For many, working from home these days also means acting as teacher or instructor for children who have to be home from school. If you’re looking for tips, inspiration, or commiseration, here are some resources, summarized and linked for your convenience.
Stoke member and founder/CEO of Blue Steele Solutions, Heather Steele, offers this bit of advice for productivity and sanity:
Time blocking/pomodoro method.
Break the tasks you need to get done up into 15-20 minute sprints. Stop trying to work for an hour or more at a time. It's not going to happen.It takes a little practice but you can get so much more done in those tiny blocks of time than you think. Alternate with 5-20 minutes of break time. Seriously, it works! Do this for your kids assignments and your own work tasks and you'll find yourself feeling efficient and energized and still having plenty of time to just have fun.
I use this method in my business, I get 40 plus hours of work done in 20 hours every week.
She even wrote an entire blog with more tips on time blocking and batching tasks, using her own advice, and gave herself 15 minutes to do so. It turned out pretty sweet.
Coronavirus Triple Duty: Working, Parenting, and Teaching From Home (linked)
NPR’s Yuki Noguchi shares her experience working from home and chatting with her 10-year old son, Kenzo, about “doing 4th grade” through an Ipad that he was sent home with as schools closed in Washington. It’s a 4-minute refreshing listen, or you can read the article.
Takeaways
Carve your physical space into zones as best you can & carve your time (and family’s time) into a schedule that you should work to keep.
“…As parents learn to remote work, their children will also learn, by example.”
5 Tips For Effectively Working From Home During the Coronavirus Outbreak, When You Have Kids (linked)
FlexJobs career development manager Brie Reynolds, executive coach and author Julie Kratz, and entrepreneur Patrice Cameau offer five tips for implementing an effective work-from-home set-up for both parents and kids.
Takeaways
Set a schedule that replicates a normal school day for your kids
Set one for yourself that aligns well with that schedule
Over-communicate with your coworkers and with your child coworkers about expectations and how you’ll handle situations as they arise
Set clear and visible (if possible) boundaries for your availability
Take breaks, and communicate when you’re taking these breaks, as well as sticking to them!
And finally, here’s a list of children’s authors doing online read-alouds & activities to help with the teaching at home duties.