Work Remotely With Kids Full House: How To Work Remotely With Kids?

The new reality has affected a lot of people. For you, it may have happened for the first time. Now you’re working from home with your partner and kids around.

For most of us, the change requires effort. The Internet is now literally loaded with tips on setting up an effective environment for your home office.

Companies that went 100% remote share their stories, manuals, etc. (You can read our own business guide here). You, our customers and readers, shared some tips too.

I went through all this information and put together a summary. It will not work for everybody, but I hope that at least some of you will find it helpful when you’re working remotely with kids at home.

You can check out our repository where I am also sharing my own story of how I put this guide into practice.

1. Accept limitations

When you work remotely with kids, your day will not be the same as it was when you worked from an office. Struggling to find peace and quiet from 9 am to 5 pm, at times you will most likely get frustrated.

You now have to do things differently. Accept it.

2. Plan your new scheme

Most typically, you stayed at home with your partner, who also needs to adapt to deliver remote work – respect that.

Depending on your situation (household setup, kids or other responsibilities) there will be different things to cope with.

Have a cup of coffee or a glass of wine together and define your challenges. Make a list. Figure out how to manage various situations. Here is my own example.

My example schedule

Each of us has to find the way that suits best. Here is how I am doing it.

My kids (Alek 7 y.o., Staszek 6 y.o.) get bored, yours too? And when they do, they start fighting over something abstract like “did the dinosaurs die because of the new coronavirus”.

My wife (Anna, she’s been around a bit) is a highly-reactive person, meaning that while I can focus in virtually any conditions, she is distracted by the kids laughing in the next room.

If we don’t have a plan, we will end up somewhere dark right around Wednesday.

Objective

To reduce the number of situations when the kids go crazy and we can’t work.

How do we plan to achieve it?

• The kids are left with some highly self-engaging activity (the only way to manage a situation when we are both taking calls or need to focus)
• One of us is engaged in an activity with the kids (most effective in creating conditions to focus for the other partner)
• Both of us are engaged in an activity with the kids (works only if no critical tasks like calls are to be delivered).

What do we need to succeed?

We are open to planning our day differently than usual 

• • Organizing our working time to save some space for the kids during the day
  • Trying to maximize the productivity of the time we spent on commuting 
  • Being more flexible with our working hours
  • Accepting the fact that maybe we will have to start our day earlier than usual.

We will split duties

• • When needed, one of us will take a break and get involved in activities with kids, so that the other can continue work
  • We agree on the “a call is a priority, self-work is flexible” rule and support each other accordingly
  • We made call times visual to help us follow that.

Kids’ IKEA whiteboard reinvented, guess who works in HR!

We look for available working space in our 64m² flat

• • Bedroom: fine, quiet, good for a call or up to 1,5 hours of undisrupted work (more than that will end up in backache), weak wi-fi (needs a hotspot)
  • Kitchen/ living room: preferred, as the dining table is the only adult-sized-desk we have, good wi-fi, close to the coffee machine; cons: the only room with the TV and console, and we don’t want to change that (we simply need to take it into consideration when scheduling calls, etc.)
  • Kids’ room: conditions the same as in the bedroom
  • Balcony: a good place to make quick calls, but need to be careful with sensitive customer info when talking loudly.

The kids are easier to handle when separated

• Our kids share one room, so we will try to create an equally attractive space for them to play separately
• We will prepare self-engaging activities (I have gathered some ideas here: Self-engaging activities for kids)
• If needed, we will split kids and:
  • involve them in different self-engaging, learning activities and encourage them to share this knowledge later
  • make them prepare different kinds of puzzles for each other – hopefully, they will spend some time solving them 😉

My new schedule

This is how I plan to manage it this week (a general idea, before each day I plan the next schedule in detail with my wife):

This is just a framework. I accept the fact that it may not work that way every day and I am ready to improvise.

Alek (left) and Staszek (right). What can possibly go wrong?