3 Big Reasons Parents Can’t Clock Out of Work

Ever find yourself thinking about work while making dinner… or checking your email while your kid is telling you about their day?

For so many parents, the workday doesn’t end when we leave the office. Whether it’s the pressure to stay connected, the mental load we carry, or just the pace of modern life — it’s hard to truly clock out and connect with our kids after work.

In this episode, we’re breaking down the three big reasons it’s so tough to disconnect — and more importantly, we’ll share what you can actually do to shift out of work mode and back into family mode, without guilt or overwhelm.

Things you’ll hear in this podcast:

• Ways to take control of your work life so it doesn’t interfere with your home life.
• Practical things to do in your home to help you leave work, even if you work from home.
• How to approach a demanding boss when they are making it difficult to clock out.

If you’re ready to disconnect from the office and truly reconnect with your family, this podcast is for you—let’s get started.

00:00 Introduction: The Struggle of Clocking Out
00:29 Understanding the Universal Struggle
02:05 Reason 1: Devices Controlling You
04:13 Reason 2: Lack of Boundaries
09:13 Reason 3: Not Scheduling Time
12:33 Recap and Final Thoughts
13:33 Free Guide and Next Episode Teaser

When you finish listening, we’d love for you to connect with us on social media!

Follow us on Instagram and like our page on Facebook to keep the conversation going. It’s the best way to get quick tips, encouragement, and resources to help you make time for what matters most—your family.

Get our FREE resource, "30-Second Micro Moments of Intention with Your Kids", by going to: parentsmakingtime.com/freeresource

Parenting is hard. Intentional parenting can seem even harder. Motherhood, fatherhood, marriage, and all that goes with those important aspects of life can make it difficult to prioritize tasks, embrace intentional living, focus on present parenting, and build family bonds. We're here to help ease your parenting anxiety so that you can stop feeling overwhelmed, find joy in your parenting journey, and build family bonds that last for generations. Here at Parents Making Time, we are all about that parent-child connection, self-care for parents, and helping you overcome mom guilt and dad guilt. If you have a question or would like to share an experience about your own parenting, please feel free to reach out to one of us! Please note, we may use your question and/or comments as a part of a Q&A Parenting Advice segment on one of our episodes.

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Transcript

Anthony: [00:00:00] So as parents, you may leave the office, but work doesn't always stay behind. And in this episode we're unpacking the three big reasons why it's so hard to truly clock out of work, even when you're technically off the clock and what you can do about it.

This is Parents Making Time. The show that helps busy parents put family first without burning out. We are Anthony and Jennifer Craiker. We don't just give parenting tips. We help you become the parent you want to be.

Jennifer: So this is a universal struggle that we very much understand.

Anthony is a busy attorney, and I work two part-time jobs in the nonprofit sector. We both work from home, so leaving work is really difficult. We struggle with it. Really just like I said, it's at our house and this is a daily and weekly thing that we need to figure out. We know everybody struggles with it.

It's not just us. Whether you work at home or you go into an office, we know this is a really hard thing. 

Anthony: And the big mistake parents make is not taking [00:01:00] charge of their time when they're at work and at home. 

Jennifer: We feel this pressure. We wanna succeed, we wanna do well, we wanna be dependable. We wanna answer those texts when they come.

We're trying to advance in our career. We're trying to support our families. It's all well-meaning, but we gotta figure out. Where to put those boundaries. 

Anthony: Yeah. Because if we don't, that's going to lead to missed moments with our families. We're not gonna be fully present and we're gonna get exhausted and burned out because we're always in the back of our mind thinking about work in one way or the other.

Or we're responding to messages off the clock or we're getting. Pulled back into work right before we go to bed. You know, all of those things that tend to happen when we're outside of the office, whether your office is at home or at a different location the consequences are pretty significant If you.

Don't make a concerted effort to really clock out of work mentally and emotionally. 

Jennifer: Yeah. I think that clocking out mentally is the biggest one, especially for us when we work at home. But for everybody really to let yourself mentally leave the [00:02:00] office. So there's three things, right? We tease three things that we wanna advise you to do in order to accomplish this.

And the first one's about your devices. The number one thing that we need to stop doing is letting our devices control us. Maybe that's by separating your devices. Maybe you can have your work phone and your personal phone, or find a way to not have work on your personal phone. I don't know. For me, that's hard because I'm not able to separate mine, but I am able to maybe put, do not disturb on certain messages from certain people or log out of my email on my computer so that I don't see those things until the next day.

 Just so that I can have dedicated time where I am. Off the clock. 

Anthony: And if you work from home, you should really consider having a dedicated workspace where that's your space, where you go to do your job every day. And when you're not in that space, you're not working. And it doesn't mean you have to have a home office or anything like that.

That's not always practical. [00:03:00] Like for years. We had my dedicated workspace was actually in our bedroom. 

Jennifer: Loved it. 

Anthony: Yeah. Yeah. Which that wasn't ideal either, because sometimes I would get sucked into work like right before bed. I'd go and check my messages 'cause my computer was right there. Then I'd end up responding messages or looking at case files or whatever, getting ready for court the next day.

