Do you find yourself rushing from one thing to the next?

Grabbing your to-go mug of coffee while putting on your shoes and asking everyone if they've gone potty while you rush out the door with zero seconds to spare.

Or slamming the laptop closed as soon as you hit send on that last email as you rush to not be the last parent at pick-up today.

It's not that you mismanage your time.

It's that there's just so much to squeeze in. And you want to get as much out of your time as possible.

So you squeeze in as much work as you can and then rush to home so you can spend as much time as possible with your people.

But I wonder how much you get out of those "squeezed in" minutes.

Or what your kids get.

This exact thing came up in a coaching session recently where this mom was feeling like her evenings with the kids were stressful.

She felt a little frazzled walking in the door after a long, stressful workday and her kids felt that too.

She was worried that she was giving all her energy to work and that she wasn't reserving anything for her kids.

After walking me through her schedule, we agreed - there really wasn't any wiggle room to do less at work. No opportunities for creating space so she'd have some energy leftover for the evening.

But there was a small block of 10 minutes at the very end of the workday.

A 10-minute block that she had been viewing as time that belonged to her kids, because it was technically after hours.

But those 10 minutes that she rushed home to spend with her kids were full of the boiled over, frenetic energy from work. And those 10 minutes set the stage for an evening that felt a bit frenzied, frazzled, and rushed.

So, as an experiment, we decided to see what it would feel like if she took those 10 minutes and used them to settle herself. To process through the stress and expel some of that frenzied energy before coming home.

She settled on walking around the parking lot at work, along a little path that's nearby, while listening to a guided meditation to help her slow her breathing and release some of the tension.

I'm not gonna lie. I could see resistance in her eyes as we talked about this plan.

"But that's 10 minutes that I'm not with my kids. Shouldn't I be giving them that time since I'm technically no longer working?"

The answer is sure, you can absolutely give them those 10 minutes.

But what is their value?

Are they just a number that you need in order to add to your total so you can feel ok about your work-life balance?
Are they 10 extra minutes because you really want to get home and be with your kids?
Are you able to feel fully present for those 10 minutes when you have them? Or are you so tired, distracted, and impatient that they're just a number?

This client committed to giving it a try. To 10 minutes of walking and decompressing for two weeks.

If at the end of that time she didn't feel like the walk and time away from her kids were worth it, she could go back to rushing home and giving them that time. But if she did feel a difference, then she would know and could decide what to do from there.

For this client, the 10-minute walk and guided meditation changed the feel of her evenings so much that she's decided to keep them.

Yes, it's 10 minutes that could be spent with her kids. But when she uses that 10 minutes to decompress and comes home after a walk, she's a different person.

She's able to shed the stress from her workday and come home excited to be at home.

She's calmer and her kids feel that too.

They have her attention. They feel her presence. And they don't think, or even know about those 10 minutes they "could have had". They just know that mom is home and she's glad to be here, with them.

How do you transition from work to home and is it working for you, for them?

Those 10 minutes add up. Make sure yours are valuable.

Transitioning from Work to Home as a Working Mom

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