Family Life

When you work from home, coworkers can’t bother you with idle chitchat, noisy phone calls and weird lunch smells. But your kids can, and they will. And you can also bother them, although hopefully not with strange smells. Your family can be your number one stressor and the number one benefit when working from home. How you interact with your family during the workday can affect your overall quality of life.

Family tension caused by working from home is not discussed often due to how personal it is. People might say that they stopped working from home because there were too many distractions, but they might not say out loud that it hurt their marriage or relationship with their kids.

When talking about work and family life together, the term work-life balance is usually brought up. It typically means: Is my employer asking too much of me?. The way we determine too much is to compare it to other opportunities. Are the hours sane for our industry, is the schedule consistent? Do I need to work weekends or nights, and if so, how much warning will I get? These are all excellent questions, but they miss the real point.

I don’t believe that the term work-life balance strikes the right chord. To use the word balance, it seems like there is some equality for both sides. But your life isn’t on one side of a see-saw while your work is on another. Your job can fire you or disappear in a few weeks, and twenty years from now your family will still be a part of your life, and your work might not be. One side serves and supports the other; they are not balanced.

We shouldn’t seek a balance between our work and life but an intertwined work-life harmony. We set strict boundaries for certain things and allow the rest to intermingle organically. We should want to have our children and spouses know more about our work and for our work to even know about our families.

A very strict separation between work and normal life is needed in some industries that deal with more serious matters; I’m not proposing a surgeon invites their children into the operating room and tells them to sit quietly and watch their iPads, but I am saying that both the children and the surgeon can benefit from the natural dynamic of being in or near the hospital and understanding her job. We should be as we are all the time.

Building this harmony is not easy, and this challenge surprises many. Your daily schedule affects theirs directly, and not being in sync with them can alter both of your lives. Mismatched expectations related to housework, regular schedule, noise levels, and interruptions can cause extra stress. The topics apply most directly to your spouse and children but can also affect the relationships with anyone that you live with: your roommates, in-laws, live-in boyfriend, pet lizard, etc.

Understanding Expectations

When you start working from home, your family will have expectations about what this means for them. Home is where you relax and build your lives together, so you being there more often has to be a good thing. On the surface, it seems like having a warm body at home to receive packages, let the insect repellent service inside, and perhaps get ahead on household chores would be all upside. Also, if your spouse already works from home or has stopped working to care for your children, it would seem that having you both at home would carry with it all sorts of benefits. In those desperate times when they need to run a 15-minute errand without the kids along, wouldn’t it be great to be able to leave kids at home with you? And won’t it be great to eat lunch together every day and have another adult in the house?

As you move to remote work, you realize that you are just as busy as you were before, and arguably more so with extra communication and organizational tasks as you get used to this new way of working. As easy as it might seem, cleaning the dishes during your lunch break every day is additional work that isn’t easy to get done consistently. And knowing that your spouse will make a few unexpected requests each week for you to watch kids, or sign for a package, or run an errand adds stress.

Your kids might think that you working from home sounds excellent as well. It’s great to have Mom or Dad at home when you get home from school. They can help you with homework and provide consistency to your day. But when you get home, and Mom or Dad greet you at the door with a phone in their hand telling you to lower your voice, it isn’t as pleasant. When they seem to put up with you in the afternoon or try to avoid you when they take breaks, it doesn’t make you feel important.

The reality is that many of the benefits of working from home are upsides for the worker but downsides for their family. Here are some more examples of how large the gap can be between a benefit to you and a challenge for your family.

Change for You	Consequence for Your Spouse and Children
You can achieve higher productivity because you don’t have to deal with others slowing you down	You are less patient with everybody
You don’t have to worry about what people think of you as you work	They now live with a person who thinks that eating cereal with eggnog instead of milk is totally normal
You no longer have to shave or get all dressed up for work	They now live with a slightly less clean, slobby-looking version of you
You have full-time unmonitored access to the Internet and kitchen	They live with a more juvenile and chubbier version of you
You are always around the house	They never get a break from you
You escape a noisy office, and get to work from a quiet home	They see you always yelling at your kids to be quiet

The way to overcome this expectation is to understand your family’s expectations and set boundaries for what you can and can’t do to get your work done without completely disrupting their day.

Setting Clear Boundaries

As we discussed in Chapter 3: Sacred Space and Chapter 2: Clock-In Clock-Out, you should take work seriously, have a set area of your home to work in, and an established schedule that provides clear expectations for when you are working and when you aren’t. For those that live with you and are around during the day, these boundaries are crucial.

