By Lucy Corkhill
26th February 2013
On the WorkSMART Work Your Proper Hours Day webpage there are various tools to help you bring more balance and less stress into your working life. If you (or your partner) regularly find yourself working outside of office hours, it might be time to have a work/life balance overhaul.
One of the key things impacted by long working hours are family relationships. Both dads and mums who work late often miss not just their child’s milestones, but all the little day to day wonders. Add the fact they might well get home feeling not only frazzled but guilty, and you have a recipe for fractious family times. A friend of mine whose partner regularly works late expressed her secret irritation that he did all the ‘weekend parenting’: “I tend to deal with all the stressy daily stuff, so I have become the “no” parent, and he’s the fun “yes” parent. I don’t want to be the “no” parent – that was never the way I imagined myself! But sometimes the stress of raising them by myself under the guise of being a two parent family really gets me down and makes me more irritable with them.”
If this sounds familiar, why not use 1st March to assess your own or your partner’s work/life balance, and come up with some solutions. Avoid blame or recriminations, but set the intention to find a path that meets everyone’s needs as much as is currently possible. If regularly leaving work on time is too much of a commitment at present, start gently with a weekly or fortnightly promise to share a family evening – and get your kids to choose the agenda. Then perhaps as family bonds strengthen, it might be time to look at longer term strategies for having more time together. The more workers who make it clear to their bosses that family is a priority, the more family-orientated businesses will be forced to become, with policies like flexi-time and working from home.
Make sure you leave work on time on 1st March and enjoy some special time with your family. Here are some fun ideas to get you started:
THIS MARCH 1ST LEAVE WORK ON TIME AND…
1. Make and share a meal with your family
2. Go out for an evening walk with a teatime picnic
3. Put some music on and have a raucous, silly dance together, preferably with your own musical accompaniment!
4. Ask your kids to choose a book and all curl up in bed for a proper story time treat
5. Share a family talking circle and find out what each family member has been up to today
6. Make a camp out of chairs and bed-sheets
7. Watch the sunset together (or, if it’s raining, do a bit of cloud-spotting!)
8. Set off on a weekend camping adventure
9. Plan your family weekend over fruity family ‘mocktails’
10. Snuggle up and watch a favourite film together
