not every email needs to be rewritten seventeen times. Not every project needs to become your magnum opus.

By giving yourself defined blocks of time and actually respecting them, you create a natural stopping point. You can finish what needs to be done without allowing your entire evening or weekend to disappear into the work wormhole.

It also means you can be more present when you’re off the clock. You can have dinner without mentally composing emails. You can watch a movie without wondering what you forgot to do. You can spend time with the people you care about without your brain running through tomorrow’s to-do list in the background.

You won’t be stressed all the time.

Just make sure you block it into your calendar.

Haha.

But seriously, log off. Close the laptop. Resist the urge to “just quickly check one thing” (we both know it’s never one thing).

Your work will still be there tomorrow. Annoyingly, probably in the exact same place you left it.

So take the time off. Do something fun. Touch grass. Stare into the fridge for no reason. Whatever helps you remember that you’re a human being, not a walking Outlook calendar.

Rest is productive, too. And if anyone needs you urgently, they can join the queue with your laundry, your unread books, and everything else you’re not doing right now.