The Danger of Being Too Helpful

Years ago, my home office had a door that locked, but my wife had no issue barging in ten times a day to ask me a question or chat.

There were two basic reactions that I would have to this:

If I was making good progress at work, I would be in a good mood and willing to chat, but after she left, I would realize that all momentum had now stopped, and then be grumpy about it later.
If I wasn’t making progress, apart from watching all the videos on the Internet, interrupting me would shine a spotlight on my procrastination, which made me grumpy.

Her interrupting me drove me nuts either way. With people in the house during the day, I needed to present a way for them to know that I was heads-down working and not available for a quick chat. It seems natural for them to ask you a quick question, but your home office’s rules should be that you are not there until you complete work and come out.

Imagine that you drive to an office thirty minutes away: what concerns would they text you, call you, or wait until the end of the day to discuss? They should treat you in this way to ease the burden of constant interruptions or anticipated interruptions. Here are some example boundaries that you can set:

Set up a regular break schedule: I take a lunch break at 12 and another at 3:30, every day. This means that everyone in the house knows that they can chat with me then.
Set up a regular interrupt protocol: Real emergencies can always interrupt, emergencies can be defined as things that they would call you about if you were in an office 30 minutes away. The school called and we need to pick up a kid is a good example.
Set up a casual interrupt protocol: If somebody needs you for something eventually, then tell them to start a message with that, or write you an email vs. texting you or knocking on the door. Dad, I need help with algebra when you can is a good example.

Many who work from home have jobs requiring deep work where they need long blocks of time to get into a concentrated state and maintain it. Explaining this to your spouse and children can help, but is tricky. The message to communicate is not that your work is somehow more important than their question (and by extension, them and their needs), but that it is more delicate and time-sensitive. Not no but not right now. Describing focus-based work is easier if you compare it to concepts they are already familiar with, like building a tower with Lego, doing a puzzle, working on some tough homework, or writing a long term paper. Look to establish a system in which you are interrupted only when truly needed so that you can trust in your ability to establish long blocks of time for work. This will take some practice. Provide graceful, respectful feedback during any interruption in the beginning to make it clear.

Establish a way for the kids to know when you are in work mode or family mode; you can signal with something physical. Mr. Rogers, who changed his sweater and shoes upon getting home, is a great example. Even though I’m wearing comfortable clothes, I still go upstairs and put on different shoes when the workday ends. When I come back downstairs, I’m Dad.

Creating Space

The benefit of being so close can also be a challenge. When you work remotely, you are around much more, maybe too much. Being away from them makes you appreciate time with them more and vice versa. It is natural for your spouse and children to have their own lives. The dynamic with your spouse can turn into that of a coworker; would it be healthy for your wife to work in the same office as you, or could it cause conflict? Do they need to know every detail of your day simply because they are present more often? Please don’t complain to them simply because they are there.

For spouses that are also at home, working there most directly affects the raw amount of time you are around. Every relationship is different, but your spouse’s love language[1] might not be Quality Time. If so, you being around for another 40-ish hours a week can harm your relationship rather than help it.

Spending so many additional hours with your spouse and children might not be healthy for you either. Work can be a good break from any stress and frustrations at home and vice versa. Many enjoy the office’s time as it fills an emotional need present within them for respect and a break from stressors at home. Accomplishing things at work is cut and dry: you can tell if you are doing well or not. At home, relationships are messier, and life might be more chaotic. Many derive great emotional benefits from getting away occasionally and working away from their home. Seek the right balance of time focused on work and time focused on the family.

Resetting Your Expectations

You might have to manage your own expectations as well. If you do your best work in a quiet space with frequent phone or video calls, there is a clear need for an additional boundary: noise. Even if you are lucky enough to have an office in a quiet part of the house with a door that shuts, you will find that bursts of noise or the sounds of scampering little feet might distract you. These noises might not be loud, but your body is trained to find them important: the sound of your children fighting or your spouse stubbing her toe and teaching you a new curse word are not noises that are easy to ignore. You don’t want to train yourself to ignore the screams of your family. Instead, find a way not to hear them in the first place. A good pair of headphones is one of the best investments to keep your office quiet.

Additionally, part of the noise problem is managing your own expectations. You can’t easily control all noise in your house, but offices aren’t always quiet places either. We might add in expectations of quiet during calls, but find that many of the others on the call are taking them from loud offices, taxis, or airports. Have some grace with yourself and your coworkers regarding background noise.

