Full-time work from home: making it work

One of the changes that came with the COVID-19 pandemic was the rise in working from home (WFH). Even as hybrid arrangements have become more popular, in 2025, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that 36% of employed Australians usually worked from home. That’s still around five million people!

For parents, WFH has meant easier school pick-ups and drop-offs, more time with family in the afternoon, and decreased expenses on petrol or public transport. However, for any parent who has regularly worked from home, it may have also brought with it the stress of trying to watch your kids after school and work at the same time, too much background noise when you need to concentrate, and unexpected walk-ins during important meetings. Both the advantages and the challenges of working from home may have been even more noticeable in the past two weeks as schools have been on holidays.

I work from home full time and, in my experience, all those ups and downs are true. I am grateful for the extra time with my family, for the ten-step commute to my office, and the flexibility that it has given me. But there are also days when it can be deeply challenging and create friction between me and my children. Five years later, here are the ways I’ve found to make it work and make the most of it.

Set expectations as a family

It’s easy for you and your husband or wife to have very different unspoken expectations about what it means for you to work from home. Will you spend your lunch break with the family? Will you help out with the kids for a minute if something goes wrong? Will you do school drop-off? At the end of the day, will you go straight from work to cleaning or cooking or playing? On the other hand, it’s good to establish some realistic expectations of what your family will be doing while you are working. A ‘normal’ day for them might include lots of noise, emotion and sometimes tension between siblings. It is probably unrealistic to expect peace and quiet for the whole day. Having a conversation where you talk about these things up front will make it easier for you both. If you’ve never discussed it, it’s not too late!

Whatever you decide, do make sure that you don’t overburden yourself. Just because you are at home doesn’t mean you can (or should!) solve any family problems that occur throughout the day. It is a work day, after all, and your commitment to your employer is important. Make some initial decisions and revisit it in three, six or twelve months to see what’s working and what’s not so you can recalibrate together.

Start your day with prayer

Sitting down at your desk and spending a few minutes in prayer is so much easier to schedule and manage when you work from home. You can thank God for the blessing of working from home and ask him to help you be faithful to your workplace and to your family throughout the day.

In Colossians 3:23–24, Paul says, ‘Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord’. This is true whether you work from home or from an office, but WFH can come with different temptations: taking lunch breaks beyond your set time, doing things around the house instead of working, and neglecting relationships with colleagues since checking in with them is not as easy as just walking over to their desk. Commit your day to the Lord and be a faithful home worker.

Keep the door closed—sometimes

Do what you can to have a separate study or office space with a door that can be closed. That door will reduce stress for both you and your family. Let your spouse and kids know that when the door is shut, you’re in the middle of something and they’ll need to come back later. This is ideal when you need things to be quiet or you’re leading an important meeting, and it can help to reduce frustrations with your kids making noise in the next room.

In reverse, I am certainly guilty of responding to a frustrating moment at work by immediately walking out of my study and finding my wife so I can vent about it. Your partner may not mind this (and my wife is wonderfully gracious as she listens to my admittedly very few workplace woes), but in the same way that your family might need to respect your work space, you may need to do the same for their home space during the day.

Being able to close the door to your office at the end of your work day is also a great way to signal the shift from work to family time. That’s one good reason why it’s not ideal to work from your bedroom as it can blur the lines between ‘work’ and ‘rest’ time.

Keep the door open—often

If you’ve worked from home for a longer period, your children likely have no understanding of how fortunate they are to have you around for more of the day. Whether they can fully appreciate it or not, make the most of it. If you’re not in a meeting or doing deep work, leave your door open. Let your kids come in and wander around your home office or tell you things about their day. I’ve had so many unexpected, beautiful moments with my kids when they’ve randomly wandered in to tell me something or wanted to sit up on my chair with me while I worked.

[Promote The Forgetful Prince here]

Finish on time

You might not have a commute, but try not to spend that extra time doing more work. This is another area where you can set expectations up front. Maybe on Mondays you take half an hour to yourself to wind down for the day by going for a walk or reading a book. On another day, you might take your kids to the park or run around in the backyard or sit down and watch TV together.

When my eldest was around two years old, I often wished I had the opportunity to have a quiet 30 minutes on the train to give me a buffer between the busyness of work and the busyness of home. I’m still not sure whether, if I’d had the option, it would have been better for me to take a more hybrid approach. If you have the flexibility with your employer, don’t be afraid to change it up in different seasons of life. Perhaps that 30 minutes on the train will make you a more loving parent when you arrive home.

In the same vein, try to keep to your hours; just because you have your whole work setup at home doesn’t mean you need to do overtime. Keep the weekends (or your days off) and the evenings for your family.

Working from home can be a great blessing, but it should never come at the cost of godly relationships with your family or your colleagues. It’s always worth stepping back to assess the arrangement and ensure that it is helping you to love others—both your family and your colleagues—more.

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Andrew Barker is the Communications Lead at Compassion Australia and lives in the Southern Highlands of NSW with his wife Amelia and their two young children. He is a passionate writer who is striving to bring his children up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

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