By Alyssa Fox | Senior Member
My kids are my pride and joy. Being their mom brings me my happiest moments, even when things are hectic. I also love what I do in my career. Using similar principles and tricks in both areas helps me balance my life in a way that keeps me busy, but fulfilled.
Plan, Plan, and Plan Again
Parenting requires planning, planning, and more planning. Being a working mom requires that I lay things out the night before, religiously update my calendar, and frequently communicate with other family members. If I forget to do those, it means one of my sons doesn’t get his homework done, or misses a scout meeting if I have to work late because I didn’t tell my husband. If you don’t plan well as a parent, it’s likely that someone else in your family will be negatively affected.
At work, if you don’t plan well, it affects other people similarly. If you are working on a project with other writers, it’s important to plan appropriate workloads and milestones for your tasks. Otherwise, someone on your team could become overloaded and stressed, and eventually burn out. Or the project team could be waiting on you to deliver an important release if you plan ineffectively and don’t incorporate realistic milestones into your overall schedule.
Keep it Together
Keeping track of all my kids’ needs for school, scouts, and piano lessons, my needs for my job and STC responsibilities, and my husband’s needs for his activities requires mega-organizational skills. I am a big list maker and use paper, calendars, and apps to keep us all coordinated. If Monday at my kids’ school is Hawaiian Shirt Spirit Day and I send them in their crazy hats, thinking it’s Crazy Hat Day, you can bet I won’t hear the end of it for a while. I have also been teaching my sons how to keep their own calendars, and use them to track their own details. You can never start your kids too early on organization, right?
The same goes for technical communication. Handling multiple deliverables, people, and sometimes projects requires structure and tools to keep everything straight. Forgetting important details in user documentation or in an explanatory video can set up your users to fail, which none of us want to do.
Consulting the Experts
As their mom, I know my kids and how they tick probably better than anyone around. I can generally tell when they’re actually sick or when they’re faking. I can help them with their math homework still (my oldest is in 5th grade, so he hasn’t surpassed my math recollection yet). But there are times when things come up with them that are outside the scope of my knowledge. When my six-year-old fell off a bunk bed and busted open his eye, I knew I should take him to the ER. I can’t do stitches, and I doubt he would want me to.
Technical communicators should have a level of technical knowledge that facilitates their writing the big-picture view of how a product might work. But when they don’t understand why a product is working a certain way, or how the architecture of the product affects the performance, it’s prudent to bring in an SME to help them understand more fully. Taking a guess doesn’t benefit the writer or the audience for which they are writing.
Agility is Key
Finally, remember that having kids guarantees that things will not always go according to plan. So while planning is important, having the ability to "bob and weave" when things come up is equally important. Nothing is more stressful than being so wedded to an idea or plan that any deviance sets you off. Flexibility is essential when dealing with kids.
Agility is also an important skill in technical communication. Being able to roll with the punches and changes to plans makes you a more valuable asset to your team than one who can’t adapt to updates. Ideally, you’ll be getting constant feedback from your users and will need to respond in a timely manner.
Summary
Balancing such an active life can be difficult at times, but remembering these principles has helped me as I juggle my family and professional responsibilities. Often, until you get things down on paper, you don’t realize how much is really going on and where you can improve. As Marcus Aurelius said, "The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious." Now please excuse me while I make my to-do list for tomorrow.