For example, during my first few years working this way, we had very young children of the eardrum-testing variety. There is no sound like hungry twin six-month-olds. My role involved being on long conference calls, and I was very stressed about how loud my kids were. I was in a room with the door shut, but it felt like they were sitting on my shoulders screaming at my coworkers. Every call had additional stress, and I would find myself getting frustrated at my wife for not preventing the problem. Of course, it is impossible to quiet kids down at that age and possibly unhealthy to do as they get older. Kids are loud. My stress didn’t do me any good, but a decent set of noise-canceling headphones combined with a proper hardware mute button helped. And in polling my coworkers, I found that because of people’s natural ability to ignore background noise, it wasn’t nearly as big of a deal as I felt it was. Their typical response was, “What? Oh yeah, I guess now I sort of hear that a little - I wasn’t sure what it was.” or “No, I hadn’t noticed at all”.

You might also have to reset your expectations around how flexible your schedule really is as it becomes even more critical to providing consistency for your kids. Adjust to what works for them as much as possible. An afternoon coffee break right when your children get home is an excellent way to greet them and then disappear again as they do homework or play. Block out the thirty minutes when they arrive so that you aren’t in the middle of a tense phone call when they come in the door with a noise equal to an aircraft carrier running ashore. I have taken a 3:30 PM break for years, so my family knows that if they need me for anything in the hours before that, I’m always going to take a break then and help them. It works for both sides.

Your Kids and Your Work

It might seem like we are trying to keep our kids away from our work with all these boundaries. But working near your children is a great, natural, and powerful opportunity to teach them about work and how to be a professional while enjoying your work. To put it in parent-speak, working in front of your kids creates a lot of teachable moments: small, unplanned situations in which life lessons show up in the real world.

The stakes are high. They see your work and the messages that they hear from you affect what they think of work, how they should act at work, and why we work. If you try to separate your work from them completely, you will fail, and if you always communicate that work is terribly important, tedious, or stressful, then this is what they will think. They hear and see everything you do; you send messages without meaning to do so.

Our kids are watching everything, and we can accidentally send messages that we don’t believe with our behavior:

Work is something that you tolerate, that you have to do even if you don’t like it.
Work is a calling, is done out of passion, and is fun.
Work is done to support the family.
Work is Mom/Dad’s favorite thing, and the family is secondary.

You probably only want to send two of these four messages, and if you work in an office, you get to tell the kids what you thought after the fact. But now they see a more unfiltered real-time version of work, so you must be careful what you show them. You have a unique opportunity to speak directly into their lives about work.

When my daughter Chloe was four, she built me a home office in Minecraft[2]:

I didn’t ask her to, and she didn’t ask me any questions before construction started. My office was at the top of a tall tower, and you could only get to it by opening a door, speaking to a security guard and signing into a book, and then climbing about ten flights on a ladder.

At the top of the tower, I had a bookcase, a computer, a clock, and a chair. The walls were windows so that I could watch her and her sister play, but not hear them.

I need space, but I want to be nearby. I had a system in place for when I could be interrupted, which she expressed as a judge that decides if someone can climb up the ladder right now. She had picked up on all of this from just overhearing me work and how I reacted, at four years old.

How to Talk to Your Kids About Work At Their Level

To better allow them to interact with you and understand why you need space or quiet, it helps to explain work to them in an age-appropriate way. There are certain topics that we have to explain to children hundreds of times in hundreds of ways as they mature, and work is one of them.

When your children are very young in the years before kindergarten, they will not understand why Mommy or Daddy has to leave and go into one room of the house and play on the computer without letting them have a turn. They have no concept of work, homework, or even things that must-be-done-so-that-we-can-all-have-tacos. The best approach here is to make a clear physical signal of when you are working and when you aren’t and to make the most of your breaks to play with them. You might find yourself sneaking out of your office to go to the bathroom because you realize that every time you see them, you should probably play for a few minutes, which isn’t possible all the time. Don’t feel guilty about this reality. When you are done working, make a huge deal about how happy you are to see them.

Once they go to school, they start to understand responsibility, and through school, they will understand that there are some things that must be done. Learning the concept of homework helps here. It is important at this age to be comfortable with them watching you and asking questions. You don’t want to give the impression that work is somehow unpleasant, secret, or boring. If you yell every time they mess with things on your desk or interrupt, you reinforcing that work, and perhaps homework, are terribly stressful. They will want to help you work, and you should create opportunities to let them type or draw or give you insight into the market analysis report you are working on (you can always edit their changes later if you don’t agree with them).

