Work-life balance is almost impossible to achieve. How can you when you are basically tied to your job and your family? There are no boundaries to your work and personal life. Your work spills over to your personal time and vice-versa. When employees begin working from home because of the pandemic, this has been more of a problem than a solution. Although people love the idea of spending more time with their families because they are staying more at home, it also means that they have to mix work and family together. This is always a challenging situation.
But what if your problem is more than about time management? What if you are in the middle of divorce proceedings? How can you separate your family problems from work?
Get a Good Lawyer
First thing’s first. Hire a good lawyer. There are many components about divorce, child custody, and adoption, which are the usual family cases in court. If you do not get a good lawyer, you have to do things on your own. You have to research and try to decide on your own. This is the worst thing to happen to someone who’s already juggling many things. Make sure that your lawyer is an expert in the case you face in court. A divorce lawyer should be hired if you’re legally separating from your spouse. At the same time, you need competent child custody lawyers if there are children involved in the divorce. So, get a good lawyer and put your worries at rest.
Talk to Your Boss
If you face a big personal problem at home, better talk to your boss about it. Anyone will understand that these problems might affect your productivity at work. It’s okay to just give your boss a head’s up regarding your issues. That’s much better than surprising them about your unproductiveness at work. At the same time, don’t deliberately be unproductive. Even though your boss understands what you are going through, that’s not a good reason to be irresponsible at work.
Negotiate Flexible Hours
For a win-win situation in the office, ask if you do flexible hours. This means coming in and out as you please as long as you finish what you should do. In fact, if you can afford it, you can even work part-time for a while until such time that you fix your problem. Of course, this is always a big disruption at work. The management might not even allow it despite your good standing in the company. So, a good deal would be for them to allow you to work flexible hours as this will not be disruptive to their work and the time you have to spend with your family.
Plan Things in Advance
The workweek is always when people are busiest. You can better prepare for Mondays if you use a couple of hours of your weekends doing work you should do on Monday. This way, you can better face whatever problem is facing you during weekdays. Most court appearances—if you are in that process—will be on weekdays. If you manage to squeeze in work on weekends, then it means you have time on weekdays to attend to your case. Again, this will only work if you own the company or your boss allows it.
Find Help
You cannot do this all alone. Even if you are in the middle of a divorce, you should ask your spouse to do their part in taking care of the household or kids. That’s unless, of course, the issue is child abuse; then it’s impossible to leave your kids to your spouse. You can also tap the help of friends and family who can be your number two and three. You need all the support you can get in such a difficult time. Hopefully, someone will take in your kids while you run errands, fix work, and attend meetings with your lawyers.
Take Time for Yourself
As always, getting burnt out is all part of trying to juggle work and family life. When you have problems in the family, that’s all the more reason you have to take time for yourself. The only way to be productive both at work and at home is to rest and breathe it all in. Nothing good comes out of running yourself to the ground. It only opens up ways to abuse yourself and others.
Don’t feel like the world is ending whenever you have to face family problems. While you shouldn’t let it affect your work, you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself if it sometimes does. Humans fail and make mistakes. What’s important is for you to recognize such mistakes and do your best not to repeat them again.
