The Realities of Running a Daycare
Running a child care centre can feel like working two full-time jobs at times. Between managing staff, putting together paperwork, overseeing day-to-day operations, and continuously improving your care facilities, the workload can feel impossible. We know because we’ve been daycare owners ourselves!
Although it can be extremely rewarding, the lack of personal time can lead to increased long-term stress. The health impacts of continuous stress can be extensive, causing conditions such as heart disease, high blood pressure, headaches, depression and anxiety, and more. This is just one reason it’s so important to take back some of your time. But is that possible? Let’s look at a few approaches to creating better work/life balance as you run your child care service.
A Realistic Approach to Work/Life Balance
Strategies for Taking Time for Yourself
Before you start to work on building out more personal time, it’s important to set particular goals. What does personal time look like for you? Many daycare owners haven’t even considered this in years. Do you want more time with your family? Do you want to be able to travel? Or do you have other hobbies or pursuits that have been put on the backburner?
Think about what you’d like to do and how much time you need away from your business. This will help you prioritize key action items and stick to your plan.
Set Up Your Work Remotely so You Can Gain Distance
Getting physical space from your business is one of the most difficult items for any business owner to achieve, and this is only exacerbated for daycare center owners who are tied to one or more child care centers. Even if you have a laptop or personal computer at home, if your daycare software doesn’t travel with you (or, in other words, if it’s not in the cloud!), you may end up stuck at work more often than you’d like.
One of the main reasons we built the TimeSavr app as a remote application that can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection is because we wanted a break! Whether it was a week-long trip down south to sit on a beach or just an evening at home with a home-cooked meal and a tea, we wanted to have flexibility in where we were working.
Build a Strong, Empowered Team
Your business relies day in and day out on your daycare center workers and early childhood educators. But building and overseeing a team is complex. Scheduling, communication, and tracking hours are among some of the greatest challenges. Daycare managers are often inundated with requests for time off, changes to schedules, and employees who forgot to clock in. All these issues can be solved with a daycare management app that empowers your employees to track their time in, time off, and overtime from their phones or computers. Plus, TimeSavr can also improve educator attendance and ensure that your staff feel acknowledged and involved, leading to better overall daycare staff retention.
Automate Your Reporting
If there was one thing that ate up our time as owners of child care programs, it was paperwork. Creating reports on spreadsheets could take up hours out of each month. The TimeSavr app was created to gather, analyze, and prepare all the data that was needed to submit, literally leaving us with hours of our time back.
See How TimeSavr Gives You Time Back from Your Business
Our goal is to help you save valuable time as you create incredible child development programs and daycares. To see how much time TimeSavr can actually save you in a month, you can try our free two-month trial! We’ll walk you through an easy configurable set-up and get you started in no time at all.