Do you have enough time to work?

While constructing the family schedule this past week, I created a new list: hours Mom has available to work. With five kids, there’s a lot of driving to be done, and despite having plenty of help, I still do a fair amount of it.?

My “long” day (Tuesday) is currently 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., which is not actually that long as work hours go. So it’s not surprising that I’m feeling a bit crunched. I can try to work efficiently, but ultimately, I need to make sure I have enough time to do my job.

Maybe you have been discovering the same thing. If you work at a workplace during set hours, this might seem like a bizarre discussion — the hours you work are the hours you work! But many jobs are more malleable, or self-directed, and as more professionals work from home occasionally, there’s a lot of flexibility. Which is great, but if you are taking on responsibility for things like school pick-ups, or shuttling kids to activities, it’s important to make sure that you preserve enough focused hours to achieve your professional goals. We can all try to be more efficient, but it’s impossible to do 35 hours of tasks in 30 hours, no matter how amazing you are.

In my case, by constructing this schedule of “LV work hours,” I could make more rational choices about which days I could give my teen and pre-teen kids a ride home from after school activities, and which days they’d need to take the activity bus. I could give my high school student times when our nanny could get him on the way back from other children’s activities, so there wouldn’t be multiple trips. I could also note times when the 3-year-old would be out of the house for longer stretches (sometimes it’s hard to keep him out of Mom’s office).?

I could also see if there were going to be particularly short days (for instance, those with a during-the-day kid commitment), and plan to balance those with a night or weekend shift. While evening and weekend work hours might not be ideal, the truth is that even with some triaging, my “LV work hours” list only totaled 39 hours, and I’d generally need to exercise during those hours too if it was going to happen. Cut into that block with appointments and no wonder time feels tight.?

If you, likewise, have a more malleable schedule, you might try seeing when you can work and when it tends not to, well, work. If the total number of available hours is under what you’d like to devote to your professional goals, then adding a night or weekend shift isn’t a sign that your life is unbalanced. It can actually make your life more balanced! People tend not to believe me when I tell them this, but the numbers are what they are.?

Do you have enough time available to work? If you’ve been feeling crunched, it might be worth investigating.?

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