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Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is to give yourself some longer work days, particularly if you work flexibly

and are responsible for kids or other tasks on the home front.

You want some days when you don't have such a hard stop.

In this extra time, you'll do a little speculative work or maybe think ahead or do the work that makes you feel more on top of things. All of this

can make life feel a little more calm. So one of the sharpest life transitions with parenthood, I mean, at least for some of us, comes at the end of the workday.

Pre-kids, if you needed extra time to wrap something up, you might have just done it.

But for those trying to make a daycare pickup, where you are charged by the minute if you are late,

there is a hard stop at the end of the day.

Even if you have another child care arrangement, like a nanny, this person no doubt has a time that they are expecting to leave.

And you would probably like to see your kids before bed. This means that the end of the

workday features a lot of awareness of the clock. And this isn't a bad thing. Lots of people become

way more efficient and effective when they are accountable for their time. But sometimes it is nice to feel a little more relaxed about the end of the day.

This is particularly true if you work flexibly and wind up spending late afternoons going in and out of work

as you are driving to kid activities and such.

None of this is either or. You can choose to be present some

afternoons and not on a few others. I like to think of having one longer workday every week or so.

If you are normally doing daycare pickup or school pickup, maybe your partner can take

one to two days a week. If that is not an option, maybe you can hire a sitter for an evening

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