Balance Revisited

Many of us try to balance our home lives with our freelance writing careers and most of the time we succeed. We manage to get breakfast for children and get them off to school, talk to clients, meet deadlines, collect children, supervise homework and tuck them up in bed. All without breaking a sweat (most of the time, anyway). Then there are the other times.

Those are the times where nothing goes according to plan. All of a sudden you are racing against the clock, trying to cram in all those essential tasks you thought you had left enough time for. As I’ve discovered, it doesn’t take much to derail the working day. An unexpected phone call can lose you half an hour or more. A public holiday in the middle of the week can wreak havoc on your schedule. And if someone drops by for coffee, you have to tear your mind away from the mound of work that you know will still be waiting for you at midnight.

So how do you find balance? I’ve written about this before because I face the same challenges. I have a five year old daughter who’s in school but with whom I want to spend time when she’s not. Time with friends and family is equally important. Sometimes you just have to look at the big picture, which is what I did after a frantic year where I was glued to the computer from morning till night.

I decided that I had to control the work rather than letting it control me. I decided that there had to be some sacred family time with my daughter, husband or mother (or all three at the same time.) I decided that there had to be time for exercise to look after my long term health. And I decided that there had to be time for friends, because the deal is that you support each other.

So how has that affected my freelancing career? The truth is that after the madness of my first year of freelancing (during which I also completed an international move), the succeeding years have been much saner. There are still times when I turn down social gatherings because of work pressure, but there are also times when I reschedule jobs to allow me to meet commitments to the people who are important to me.