Despite any amount of preparations (mental and monetary) to step down from the exciting corporate world to care for my child, nothing prepared me for the uphill quest that awaits. Finding a part-time job that allows remote work, flexi-hours for caregiving & making use of my accounting qualifications & work experience is almost equivalent to finding a unicorn. An above modest hourly rate would be a bonus since I can't expect to earn the same rate as my previous full-time role.
Lesson 1 to Self : Moderate your expectation
A speaker on freelancing once shared that you should not undercut yourself. I have learnt to find my comfort level for:
- Work to be done - entry level, little experience, hands-on. How open are you to leaving the management world behind and accept a lower rung role?
- Salary - give yourself a range that you and your family can accept. Yes, family cos I need to finance my mortgage and child's education.
- Official work hours - you need discipline to run a tight ship to schedule your deliverables to your boss while balancing caregiving
- Time-frame - how long do you see yourself in this job role? A year? Until after PSLE? Until your child gets a place in student care? Until your elder sufficiently recovers from her illness?
Achieve work-life balance by prioritizing the factors that mean the most to you and you are happy with the pie chart. You alone will know what is best for yourself.
Tip: List down (no joke haha, don't mess with my tools eg. lists and excel) your priorities based on the 4 categories above or add more if you need. Put a percentage of what each factor means to you in separate rows to sum to 100% eg. nature of jobs (20%) + high salary (10%) + 4 hours a day (60%) + duration of job (10%) = the job must only be 4 hours a day or less, I am open to a lower pay, entry level job that can be project based or short-term stints. You can do a permutation with separate columns.