Years ago, I printed out a chapter of something I was working on and showed it to my daughter Sarah and asked her to be an editor. She added the word Sarah to each page and scratched out all the other text. While I appreciate her focus on brevity, many of my words made it back in the later drafts. My other children have held important jobs related to my work in the past, such as:

Replacing my Keurig cup in my coffeemaker and then making some new coffee when they get home from school.
Keeping the printer stocked with paper.
Taking out the trash in my office.
Putting more batteries in my mouse.

Now Sarah is a teenager, and she is earning money by drawing a cover illustration for my next book[3]. I’m using the process to teach her how design projects work, as sort of a loose apprenticeship.

When your children get into late elementary and middle school, they start to have enough knowledge that you can truly explain what it is that you do and perhaps get them involved directly. At this age, children will be interested in what it is you are working on now, and you should still double down on the communication that they are more important than any work that you have to do. Around this age, they learn about what home-schooling is, and there are some good similarities between home-schooling and home-working that you can use to explain the situation.

As they get older, get used to the idea that interrupting you is as important as your boss doing so. They pick up on any signal that you give them; they can tell when you are stressed at this age, and when you are just politely listening but really worried about some loose end at work. Be careful that you don’t send the wrong message. A former coworker of mine would occasionally say: “Hold on just one second, someone very important just walked into my office” and then return a few moments later. Many thought it was because he was working in an office, and perhaps some important executive had wandered in, and he needed to be interrupted, but it was just what he did whenever his children or his spouse walked into his home office. This is the message you want to send.

You hear it so often it is a cliche, but your time with your children goes by fast. The Halloween years, roughly ages 2 - 12, when they want to dress up but before they think it is lame, are powerful in a child’s life, and you cannot repeat them. For most of us, these same years are when we are most focused on earning income. The overlap of so many hours away from your children just when you can influence is brutal and challenging. Working from home is one of the most powerful tools to gain time during those years.

It wasn’t that long ago that people used to work near their children. A natural apprenticeship would develop as the children slowly started helping rather than play mimicking the adult. I don’t expect my children to do what I do, but seeing my work is good for us both. Working from home gives us a chance to apprentice our children to integrate work into their overall lives.

Find and Use Your Flexibility

Every one of us has learned how to send emails on Sunday night. But how many of us know how to go a movie on Monday afternoon. You’ve unbalanced your life without balancing it with someone else. // Ricardo Semler

When you get dressed up, drive to an office, and work away from your children and spouse, you get separation from them for a few hours a day, and you can use this space to build a slightly different version of yourself at work. Perhaps you are very loving and funny with your kids, but direct, critical, and severe at work. It certainly isn’t bad to behave differently at work, but if the differences grow too large, it isn’t healthy.

One of the true powers of working from home is that it allows you to be yourself all the time. You find that you are suddenly cursing less on conference calls when at home, or that your wife comments about your “work voice” disappearing, or you start to enjoy your kids breaking the tension of a hard work problem by spraying water at the outside window of your office.

I mentioned before that we should seek work-life harmony instead of work-life balance. Be careful that the real demands of your job and the perceived demands of your job don’t get confused. Your role might need you to stay at your desk all day, ready to respond to some work semi-emergency, or it might need eight hours of focused work from you each day, no matter the schedule. Some jobs require the right answers and don’t care as much about the time spent.

A few years ago, this difference hit me, and I realized that it was limiting the freedom that working from home provides because I thought that I couldn’t take a few hours in the middle of the day to spend with my kids. I realized that I had learned how to hide the fact from my boss that our kitchen just flooded, or that my daughter is sick, or that I’m stressed about something else from home. But I hadn’t learned how to hide from my kids that I’m stressed about some upcoming executive meeting, risky deadline, or work emergency. That difference was killing any work-life harmony. I needed to realize that it can flex in both directions; I could take 30 minutes and help my daughter with her homework, just as quickly as I could take 30 minutes on a Saturday to respond to some work emergency.

Working around our families can be the best and most challenging part of working remotely. They are so important to us, and we are working partially for them, but they can accidentally be obstacles to us doing great work, and our jobs can hinder our ability to care for them like we want to. Using the techniques we outlined, we can establish boundaries that allow for more free time to be the parents, partners, and employees that we want to be.