Ensuring You Have Quality Family Time When Stretched to Your Limits

Last updated on May 5th, 2024 at 09:21 pm

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It is that cliche we are all more than aware of. Life is just so busy that we don’t stop to smell the roses. As parents, we can find ourselves caught up in a whirlwind, but this means we’re not paying attention to quality family time. What can we do to ensure that we do have a far more meaningful existence with our family beyond work and life duties?

More Family Events

One of the best things we can all do is to prioritise more family events. Money might be tight, but when we look back on our lives in 30 or 40 years time, we’re not going to think about the lack of money we had; we’re going to regret that we didn’t spend more quality time with the people we cared about. The reality is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to have great family time. 

There are things you can do on your doorstep such as nature walks, but you also have to remember that the family events need to be documented. If you aren’t getting into the habit, it’s time to take more photos. You can use your phone to capture videos and images and you can dump them on your computer. However, it’s important to remember that if you plan on documenting your family life, make sure you have a good filing system on a computer. There are apps that clean Macs, so you can make sure there’s plenty of space on your computer.

Establish Work Boundaries

One of the biggest mistakes we’re all making is prioritising our work over family life. For many of us, we get to work as soon as we wake up and don’t necessarily stop until after 6 pm because we have no choice. It’s easier said than done, but while you need to get things done at work, you also need to make sure that your children don’t feel runner-up to your workload. 

It’s an incredibly difficult thing to get right, but you may benefit from changing your work set-up. There are ways you can work smarter rather than harder. If you type a lot, you can use voice software to dictate and potentially cut your workload in half. You can also benefit from less multitasking. But you can also benefit from ensuring that when you have quality time with your children, even if it’s 10 minutes, that work is not on your mind or your phone is not in your peripheral vision.

Family Time With a Purpose

We have to remember it’s about quality rather than quantity. If you are all at home doing different activities you’re not spending that proper time as a family. If you are lucky enough to still be working from home while your children are in school, you’ve got the opportunity to do certain house duties on your lunch break so you can spend more time with the kids when they come home.

It is one of the most difficult balances to get right. There is ongoing criticism that a lot of people don’t work hard enough, but you don’t want to look back on your life and think that all you did was work. If you have a family, but you need to earn a living you need to find a way for it to work for you all.

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