In celebration of work-life balance

I find it difficult to blog nowadays as most of my time is spent on juggling. Juggling work, home, family, studies. I used to be really good at this but I think at the moment I have too much on and my life is not just yet organised enough. On the other hand, when I talk to some of my clients (I am doing a lot of mentoring and advising individuals nowadays) I often realise just how far I have come. I don’t mean to sound too proud, I simply see the stages of my life in their current choices and only this way I get to realise how much I have achieved in the last few years. But also how much I can share and teach. First of all the home – for those of us who work from home the quality of life is amazing comparing to office work, of course, but we also need to be very organised! I – for example – am not a clean person. So much so that as a child I had my own term for the mess in my room. ‘Creative chaos’ I used to call it knowing that lack of order is my underlying arty state of happiness – I need it! So now, as a person working from home, I have two jobs – the work itself and the office manager. The work is done by the social media adviser. The office manager, on the other hand, is planning, packing away, cleaning, ordering supplies, creating a work space out of a private home space. It’s easy to do but it costs time. Time that I have to add to my schedule but also suggest to my clients. My running partner used the word ‘contingency’ describing her freelance editing job and I think I would apply it to my home-office managerial position too. Maybe the additional time spent on ongoing supervision of our home-office spaces in not an unexpected expense in time (and sometimes money) but we often tend to think so. I can only compare it to those memes on Facebook where men joke about the time their wives spend without work on ‘doing nothing’ around the house and not realising that the house is clean, planned, equipped, supplied…And so I became my own office manager, ‘joking husband’, reviewer for one hour each day. I now bill it in my company time  (I used to ignore it for a long long time and try to do everything myself. It resulted in stress and a small impact on my health too and I will not let that happen again). So I urge you all, home-office workers, to consider your office managerial skills as a job role within the business. By doing so you will build it nicely into your daily routine and into your business planning too.