We have three children still living at home – a one-year old, a four-year old and a seventeen-year old. Working a normal job just wouldn’t give me me enough time to take care of everything for our family.
My partner works a full-time job. She does work from home but because I have set my job up to be as flexible as possible, I do lots of the heavy lifting of other bits around the house. Family admin or ‘fadmin’ as we call it is mostly done by me. I manage all of the bills, doctors appointments, school runs etc. I try to make my partner’s home life as easy as possible so that once she finishes work, she can relax and does not need to worry about all of the extra work that being an adult involves.
My Weekly Schedule
Mondays / Wednesdays / Thursdays
These are normal work days for me. Our four-year old is at nursery so this is the time for me to get work done. Assuming all goes well, I only work three days a week, roughly 8.45am to 4.30pm with a 30-60 minute break during the middle of the day.
I wake up around 6.30am and the first thing I do is check my e-mails. I know lots of people advise against this as receiving a stressful e-mail can immediately get you off to a bad start. My reasoning is that I worked in technical support for many years and I was always on edge if I didn’t know that everything was working as it should. If I got into work and found that a system was down, that could dominate my whole day trying to get things back to normal. The fallout would also impact other people trying to do their work and it would just cause stress. I would rather know that something has gone wrong as soon as possible so that I can fix it. I can deal with it straight away and hopefully fix any issues before anyone else notices. If I don’t check my messages, I am carrying around the stress of something might be wrong until I know it isn’t.
I then try to jump in the shower before the children wake up. I get ready then wake up our four-year old. My partner normally takes care of the one-year old first thing then we meet downstairs for coffee whilst the children come out of their sleepy daze.
We take it in turns to go back upstairs to finish getting ready whilst the other one looks after the little ones. During this time our daughter will get up and come down to join us whilst she gets ready for college.
Around 8.20a.m. it’s time to get the four-year old off to nursery meaning I’m back home for 8.45a.m. Our one-year old is looked after during the day by his nan so that frees my partner and I up to get some work done.
I’ve stopped taking calls directly now for over a year so my day is usually fairly free of interruptions. I get to my desk and skim through my e-mails again and then work through my list of jobs.
My work is currently divided into a few different businesses – web design, web hosting and ecommerce. I’ll work through bits depending on what is urgent and what I feel like doing, leaving the boring bits until the afternoon.
At midday I’ll go for a dog walk for 30-60 minutes then head back and grab some lunch. I’ll normally be back to work around 1.30pm, leaving me another three hours of work. This takes me up to 4.30p.m. when I usually down tools to go and do the nursery pick-up.
Once home from nursery, I now have two boys in the house so there’s no chance of getting any other work done so this usually means that, all going well, I have around 17-18 hours of work time a week but trying to fit it all into that time can be tricky.
At 5-5.30pm my partner finishes work. She also works at home but is employed so works full time. She comes down, takes the two boys and I head off for another dog walk, heading home at 6pm for dinner. Then it’s bedtime for the little ones meaning that we are usually free by 8p.m.
I try to get to bed by 10.30pm so the time before this is used to catch up on any outstanding work or free time to relax.
Tuesdays and Fridays
Our four-old only goes to nursery three days a week meaning that Tuesdays and Fridays are ‘Dad Days’. I take care of them and this means that generally I do not do any work. There has been the odd urgent thing to take care off but usually these days are off limits for work.
Saturdays and Sundays
These are family days and both my partner and I do everything we can to stay off of the laptops. We’ll do things with the children, go out shopping or just do bits around the house. Anyone seen in possession of a laptop will be given a death stare!
