Tips for Working From Home With a Baby

This pandemic has turned everything topsy-turvy. As I type this, I have been working from home for 7 months, and that is the current new normal. With that, we have an ever-growing baby (turning toddler), at home, with just me and my husband.

Here are the tips I’ll impart based on what I’ve learned working from home with a baby. Spoiler Alert: it is hard and it sucks sometimes. Hopefully, this guide can help keep you sane and in control of the hours you have in the day.

Note: these experiences are only based on a one child household.

Learn to say no

Saying no is one of humanity’s inherent flaws. Most of us just don’t know how to say it, especially in a work or professional environment. However, if you’re trying to juggle your personal and work life in one roof, which one would you prefer?

In my case, I prefer my personal life, so I do say no to a lot of unnecessary things work-wise. I’ve learned to say no to last minute meeting invites that don’t have an agenda. I’ve also learned to say no to last minute tasks that are originally not part of my day and need to be delivered that same day.

See: The Cubicle Dweller’s Manifesto

Unless you have some leeway after your 9-5 schedule, then you can probably tackle on that extra work and negotiate about deadlines, but you’ll have to be strict about your schedules.

After all, there will always be deadlines, there will always be urgent requests, but the most urgent request that you should attend to will have to be the wailing of the baby.

A crying baby is definitely not a good thing to hear, especially if he or she has already gone into full-out screaming/crying mode and you still have to do things at home or at work.

Set priorities/Write lists

I’ve since set up priorities per day with a rough idea of the tasks I want to accomplish. However, I do have a list that I write on an almost daily basis on what I need to accomplish at home.

That way, I can stay on top of our extracurricular, side hustle, business, and personal life, even though we also have full time jobs. You can opt to write lists on tasks you need to accomplish at work too if it helps you get organized.

Nothing is more fulfilling that ticking something off a list, don’t you think?

I’ll admit that I dropped a few things on my plate every now and again, and our online business is taking a beating as I don’t get to update and concentrate on the the two blogs we own as often as I need to.

Even with a content calendar and a list of topic ideas, where does one find the time to balance house chores, spending time with family, researching travel and deals, and working full time all at the same time?

Honestly, I pretty much only find time to write and look at our online business when the in-laws are over to take care of the baby. Sometimes the baby may fall asleep early, giving us a few hours to finish tasks related to full-time work or our online business. Sleepless nights are also a good time to get in some extra hours writing.

Talk to your partner/husband/wife about your schedule

There are days when one partner is busier than the other, then there are days when both of you are busy. At the start of every morning or before the end of the evening the night before, we try to talk about the hours where we have leeway on when we can take care of the baby.

If my husband has a 7:30AM call, then that means the baby will be with me from 7:25 until around 9:00AM when I need to turn on my computer and log in to work.

If I have a free few minutes because I want to take a break from work or I finished early, then I take the baby from the husband and look after him while he goes back to work.

It would help if your job does not need you to be online at all times during the regular 9-5 schedule. My husband’s is not, as long as he delivers the job that he needs to do within the end of the day.

Unfortunately, my job is really demanding that I be online from 9-5, so my poor husband has to make up some work at the end of the day, usually in the evenings from 7 until 11pm, especially if the kid is just being difficult that day.

Talk to your partner about your schedules and make it clear how to schedule stuff in. Also, no overtime for you unless there’s a really valid reason. If you spend more hours online than the usual 9-5 then it will mess up your partner’s schedule.

All time is created equal. Respect your family’s time.

Find your state of flow: what drives you?

The state of flow is where you actually can concentrate on a task at hand and finish it within a set period of time. What drives you to finish these tasks on time?

In our case, I want to finish as much work as I can during the time that the baby is sleeping in order to be able to step away from my desk whenever he needs me.

That means that when I do my job, I give it 110% and could even do things much faster than normal than when I’m actually working at the office. Hey, work from home parents are actually proven to be more productive and efficient with their time when it really matters.

