Moms working remotely have had their hands more than full since March. Women have been tasked with still working their 40 hours and still caring for young children. Their careers have suffered much more than their male counterparts and anything that moms can do to make it easier, they should.
Boomerang is designed to organize your most important tasks and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. Aye Moah has been a work from home mom for the last two years and she knows the challenge of working at home with her kids. Along with her husband Alex Moore and friend Michael Chin, they co-founded this email app which takes the problems with the average work email system and revamps it.
Some main features include scheduling emails ahead of time and sending emails to archive them until you need them. As a busy working woman, Moah noticed that she spent a good chunk of her workday answering emails. Moah began developing her own system to organize her emails and increasing her productivity.
This was where she developed Boomerang. Moms.com spoke with Aye Moah to learn all about Boomerang, how it works, and how moms working remotely from home while caring for their kids can balance work and life.
As a mom herself, Moah has some great tips to increase your workday and balance your kids. Keep reading to learn all about Boomerang and how working at home with kids can be done.
Moms (M): What has the pandemic done to working mothers? Do you think they were disproportionately affected?
Aye Moah (AM): The pandemic has made it difficult for working mothers to prioritize all the tasks she needs to complete in any given day. Before the pandemic, moms were able to focus on work while in the office and the kids were at school, and then focus on taking care of the kids and house when home or off the clock. Now being home all the time with the kids (if they’re still doing remote learning), it’s a juggling act since there are no longer boundaries between work and home life.
M: We know that moms need to balance managing work, the kids, and the home during these uncertain times. According to your research, how much work are moms getting done from home and how hard is it to manage?
AM: In a study released by the New York Times in May 2020 on pandemic-era domestic work, women working full-time remotely reported spending more time than their partners helping children with remote learning (80%) and being most responsible for child care (65%)—a number that rose to 70% for women with children under 12.
As mentioned above, the pandemic has shattered the balance between work and home life, and moms are now being tasked with managing their career and caring for their kids in the same eight-hour window. It’s become increasingly difficult for working moms, especially those with demanding jobs, resulting in over 800,000 women leaving the workforce in September alone.
M: In your experience, have employers or coworkers been understanding if working moms fall behind?
AM: Since becoming a mom, I’ve only worked at Boomerang where I’m the co-founder alongside my husband. That said, our coworkers are very flexible and understanding of our duties as parents, as are many other employers. The pandemic has changed how we work, and I fully believe the post-pandemic workforce will not be the rigid 9-5 workday to better accommodate individuals’ responsibilities and well-being in and out of the office.
M: Do you have any advice for moms who wish to advocate for themselves at work? For instance, if they need to ask for more time at home or time off?
AM: The biggest concern for all employers when employees request time off is falling behind on work. In order to ease an employer’s mind when requesting off is to show them how you plan to accomplish all your responsibilities by working fewer days or working remotely more often.
Show them a mock schedule of the days you are working and have specific times blocked out for team meetings or working on timely tasks to assure your boss that you’re available to the team and are on track to meet all deadlines.
M: Please tell us about Boomerang and why you developed it.
AM: I had always hated email as a main form of communication—how easy it was to miss messages, to get sucked into the inbox vortex and to get stressed out from the seemingly never-ending stream of incoming messages. There had to be a better way to do it.
So, in 2010, along with my husband Alex Moore and our friend, Michael Chin, we co-founded Boomerang to eliminate the glaring issues with email—the biggest offenders being productivity hindrance and high-stress levels. Boomerang was created to allow users to remain focused and organized without getting buried in a crowded inbox, but also to show people that email should NOT be running their lives.
Boomerang’s features include “boomeranging” an email (this allows users to archive a message and have it reappear in their inbox at an optimal time to address the request/assignment in the email), scheduling messages to send a specific date/time, read receipts and follow up reminders.
We’ve now extended beyond email and are looking to remedy the inefficiencies of scheduling meetings with our Magic Live Calendar, which uses patented technology to insert a live view of your calendar right into an email.
This eliminates the tedious back and forth of scheduling a meeting by allowing users to suggest meeting times for consecutive days based on your availability, which is updated in real-time to reflect your most current schedule; share your free/busy schedule from inside your email so the recipient can suggest times that work for them (also updated in real-time!); and event detection that allows you to add an event to your calendar with one click.
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M: What are some easy ways for moms to stay organized while working from home?
AM: My first tip is to figure out tomorrow before you leave work today. At the end of every day, I like to spend my last few minutes at work reflecting on the past day and planning what I need to work on tomorrow. That way, I can determine what I need to accomplish tomorrow while my mind is still plugged in from today’s work.
The next morning, I can jump right into tackling that work, and can better prioritize if any urgent requests come in the next morning. Start by setting a calendar appointment for yourself, blocking out 5-10 minutes at the end of each workday. This technique is especially effective when you keep an organized task list - you can quickly glance at it and see everything that you need to work on.
Next, don’t waste time and emails scheduling meetings. Did you know on average it takes eight emails to schedule a meeting between the back and forth to accommodate ever-changing availability? To avoid the scheduling headaches, especially now that we rely solely on Zoom and phone calls to meet with coworkers, is to block off pre-determined slots each week that will only be for meetings and calls. In addition, you can start implementing smart tools to do the hard work for you by suggesting meeting times based on your availability in real-time.
Take control of your inbox. Set calendar reminders for important meetings, deadlines and dates, and archive messages that don’t need immediate attention—using email technology will help identify important emails and bring non-urgent emails back to your inbox when they need attention. Lastly, consider closing email or using a smart tool to pause your inbox when focusing on your child/children or an urgent project.
M: Are there some vital tips every mom working remotely should know?
AM: First and foremost, use your calendar to help plan out your day. Whether it’s at the beginning of each week, or the end of each day, block out times on your calendar that are dedicated to breastfeeding, pumping or helping your kids with remote learning. This will help protect your time and better balance working with taking care of your children.
Start responding to emails in batches. Working moms are expert multi-taskers, but they, too, fall victim to an overloaded inbox on especially busy days. Research shows that in 20 minutes, you should be able to clear about 51 emails from your inbox. Start at the top and work your way through emails from co-workers, clients and branded newsletters.
If it takes longer than three minutes to take care of, archive it to be addressed later as long as it's not urgent. If it is timely and requires a lot of work, it often helps to turn the email into an entry on a to-do list or schedule time to work on it. That way, you can prioritize it in context with your other big projects.
Stop the constant onslaught of email. A typical email user deletes almost half of the emails they receive each day, which takes about five minutes. Over the course of the year, that’s one full day dedicated to deleting emails.
Instead of wasting that time, why not unsubscribe from the email lists that you aren’t reading – the retail store newsletters, digital editions of magazines, daily recaps from social networks – and get your time back. Gmail lets you unsubscribe right from the top of an email.
M: It can be confusing for kids to see their parents home but not pay attention to them. How can moms ensure that their kids don’t feel ignored while they’re working from home?
AM: As mentioned above, a key component of the working mom balancing act is making your calendar work for you. Be sure to block out the times you need to be at your computer whether it be for meetings or to get quality work done on an assignment and use the remaining flex-time to eat lunch with your kids or play a quick board game to give yourself a break and entertain them for a bit.
Thank you so much, Aye! Boomerang seems like an amazing tool for any working mom. We appreciate your advice so much. Check out Boomerang here!