Working from home during the school holidays is rarely a childcare problem. The children are safe, fed and somewhere in the house. What has gone missing is the ninety uninterrupted minutes your Thursday quietly depends on.

Queensland state schools close for a fortnight from the middle of September, and very few parents have two spare weeks of leave sitting there to match it. So the holidays get absorbed into the working day instead, one interrupted call at a time.

It can be done well. It mostly comes down to deciding in advance which parts of your day are genuinely fragile, then giving those parts real protection rather than hoping the morning goes kindly.

Why working from home during the school holidays is harder than it looks

In term time the day has a shape imposed on it from outside. The morning drop off ends one thing and begins another. Pick up is a wall you can plan against. Take those two edges away and the day becomes eleven hours of undifferentiated time, which sounds generous and behaves like the opposite.

The second problem is that children read presence as availability. A parent at the kitchen table is not at work, whatever the laptop suggests. A four year old will not distinguish between answering emails and being free, and honestly, nor should they have to.

The third is the recovery cost. Being interrupted is not the expensive part. Finding your way back into the thing you were doing is, and a morning with nine small interruptions is not a morning with nine small costs. It is a morning in which the difficult task never quite gets started.

The aim is not a silent house. It is two or three properly protected stretches, and a clear answer for everything that falls outside them.

Start with the shape of the fortnight, not the shape of the day

Most families plan school holidays one evening at a time, the night before, when the options have run out. Ten minutes with a calendar and the whole fortnight in front of you produces a far better answer, because it shows you where the real pressure sits.

Open your work calendar for both weeks and mark three things.

  • The immovables. Client presentations, board meetings, anything with an external audience and a fixed time. These are the hours that need cover, not goodwill.
  • The deep work. The one or two tasks that genuinely need a clear head. Note roughly how many hours they need rather than which day they land on.
  • The soft hours. Admin, email, reading, the things that survive being done in fifteen minute pieces with a child in the room.

Now you know what you are actually buying. Most families discover they need cover for far fewer hours than they feared, but that those hours are very specific. Two mornings in week one and one full day in week two is a plan. Some help over the holidays is a wish.

Protect the blocks that cannot bend

The meeting block

Meetings are the least forgiving part of the day, because somebody else set the time. If a meeting matters and cannot move, it needs a person in the house who is not you. Everything else is a gamble with an audience.

Where meetings are flexible, cluster them. Four calls between ten and one is a single block of cover. The same four calls scattered across two days is a whole week of low level tension.

The deep work block

Deep work rarely needs a specific time, which makes it the easiest thing to solve. Book it against cover you already have, or move it to the edges of the day when the house is quiet anyway. Plenty of parents get more done between six and eight in the morning during the holidays than they manage all afternoon.

The handover

The ten minutes when a sitter arrives decides how the next five hours go. Say where you will be, whether a shut door means do not interrupt, what is worth coming to find you for and what is not. Children settle much faster when the rules of the day are said out loud rather than discovered by trial.

What a sitter actually changes about a day at the desk

The obvious thing is supervision. The less obvious thing, and the one parents mention afterwards, is that the children stop being in a holding pattern. A day with a sitter is not a day of being minded near a working parent. It is a day with a morning plan, a walk, a lunch somebody else made and an afternoon that goes somewhere.

Our carers are employees of The Care Collective rather than contractors, which matters more on a day like this than it sounds. The person in your home is insured through us, paid by us and accountable to us, so you can close a door and leave it closed. Every carer has been screened before they ever meet a family, holds current first aid and CPR, a valid Working with Children Check and references we have already taken up. Roughly the top twenty per cent of applicants make it through. None of that is work you need to do, least of all with a client waiting on a call.

If the holidays are only the sharp edge of a bigger problem, it may be worth looking at ongoing nannying rather than one off bookings. Families who work from home most of the week often find the same two mornings, every single week, are the ones that break.

Set the house up so the day runs itself

Give the day a base

Pick one room that belongs to the day, and let it be genuinely messy. Craft, cushions, blanket forts, whatever it takes. A house where every room is in play is a house where the noise travels, and the noise will travel to wherever you are.

Write down the boring information

The wifi password, the lunch situation, the medication your eldest takes at midday, which neighbour holds a spare key, what time the afternoon usually goes quiet. One page on the bench saves a dozen text messages, and those messages always arrive during the one call that mattered.

Name the interruption rule and then honour it

Blood, fire, or somebody at the door. Say it to the children, say it to the sitter, and then be genuinely available at the times you promised. A rule you enforce once is a rule. A rule you only announce is noise.

Plan the changeover

The worst twenty minutes of a home working day is the moment the sitter leaves while you are still mid task. Finish ten minutes early. Let the handover be a proper conversation about how the day went rather than a scramble in the hallway.

Filling in the rest of the fortnight

Paid cover is not the whole answer, and it should not be. Between the protected blocks there is room for the cheap, unstructured parts of the holidays, which are usually the parts the children actually remember. We have put together ideas for the Gold Coast and for Brisbane, most of them free.

It is also worth deciding now what happens on the day that goes wrong, because one day in ten usually does. A child wakes up unwell, or a meeting appears at seven in the morning for eleven. Knowing in advance who you would call is the difference between an awkward day and a lost one.

What holiday cover costs

Casual babysitting starts at $56 per hour for one or two children, Monday to Saturday, with a three hour minimum booking. Three children are $60 per hour and four are $65. Sunday is higher, at $70 per hour for one or two children. Ongoing nannying uses the same hourly rates, with a $500 non refundable recruitment fee at the start of a placement.

A worked example, since hourly figures are hard to picture: three hours on a Tuesday morning for one child is $168.00. That is cover for one board meeting and the hour either side of it.

The full rate card, including overnight babysitting and cleaning, is on our pricing page. Rates are GST inclusive, and a 2% service fee applies to every booking.

Frequently asked questions

Can a sitter come while I am in the house?

Yes, and it is one of our most common school holiday bookings. Set it up properly at the start: say where you will be, and agree what a closed door means. Most sitters will take the children out for part of the day, which helps everybody, yourself included.

How far ahead should I book school holiday cover?

As early as you can, particularly for the middle of the week, which goes first. That said, we take a great many short notice bookings. If tomorrow has just fallen apart, get in touch and we will tell you honestly what we can cover.

Is there a minimum booking?

Three hours for casual babysitting. In practice that suits a working day well, because three hours is long enough for children to settle into something rather than sit in the waiting room of your attention.

What if I only need two mornings, not the whole fortnight?

That is the normal request. Most families book the specific hours that cannot move rather than blanket cover for a fortnight, and the total is usually far lower than they expected.

Tell us which hours matter and we will cover them

You do not need somebody for the whole fortnight. You need somebody for the four or five hours that decide whether the fortnight goes well, and for the children to have a better day than a screen and a closed office door.

Book a sitter for the dates you have marked, or contact us on 0451 394 018 if you would rather talk it through first. We look after families on the Gold Coast, in Brisbane, across Northern NSW and in Sydney.