And you know, all of a sudden, an hour and a half later, Jen's. Sleeping, sleeping, snoring. Hey, 

Jennifer: don't give up that detail. And, 

Anthony: and I am staying up later than I should, and that's making me tired. Right? But, you know, so maybe not in your bedroom , is the more important if you 

Jennifer: can do it. At the time, that was really our only option.

Anthony: So. With your devices, whether it's your computer, your phone, whatever, let yourself be unreachable to some degree, with work with your coworkers. With supervisors, because if you're always reachable on your device, you're not gonna be able to check out mentally, clock out [00:04:00] mentally and emotionally from work when you're technically.

Off the clock, 

Jennifer: you're also setting a precedent with that. If they know they can text you at any time, they will. 

Anthony: Yeah, 

Jennifer: right. They, oh yeah. I'll text Jennifer. She'll answer. 

Anthony: Yeah. You know, and so that leads to the second point, the second big reason that you're finding it difficult to clock out of work when you're.

Not at work, which is you're not setting boundaries with coworkers, clients, and bosses. And this is super, super important to do. Now I'm an attorney, so I, I represent clients, I have a lot of clients, and other professions have clients. And clients can be very demanding at times. And they want your attention and they want it now.

But that's not practical. It's not reasonable. So you have to set some expectations with clients or customers or whoever. So one example of how I've done this is, I realized early on as a young attorney, as my voicemail would. Get blown up [00:05:00] daily by clients that, I had to do something to try to manage their expectations of when I would be able to get back to them, right?

So in my voice greeting, and it's been this way for years I say, you know, thanks, you've reached attorney Anthony Craiker, leave a message, whatever. And then I say, I typically return. Calls within two business days, and I say business days specifically so that they know that I'm not gonna be calling them on Saturday or Sunday to get back to them.

 And that has helped manage, expectations with my clients to a certain degree. It's been helpful over the years to have that, so that they know. About what the timeframe is gonna be before I'm able to get back to them. 

Jennifer: Yeah. And I can testify to that. I know that his voicemail says that I've heard and seen the clients that call him over and over and over and, and how that boundary needed to happen.

But it can be even harder when the demanding person is your boss. Yeah. Because you feel like this is the, the one who hired me. This is the one that why I'm keeping my job is through this person. [00:06:00] That might require a pretty tough conversation. If it's really bad, if those conversations aren't going well, you might need to look for a new boss, a new job Really.

Which is hard. 

Anthony: Yeah. Easier said than done. , And I've been super fortunate in my career. My supervisors and bosses have always been just. Just great people and understand that there is a separation between work and home. But if you do have one of those toxic type bosses or, or just a boss that just expects you to be on the clock all the time, you can have a respectful.

Conversation with that boss. That's part of being an adult is having difficult conversations. And so think through ahead of time the things that you wanna say in a respectful manner and be like, look, you know I want you to know that I'm dedicated to this job. I'm loyal to my job.

But I need to have some time where I'm off the clock. And so I wanna set some expectations of when I'm going to be able to respond to you so that you don't think that I'm ignoring you or not getting back to [00:07:00] you. And you can know when to expect me to respond. Uh, if that conversation doesn't go well, that's a strong indicator that you're not in the right position.

Jennifer: Right? And there's also coworkers that might message you or. Maybe they work different hours than you. So for instance, my jobs, I said earlier I work two part-time jobs in the nonprofit sector and I work for two small nonprofits. And my coworkers, you could say they're actually not employees of the organization.

They're volunteer. Board members. And so they work outside of, on those things, outside of their day-to-day job, mostly after 5:00 PM and I try to set some boundaries and say, you know, you can text me whenever you're available, but I will text you between these hours. Or if I do happen to be texting them during the day, my job is flexible.

I don't have specific hours. And so I might say, if someone's texting me, Hey, I see your message, I'm at an appointment, or I'm not. Able to answer this right now, I will get back to you at, and I give [00:08:00] them a time, it helps me to remember to get back to them, but it also helps them manage me, manage their expectations of when they'll hear from me.

Anthony: Yeah, I mean, really you're kind of training the people that you work with and interact with and your in employment to understand that you're not on demand and we should never feel like that. Right. With really, with, with anybody maybe outside of our spouse or our children when when it's an emergency, that kind of thing.

But we have these devices and it's so easy to communicate that there's kind of this cultural expectation. I think, that you're gonna respond as quickly as you can to a text message or to a DM or to an email. And really that shouldn't be the case. I mean, before we had these devices, nobody ever expected you to respond immediately to

you know, to just day to day kind of mundane questions. Yeah. 

Jennifer: But if you're like, mes letting those messages go is really difficult. So, example, a few nights ago I got a, a text message from my boss at like, it was [00:09:00] like 10, 10:00 PM we were going to bed. Yeah. And I saw the message and I started to respond and I had to stop myself and say, Nope, it is after 10:00 PM this can wait till tomorrow.

