Are You a Working Procurement Parent? Here’s How to Plan Your Week
Does this situation sound familiar to you?
You’re a procurement professional, and your partner is also a professional in another field (or maybe, lucky you, your partner also works in procurement!). You have one or more small children.
It’s Sunday evening, and everything is already starting to unravel before the new week has even started. You both consult your calendars and it turns out neither of you can take one child to football practice on Monday, and you both have engagements at school pickup time on Tuesday. Wednesday may have an important fundraising event, while one of you might have to be away on a work trip overnight on Thursday.
Then the squabbles begin about whose meetings or deadlines are more important, and you both feel drained and frustrated before the working week has even begun. What’s more is that any simmering frustration and resentment is often made worse if you’re the ‘default parent’, i.e. the parent who always has to miss out when there are important caring responsibilities, a job that too often falls on women.
As a working parent in procurement, there are some things you have to accept, but others that you don’t. Fortunately, there’s a way to better navigate the Sunday evening frustrations, and it’s with a simple planning hack.
Why the Frustration?
Working parents have faced similar issues with managing work and young children for a long time. So why does it feel so frustrating? There are three key reasons why you and your partner may constantly feel overwhelmed through the week:
- Information Overload: The sheer volume of information and scheduled commitments increases the likelihood of conflicts and forgotten tasks.
- Decision Fatigue: Many decisions, like dinner plans or pickups, are made on the fly, leading to cognitive fatigue and less optimal outcomes.
- Unexpected Surprises: Each week inevitably brings unexpected issues, often falling to a “default” parent to resolve, causing frustration and tension.
The 15-Minute Plan
Given your role in procurement, you’ll no doubt understand how important planning is – and you should be fairly good at it by now. Thankfully, you can use these skills to better navigate your week with what we’ve called the ‘15-Minute Plan.’
We’ll come to the ‘how’ of creating your plan shortly, but here are a few things you need to put in place first:
- You need to commit 15 minutes to creating a plan for the week ahead, every week. This would typically be on a Sunday, and ideally when your children aren’t distracting you!
- You ideally need to diarise this plan. You might like to create a template for this, perhaps in Excel, or in another diary application.
- Finally, in order to create the plan, you need all the applicable information. This may include consulting your children’s school or childcare apps to see if there are any upcoming commitments, as well as digging into your work and social calendars.
Creating the 15-Minute Plan
So, you’ve set aside some time, consulted all apps, calendars and diaries and are sitting down with your other half. What’s next? Here are the 5 key stages of creating your plan:
1. Populate your planning document
The first step in creating a weekly plan is to populate the week ahead with all of your commitments. These may include sporting activities, pick-ups and drop-offs, work meetings, babysitter availability, unique events, and even any exercise or social commitments.
Ensure that you also add any key reminders in the plan, including things like returning library books or bringing something to a coffee morning at work.
2. Add logistics and assign tasks
After you’ve done the ‘diarising everything’ step, prioritise if you need to: what clashes and what are the priorities? Is there anything that can wait until next week? Are there things that you need to say no to, or call in a favour from a family member or a friend?
In this phase, ensure you discuss everything, up to and including the logistics of the school run, who is getting groceries, what meals need prepared and when, and any other household chores. If you make assumptions in this phase about who should do what based on who usually does certain tasks, you risk frustrating your partner.
Once you’ve decided who will do what, add some quick notes to your calendar.
3. Create a backup
If you’ve worked in procurement for any amount of time really, you’ll always need a plan b (and often a plan c) when it comes to suppliers.
And when it comes to your plan at home, things aren’t that different.
Identify any tricky moments by highlighting the week’s most challenging times and establish backup plans. Discuss who will step in if something goes wrong, and who else you might need to call for help if something goes wrong at the last minute.
4. Share the plan
It might sound a little over-eager to share your weekly plan, but it’s often the best way. If your plan involves relying on people outside of the immediate family, for example, grandparents or nannies, it’s important to share the plan with them as well.
At the end of the day, everyone – including your children – will benefit from all of their carers knowing exactly where they’ll be at any one time.
As a procurement professional, you’ve no doubt done your fair share of planning. So, as a parent, you should utilise those skills to ensure that your responsibilities outside of work are scheduled and managed just as effectively (within, of course, the constraints of the chaos that little people bring).
Are you a procurement parent? How do you manage work and home life? Let us know in the comments below.
