During the past few weeks I’ve experienced both the pull from family away from my work, and from my work away from my family. I try really hard to keep family time and work time very separate, but these past few weeks have been somewhat of an exception. I found myself often feeling that yucky feeling of stealing time away from one or the other.

The Night Shift

A few weeks ago I instituted a night-time work shift in order to catch up on some personal projects that have been dragging along. I sat down, looked at my schedule, and decided that the only way I was going to make meaningful progress was to work for a couple of hours four nights per week. When I made the case to my wife, a conversation which was much shorter than it should have been, she tentatively agreed and I jumped right into my work.

Now, I wanted to make sure I was still getting plenty of sleep, so I started right after we put the boys down to bed. If you have young kids, you know that putting the kids in their bed is only half a quarter of the battle. My wife ended up being the one who had to endure several interruptions and remind them 30 times about bed-time rules. Regardless of how much “agreed upon” freedom I had to work during that time, the feeling, that I should be sharing the responsibility that my wife was carrying on her own, kept growing and seeping into my attention.

Okay Dear, You Talk, I’ll Pretend to Listen

There were other distractions… Over the years we’ve found the great value in those last few hours after the kids are down, before we go to bed, to “catch up” and get on the same page. It’s amazing how much time you can spend in a house with another person and not have a meaningful conversation. We’d gotten into the healthy habit of talking about our days, talking about our calendars, etc. as we went about our night-time routines. Having not discussed very specific rules about my newly instituted work time, my wife expected at least to be able to get a few sentences in with me.

When I’m working, doesn’t really matter what it is, I have trouble focusing on anything else. For things like writing and developing this is especially true, but even for drawing and illustrating and things like that, I get so sucked in that I have a difficult time engaging the world around me. My wife, rightfully so because we hadn’t talked about it before hand, began to feel increasingly frustrated when she was not able to get even a fraction of meaningful attention from me.

Abandon Ship

It wasn’t too long before I abandon the night hours realizing that we hadn’t established it as a sustainable work practice, even on a temporary basis.

There are times when we become too relaxed about managing these exceptions in our schedules, and we need to snap back into being intentional about scheduling, communicating and defining work time and family time expectations. The reality is that sometimes our work load will require us to work extra hours from time to time. Rather than be surprised by these occurrences and let them cause undue stress, expect them and make a plan for managing and implementing exceptional work time.

Here are some intentional steps you can take when planning for extra work time:

Identify Your Exceptions
The first and most important thing you can do is to define your exceptions. For work time, it’s generally a temporary scheduling of work that falls outside of the normal working hours. If you don’t have a clearly defined work schedule, one of the best ways to identify exception hours is to ask the question, ‘Could I sustain these as regularly scheduled hours indefinitely?’

Define the Purpose
Exceptions in our working hours are not meant to be arbitrary. There has to be some goal or purpose for the exception. Ask the question, ‘What do I want to have accomplished by the time I’m done working these extra hours?’ This goes back to not being able to sustain it indefinitely. Without having a goal and a purpose in mind, there is nothing to drive that time and it opens you up to the risk of utilizing that time indefinitely or until you or your family becomes burned out.

Set an End Date
This is an important part of your exit strategy. Having a deadline on your goals and knowing that this exception is going to end, provides ample motivation for using the time wisely and effectively. It also provides reassurance to our family that they will not have to endure the potential burden of your extra working time forever.

Make a Strong Case
Before implementing exception work time, it is obviously important that you have a thorough and meaningful conversation with all those who will be affected by it. Maybe that’s just your spouse, or maybe it’s your spouse and kids. Before you go to them, have all of the previous points already in mind. You may even want to make a presentation that you can share with them in an official family meeting, including graphs and charts representing your investments and projections. It sounds silly to be “overly prepared” but the more informed you are, the more informed your family feels, the more you will all be on the same page when it comes to protecting that extra work time.

Gain Consensus From Everyone
Having everyone on board is vital. Even a decision not to have the extra work time causes the responsibility for the consequence of that decision (good or bad) to shift from only you to everyone involved in the decision. If everyone is on board with the decision to institute the exceptional work time, not only does it allow the responsibility of the outcome to be shared, but it provides greater accountability for the person doing the work.

Make the Rules
This is also a very important step. You must clearly outline the parameters. It’s easier to ask questions here and make arguments for or against certain rules, than it will be to work out those details when you’re in the middle of your work. This also serves to help everyone feel more on the same page and more on board with the decision.

Stick to the Plan
Once you’ve set goals and deadlines and made rules for your work, stick to the plan. In the hopefully rare case you need to do something like this again, it will help immensely if the people in the boat with you feel like they can count on you to follow what you agreed upon. If you need to change the rules, deadlines or goals, rather than make an executive decision (unless power has been granted to you to do so) have another meeting and make a case for those changes.

Nowhere are the lines between work and family more blurred, than in situations where we work for ourselves or from home. Allowing your family to be a part of the process of managing some of the work logistics can open the door to a better understanding of the role your work plays in your family’s life and well being, and ultimately serves to protect both.