This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.

Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is to build in life maintenance time.

Running a household or even just your own life is a real job that takes real space in a schedule.

You can wish that that weren't the case.

But it is wiser to simply build in time to manage what needs to be managed, because then you will feel less stressed about the whole thing.

So today's tip is based on a listener question that we received on my other podcast, Best of Both Worlds. A listener worked for a

local government agency and needed to be in her office from 8 to 4.30 each day with a 30-minute lunch.

I understood from the question that she didn't really have the ability to do any personal tasks

during her work hours. Since she had a house and three kids, things like teacher emails,

permission slips, making appointments, calling contractors, or even scheduling a haircut for herself,

or just stacking up, and she felt overwhelmed.

I know this is a common problem.

One of the real benefits of working for myself and working flexibly

is having the freedom to home from work,

as I sometimes call it, as opposed to working from home, even though I have

a home office, so I guess I'm really homing from home. If I need to buy a kid a coat, I can do that

at 2.30 p.m. And it is all fine. Sometimes I get annoyed at the volume of household management stuff that stacks up,

but I am not going to get fired for attending to it.

I know that is not universally the case at all.

...