Anthony: Yeah. 

Jennifer: But like, it was a conscious effort for me to make it stop. 

Anthony: For sure. And so number three, the third big reason that you're finding it difficult to truly clock out of work even when you're at home is you're not scheduling work and family time and. We found that when you dedicate blocks of time to work, especially if you work at home, you dedicate specific blocks of time where you're focused just on work and then outside of that time you're gonna be present with your family or taking care of other responsibilities that you have that's going to really help you to separate work from your home life. 

Jennifer: Sometimes this is done for you, right? You work in nine to five, and so you know that from nine to five. This is my work time. Both Anthony and I have somewhat flexibility in our schedule.

In fact, Anthony works for a firm [00:10:00] that's not in our state. They're in a different time zone. And so yeah, there's some, some things there. But for me, I really have my own run of my schedule and I have found that I literally, like every Monday, I put, so I'm really, I like lists. I liked to plan out. I don't necessarily have a planner.

I just have a piece of paper for every week, and I plan out my days on this piece of paper and on the top of it. I list out my work hours for the week, and so I look at what. You know, appointments I have and what things outside of work I have, and I put those in first. And then I look at that and I say, okay, these are my hours for each day.

And that's helped me organize my time so much. And it changes daily, it changes weekly. That's just how my life is. But actually taking that minute to plan that like that has helped me say, oh, it's three o'clock. I'm off the clock now. I'm gonna log out of that. 

Anthony: Yeah. And along that same line.

Blocking out specific time for your family is also really important and we're not necessarily saying you need to [00:11:00] schedule every moment 24 hours a day. No, but what we are saying is, on a weekly basis, perhaps, you need to block out specific time for your family, for your kids, for

your significant other. To where you say, okay, during this time from, from x time to X time, I am not going to let anything get in the way of being present with the people that I care about most. And that might mean putting down your device. It might mean, letting work, know that you're gonna be unavailable during those times, whatever.

But it's, it's allocating and dedicating that time just to your family, and doing that regularly, perhaps even weekly. 

Jennifer: Well, you might even wanna make sure in that case you're communicating with your family, your spouse, like. Everybody Family Night Friday, 7:00 PM or sweetheart, we're gonna have an at home date at 8:00 PM tonight or whatever.

Yeah. So that, because otherwise I might schedule something different than you have. Yeah. And then you might be frustrated with me and [00:12:00] that's a whole other, that's a whole other episode. 

Anthony: Right. And you know, having a family calendar can be helpful to where people can look and see, you know, see, see what's going on there.

There are lots of little tips and, and tricks that you can use to do this. But the important. Part, the, the principle here is dedicating specific time. That's the mistake that I think a lot of parents make when, they're finding themselves bogged down and overwhelmed and feeling like they constantly are having to respond to work messages and can't.

Can't seem to leave work at the office. 

Jennifer: So let's go through those three things again. The three things that are keeping you from clocking out of work is, number one, letting your devices control you, not taking control of them yourself. Number two, not setting boundaries with your coworkers, clients, and bosses.

And number three, not scheduling time for work and family. 

Anthony: Yeah. And as we've done these things over the years, we've seen a real difference, with our family as we've tried to [00:13:00] avoid doing these three things. And it's allowed us to be more present and intentional with our family time, to enjoy those moments when we're together and ultimately to avoid that long term cost of.

Not doing what it takes to be able to focus when we're with our family, which that long-term cost as we've talked about in previous episodes, is that feeling of regret that you don't want to have, you don't wanna get to the end of your life feeling a sense of regret over the fact that you didn't prioritize your family.

Jennifer: For sure, for sure.

Anthony: You know, as we've been talking about this today, it reminds me that one of the reasons we started this podcast is because we know how busy life gets as a parent. Sometimes it just feels impossible to slow down and create those big, memorable moments. That's why we created a free guide called 30-second Micro Moments of Intention with your Kids.

It's filled with quick, simple ideas that you can do anytime in 30 seconds or less to [00:14:00] strengthen your connection with your kids without adding more to your plate. Now, some of these ideas may seem basic or like no-brainers, but when you do them intentionally, they can make a real difference in your relationship with your child.

So just go to parentsmakingtime.com/freeresource, enter your email and we'll send it right to you. You can print it out to keep it where you'll see it. Or save it on your phone to reference whenever you need a little inspiration so that you can start building lasting memories one micro moment at a time.

Jennifer: So if you liked what you heard today, go ahead and leave us a rating or review on whether it's Apple or Spotify, wherever you've listened to this podcast, and bonus points if you share it with a friend. 

Anthony: Yep. Now, we've talked about allocating time today for family and work. If you could get 10 hours a week back that you could dedicate to your family or to your kids, that would be amazing.

Right? Next week we're going to talk about how to gain 10 hours a week with your kid and the specific steps that you need to take to do that. [00:15:00] So don't miss next week's episode. This is gonna help you get 10 hours a week back. 

Jennifer: Yeah, definitely. So until next time, make time to become the parent you want to be.