Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 282 | Top 5 Ways to Integrate Family Without Sacrificing Work

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Ep. 282 | Top 5 Ways to Integrate Family Without Sacrificing Work · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Never max out your work time with how much work you have. All right, guys, welcome to another 5-Minute Fatherhood. I wanted to do a little list with you guys. Top five tips to integrate family without sacrificing work. We had a couple of dads in our Facebook group mention that, man, how do you do this thing? How do you work from home when your kids are running around and you feel distracted all the time? So we're going to go back and forth. Jeff, what's one of the things that has helped you guys?
• 0:27
  Yeah. So I love this one really easy one is just make sure mealtimes are with the kids or something like that. So I always, you know, and it's, you know, different if you have to go to office, whatever, everyone's in quarantine right now. So I would mostly, so I would say, yeah, like, you know, try to have the breakfast with the family or try to have lunch with the family and don't just like, you know, functionally put food in your mouth, but just elevate it one little bit, you know, take five minutes and like read a funny joke or a story that you looked up before then or something like that. But activating mealtimes to kind of be a little bit more sacred and special, even if they're 10 minutes long, 15 minutes long, if they're intentional, 10 minutes
• 0:57
  That's good. All right, guys. Tip number two. I really, when I was taking my kids even to the office, but I would do this when I work from home as well, is I like to work a schedule of 15 minutes on, 10 minutes off when I'm with around the kids. And so that really allows me to be a little bit more strict about like, okay, I'm on, but every 10 minutes I came out and said, how you guys doing? What are you working on?
• 1:19
  Now, when I was taking one of my kids to work every day, this really was critical. So you can imagine all my meetings ended, you know, instead of having them back to back, they were 15 minutes long instead of 60 minutes long. So I had 10 minute break in between, which is for me better for productivity anyway. There's a lot of research around that. And so during that 10 minute break, I just need to walk around, clear my head. I always like just walked up to I had one of my kids with me, you know, and they were working.
• 1:42
  even when they're really young and just working on like homework or, you know, puzzles or whatever. And I'd sit down and say, how are you doing? Like, how is it working? You kind of stimulate them a little bit, encourage them a little bit, make sure that they're on to the next thing before I jump back into my work. So that sort of 15 minutes on, 10 minutes off, that kind of rhythm really worked well for us.
• 2:01
  I love that. I'm stealing that one. So I'm gonna start that next week. The next one for me is I call it sometimes hump week or just give every day a name, stuff like that. But essentially, what I love about that one is at least have times in the week where you are, you can be dedicated to your work, and the kids know it and have times in your week where you're going to be a little bit.
• 2:21
  it's like they know that they're going to get you all in, not kind of half on your phone or whatever, you know? And so an easy one for us, there's a lot of moments in the week, but the big one that everyone looks forward to is Wednesday is our field trip day. So that always means like my phone stays at home. We go out, we go to the park, we go for a walk, we go to the beach, anything like that, you know, two, three, four hour chunk, not even, you know, my phone's not even with me. You know, Alyssa has one just in case something happens or something, but stuff like that. If I can, so then they can look forward to that. But then I also can, you know, be working hard on Monday and Tuesday because they know that's coming, stuff like that. So that
• 2:49
  Awesome. So one for me is exercising with your kids in the middle of the day. What a lot of dads do in order to make sure they're exercising is they do it first thing in the morning, which is great. And there's seasons where that makes the most sense. But there are also times where it might make sense to do it with your kids. And so integrating it into, for me, I just learned that I sort of start burning out from all the social activity. I need a break and exercising in the middle of the day really increased my productivity a lot.
• 3:18
  And so, um, and so if you, whatever that is for you, if that you can go, you know, for a run, push in the stroller, take your kids for a bike ride. As my kids got older, I started taking them to the gym with me, um, things like that. So a lot of times, instead of just seeing some of these things as like, I just got to knock these things out first thing in the morning, or, um, you know, when my kids aren't around, if you can integrate your kids into that, that works really well. Um, a friend, friends of ours, um, the crew tops, I don't know, I can't remember what their URL is, but Brenton, um,
• 3:43
  Katie Kruhtoff have a whole website around how to exercise with your kids that they've done. So you check that out. But yeah, that can be really integrate them into things that they might fit into.
• 3:56
  Yeah, exactly. And last one is just kind of roll with the punches and roll with interruptions. And, you know, it might sound counterintuitive to of what I said, even to that last one of just like have specific names and days. But the best analogy or word picture I can give is one thing that's been really helpful for us that is allowed me to really roll with interruptions because it happens all the time. Toddlers stuff comes up, etc.
• 4:14
  is never max out your work time with how much work you have. And what I mean by that is, you know, if you have eight hours to work or something, only do six hours of work or something like that, right? Because something will come up. You'll get tired. That's what happens to me. That's the main reason for me is like I just need a break more than I think. Something happens with the kids.
• 4:32
  Something happens with Alyssa, anything like that, right? It's just like money, right? Where if you guess how much you're going to spend on something and it's $10 over and you have $50, you know, flex, then you're like, oh, well, we went over. That's a bummer. Kind of check it next time, you know? But if you don't have that, if you spend right up to what you have, then you get super stressed. And that's where a lot of times people don't roll with the interruptions because they don't have those extra minutes. Now that takes a lot of practice, right? Even back to the money example, if every week we're always spending $10 extra, we're
• 5:01
  well then that actually is us not adjusting either. So we need to also go back and say, hey, we're doing that every week. Let's just not even, let's just say that's the plan now, you know, stuff like that. So that's how you roll with interruptions is kind of being adaptable, agile, and dynamic in that sense.