Hello my gorgeous, awesome, and totally put-together Full Time, All the Time readers.  It’s been a while hasn’t it?  I hope you haven’t forgotten about me while the fabulous Miss Britt held down the fort here.  I’ve been on an unexpected blogging hiatus.  I wish that I had witty reasons for my short-term leave of absence, but the truth is that life smacked in the face.  Then the gut.  Then push me down and kicked me some more.

In other words, I suffered through my first Summer Break as a working mom. Then right when I felt like I was getting it all in control, life sucker-punched me in the face with Kindergarten.

When my son finished preschool in June, we decided (and by “we” I mean, I thought I had the best idea ever) to let our son have a real summer.  We spent lots of time at the pool.  I spent countless hours shuttling between home and a morning-only summer camp.  We played outside with our neighbors.  Saw nearly every PG or G movie in the theaters. And my son finally found bravery to ride his bike without training wheels.  It was fantastic.

I also spent hours upon hours working late into the night to make up for the lost hours during the day. 
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I had to take a morning off this week to register my son for Kindergarten.  A month ago, I had to take an afternoon off to get the last of the immunizations required to register him for Kindergarten.  Two months ago I had to wake up at 5am to stand in line to get an appointment to register him for Kindergarten.  Plus I spent a few more hours filling out form after form, getting original copies of all our bills for proof of residency, and checking then re-checking we had everything we needed to register him for local public school.

If Kindergarten is this complicated, then I’m never gonna survive college applications.
The last two months have been so stressful in our house.  I’ve got a pretty good grasp on our day-to-day operations.  As long as there isn’t any emergency or last-minute schedule change, I tend to do pretty good at balancing what I’m balancing.  But the amount of work that went into just getting ready to register my son for school nearly put me over the edge.

How I am ever going to make it through the school-age years working full-time?

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In January, I started working from home three days a week.

After three months of enjoying a new work/home/life balance, I can’t imagine how I ever lived any other way.  I’m thrilled and grateful that my boss was willing to work with me to create a work arrangement that made it easier for me to manage my family life.  I understand now why “flex time” has become such a popular idea among women in the workforce over the last several years.

But is all this negotiating to create a work/life balance about to bite us all in the butt?

A recent Washington Post article warns that advantages like working from home could lead to lay offs in a bad economy.

Fan-freaking-tastic.

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Working from home without childcare is like rock climbing without safety.  You may be able to do it, but it you fall it’s gonna cost you big time.  I did the working from home without childcare for 1 day a week for three years.  In order to do it, I had to drastically change the way I worked on that day.  Babies and toddlers can be 1000 times more demanding (not be mention impossible to resist) than whatever is going on at work.   

When my son was born, I demanded that I work from home at least one day a week.  Friday was the planned day.  The entire staff knew that I would be working from home and so the volume of issues that I dealt with turned to Monday through Thursday.  I’d make sure conference calls were strategically scheduled during during Sesame Street hour or nap time.  I purposely made my workload more administrative for Fridays.  Status reports on projects, submitting expense reports for reimbursement, catching up on the insane amount of email that I received the rest of the week, sending out meeting requests to my team for the following week. 

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Voting Day is a pressure-filled day for working parents.  Not only do you have to manage drop-off, pick-up and a busy working day, now you have to throw voting into the mix.  In history-making elections like this one, more people turn out to vote making long lines… and even more stress for the working mom.  I’m sure if I had asked my boss for time to vote, she would have approved the time off.  But then I’d be feeling pangs of guilt since my polling place is open for hours before I get to work and hours after I return home.  And I know that many employers are not willing to allow employees to leave early or come in late so that they can fulfill their civic duty.  I even heard of bosses sending out emails to their team telling them to “vote on their own time.”

For the last two years, I almost always voted via absentee ballot.  For me, it was the only way to manage the juggle.  There are days were I barely manage daycare drop off and pick-up with work meetings.  And I’ve already admitted that I often don’t take a lunch.  So voting was just one more thing to do on the list.  Switching to voting by absentee ballot meant that I had plenty of time to research the candidates, measures, and propositions.  Voting day no longer had to be the day of the election - but whatever day was convenient for me.

