The beginning of cooler weather has unfortunately brought a second wave of coronavirus and many states across the US have issued a second stay at home order. However, there are quite a few CPAs and other professionals who have been working from home ever since the first lockdown was issued in the spring, and you have kids who never went back to school in September like they normally would.
Whichever of the above two scenarios applies, this post at The Rules of Thumb blog from MoneyThumb is written for you. So if you are a CPA or other type of professional working from home, how do you navigate doing your job well when you have your kids there and you are responsible for their homeschooling? To start off, let us offer you this free ebook from Right Networks to help you handle this task successfully.
Below is a brief introduction to the free ebook:
Learn effective techniques for managing remote learning and your own workload while at home. It’s a fact of life in the pandemic: kids learning at home while parents also try to work at home. Whether it’s all day every day, a few days a week, or even a few hours a day, some level of time conflict is inevitable. Family conflict doesn’t have to be.
With some guidance from experts and a little preparation, CPAs and other professionals can balance working from home with homeschooling.
In this eBook, get tips on how to:
- Create a work schedule for yourself and a school schedule for your kids
- Properly set up a learning environment for kids and a working environment for you
- Get your CPA firm’s technology into shape so that handling home-based learning is easier
The above ebook can be a great reference for navigating these trying times, but we'd also like to refer to an article at Good Housekeeping titled I Work From Home and Also Homeschool My Kids: Here's How I Do It. The advice contained in that article is applicable to CPAs and other professionals who find themselves in the unique situation of working from home while homeschooling their kids. The article offers four main tips and we have listed those below with a bit of explanation, although we would advise you to read the article in full to get the most benefit from it:
- Give Yourself Time to Adjust--Be realistic, not pessimistic. This can help you emotionally preparing for a rocky start. This realism, in my experience, is essential for keeping your cool when kids push back. Give yourself and your kids space and grace to adjust to your new lifestyle.
- Create A Routine and Stick To It--It might seem like I’m splitting hairs, but it really is an important distinction. A schedule is rigid, but a routine order your days with flexibility.
- Unconventional Choices Make It Work--Homeschooling and working at home is hard, especially as you’re first getting started. The only way we’ve managed to make it work well for our family is by being flexible and open-minded.
- Less Is More--Think about how your kids spend their time in a more conventional school setting. Are they really doing hours of academic work each day? Probably not. Take into account transitions from class to class, the time it takes a teacher to work with 20 kids versus one, and the time kids spend in recess, gym, and lunch. Now, keep that same thing in mind any time you start to feel pressure for your kids to be doing school from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. If possible, keep up with the expectations your school district has set, but don’t stress if you can’t.
Hopefully, the above advice will help you make working from home and homeschooling your kids a pleasure most of the time instead of a nightmare. We would appreciate it if you would share this article on your social media page so that your peers can benefit from the information we have offered.
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