I’m finding it hard to carve out time to write our family business plan. Just as many companies face that end-of-year frenzy, so too, does a family. The shopping, baking, decorating, and wrapping, combined with pageants and parties, leaves little time for business affairs, be it personal or professional. But without the planning, we’re just spinning our wheels in a giant rat race to nowhere. And I just don’t have time to be running nowhere anymore.

So we scheduled a family business meeting. The agenda? Defining our family philosophy so that we could develop a family mission statement.

It was surprisingly easy and what resulted were the values and lessons that we want to impart on our children. Values which are important to us. Lessons that we have learned. Guide posts to becoming good, kind, responsible, honest and happy human beings.

It didn’t seem right to take such an important document and stick it in a pile of papers, only to be shuffled from room to room. I want and need a daily reminder to keep us all on the straight and narrow. So I painted it, on a large over sized canvas and it now hangs on our living room wall for all to see.

This represents who we are and want to be. This will be the basis for our family mission statement. These are the words that we choose to live by.

Related posts:

1. A Thousand Words
2. (Mind Your) Family Business

There are a lot of benefits to working from home. No one knows I haven’t showered yet, or that I’m still in pajamas. I have no commute and no one keeping track of my hours. In between emails and projects I can do the laundry, make a batch of cookies and put a pot roast in the oven to slow roast for the day.

These are all things that help me manage my life that I just couldn’t do if I was working in an office.

But there is a downside to working from home, and since the Clown and I both run our own businesses from home, we are intimately aware of the downside.

There are no office hours and no set breaks. Our work is like a 24-hour 7-11 store. We are always open for business, even when we shouldn’t be. The days, nights, and weekends all meld together. Nothing distinguishes work time and space from family time and space.

This is a problem. Not so much for our work and businesses, but for the family. Because if we are both going to be hunched over our computers 24/7, then what we are doing is raising our kids in an office, rather than raising our businesses in a home. And we prefer the later.

So unless I can find an office job offering a Laundromat and Crock Pot, changes to our work routine are in order.

We are officially setting business hours that are congruent with our children’s school schedule. We’ll start at 8am. We break at 3pm to shuttle kids. The Clown can go back to his hunchback position until 5pm when we will all sit down to a family dinner. Any work that still needs tending to, will be done after 9pm when the kids are all snug in their beds.

And we will all live happily ever after.

Related posts:

1. (Mind Your) Family Business