Working at the office meant a lot of distractions, people walking up to you to chat, ask questions, or just hang out in general. At home, you get pings, chats, email, all of which can disappear with just a few clicks of the mouse by ignoring them. You see, you can’t ignore people in real life, but in the virtual world, you can!

Once I’m in a state of flow, I’m sorry, there’s no way you can take me out of that state unless the kid needs me, there’s an emergency, or I get hungry or need to attend to other personal needs.

Turn off online notifications

This is important: turn off all those annoying pop ups that you get whenever you get a new chat or an email. Take them out from the task bar at the bottom as well.

More tips about emails below, but for chat, the company I work for uses Microsoft Teams. I disable everything but if I get a new message, it just puts in a small number on the task bar, which I don’t look at a lot anyway.

Also, one more thing – hold off on turning on your chat application as much as you can whenever you first log in the morning. A lot of chat applications save your messages anyway, so when you do load them, chances are you’ll still get them.

I ignore chats if I’m in the state of flow or doing something important. It’s a menace and a distraction sometimes.

Check emails only at set hours

This is a thing I got from Chris Guillebeau’s Four Hour Work-Week. Confession: I only check emails when I’m done with one task and need to look for a particular email to start on a particular task.

I do not check emails in the middle of doing something. Doing this means ruining your flow and taking your attention away from something you need to do and concentrate on. Your brain needs a few more seconds to jump from one task to another, and those precious seconds are important when I need to get 20 things done in an hour.

Skim emails & ignore non-important ones

In relation to checking emails at set times, I also have a rule about skimming emails. If the subject line is empty or is not clear, I skip them. If the person who wrote the email could not be bothered writing a concrete subject line, then I can’t be bothered reading their email either.

Subject lines are there as a brief 1 sentence summary of what an email is about. I prefer to write stuff like “Query: blah blah” if I need to answer a question. The reader then knows that they have to respond and read through the email thoroughly.

Inbox zero peoples will probably have a heart attack with me but I skim through emails and leave a lot of them unread or have automatic rules that delete emails immediately. It’s just the way it is. There’s only so much time in the day that you could spend reading emails that don’t make sense or are just forwarded but are in no way related to the job you need to do.

Sorry not sorry, but I’m not one of those folks who reads work emails while at home at night or first thing in the morning.

Learn to take breaks

It has been proven that your brain clears itself whenever one takes a walk. Learn how to take breaks while you’re working your full time job.

It’s hard to just sit in one spot and position for hours at a time, and can cause physical issues like muscle aches and pains. It also leads to mental fatigue, headaches and just plain overwhelm.

When you take short breaks, between 5-10 minutes of walking around, talking to your partner, or playing with your baby, you refresh your brain and eyes from staring at the screen too much. If you’re stuck on one thing, having the small break allows you to blank out for a bit and can lead you to the new

Avoid installing work apps on your personal phone

One rule I also took to heart: never, ever download work apps on my personal phone. The only exception is if I need it for a secure access code to log in to a virtual machine when I need to work remotely.

Work apps include apps that allow you access to work emails, notify you of any events happening, or provide secure access codes to enable you to log in to any personal device while working remotely.

Do not read work emails on your personal device, this only means you’ll end up working more hours before you go to sleep or after you wake up. That means more working hours spent instead of actually spending time with your family or enjoying your personal time.

Read the book Do Nothing by Celeste Headley – she gives a great insight on why we feel so stressed, tired, and overworked all the time.

Surviving working from home with a baby

Hang in there mom or dad, the baby will soon become a toddler, and you will eventually get through the sleepless nights, work deadlines, and feeling like you can’t juggle everything at the same time.

If all else fails, you can look at other options, all of them require paying someone to do your work for you. You can opt to hire a nanny, drop the baby off in backup day, pay for a babysitter, find an au pair (if available).

Having a baby at home, especially if you’re a first time parent means learning new things all the time as you get acclimatized to the baby and your new habits.