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Unless you already know that your boss is predisposed to letting you telecommute, one the best ways to start a dialogue is to submit a well-written proposal. In your proposal, take a business-case approach, looking at things from your boss’s perspective. Address ‘what’s-in-it-for-the-company’ issues, as well as any concerns or objections your boss might have. Plan to hit your boss with a double-whammy: A written proposal and an oral presentation.

The written proposal enables your manager to more carefully consider your ideas when she has more time.  Plus it can serve as a crucial tool if your boss must obtain approval from higher up in the food chain. The presentation prepares your manager to absorb the points in the written proposal and gives her the opportunity to raise questions or objections.

I can see some of you cringing at the idea of having to write a written proposal. Trust me on this one. By taking a professional business approach to the idea you are increasing your chances of getting an approval from your manager.  This is not a thesis statement or some large written grant.  A one to two page proposal is all you need. 

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When I decided that I wanted to work from home at least one day a week, I did not prepare a pitch.  I barged into my manager’s office one day and simply blurted out that I was going to work from home every Friday.  While my manager did agree that having an established day in which I was home was acceptable, I would not recommend this approach.   My tactic was unprofessional and while it did work to get me what I wanted, it most likely won’t work for you. 

The best thing to do is to be prepared.  The power of information is in your favor when it comes to working from home.  In order to earn that Telecommuting badge, you must prepare a thoughtful and comprehensive proposal.

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People always tell me how lucky I am that I have the opportunity to work from home.  And I agree, for the most part.  But working from home is not sunshine, rainbows, and butterflies.  I’ve had to re-learn working in a virtual environment.  It’s a different ball game.  While I do love getting to fold a load of laundry while on a conference call, my life can be totally unbalanced while I work from home.  And I’ve seen many a co-worker crash and burn when moving from the corporate office to the home office.

You may have thought of your office as distracting with water cooler conversations, idle hallway chit-chat, and that one person who always manages to burn the popcorn in the breakroom microwave.  But just wait until you are at home with a whole new set of distractions.

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My son’s preschool has been shut down for the last two days for Teacher In-Service.  The new “school year” begins after Labor Day and the teachers use this time to prepare their classrooms for the switch.  I know that I am lucky that my son goes to a year round school that is open most of the year.  With the standard holidays, four inservice days a year (two in the Fall and two in the Spring), and a week off between Christmas and New Year’s, I know that I am lucky.  I rarely have to find alternative arrangements. 

Still every year, the inservice days creep up on me and I find myself desperately making alternate arrangements.  Okay, maybe not desperate.  But this heat and forgetting to mark the days in my calendar is making me just a teeny bit crabby about the situation.  When I was complaining to a neighbor with school age kids that I was struggling to stay on task while working from home and having a four year old that was ready to break out of the house, she quickly told me to get used to it.  She pulled out the school calendar and showed me that in our local school district there is an inservice day at least once every month.  Throw in Christmas Break, Ski week and Easter break and a whole slew of other days - and we are talking almost 45 days off during the school year.

I practically had a panic attack about all those days off and my kid won’t be starting Kindergarten for another year.

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This evening, I came across the latest issue of BusinessWeek, a issue being touted as special because it’s the first issue “created in collaboration with readers.”  With the help of surveys, blogs and polls, the magazine identified the problems its readers were facing at work, and attempted to find the answers.

Interesting.

I quickly flipped to the article entitled “How to Get a Life and Do Your Job,” and tucked in.  I mean, if there was ever a person who was having a hard time achieving work-life balance these days, I am that person.  I’ve been working almost twelve-hour days lately, and feel like I’m neglecting my husband and daughter.  Something has to give, and I couldn’t wait to read the article to learn what quick tips I could do to manage my life a little better.

Now before I go any further, let me just say that some of the tips submitted by readers are reasonable and logical.  “Switch off the e-mail and the Blackberry,” says one wise employee.  “My wife and I have achieved a great work-life balance through strategic planning,” explained another.  The ideas presenting by both are worth reading.  That said, do you know what almost half of the contributing readers said that they did to achieve their work-life balance?  Do you?

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