The See-Saw

100 Ideas for Work-Life Balance

Julia Hobsbawm

• Éditeur: Atlantic Books
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782392453
• Sujet: Personal Development
• Sous-sujet: Self Improvement

In a society where women and men are under constant pressure to juggles their commitments as partners, parents and workers, The See-Saw offers life-changing tips and case studies to inspire and reassure you that you can get your work-life balance on track.Julia Hobsbawm, who combines running a successful small business with being a multiple mother of three young children and two teenage step-children, shares her own personal experiences and provides case studies and advice from women and men with different backgrounds and circumstances. Everyone is facing the same challenges: How do I save time? How do I remain focused on work but not distracted at home? How do I relax?A challenging new handbook for 21st-century life, The See-Saw is bursting with hard-won practical advice.

Contents

1. Superwoman Lands with a Bump (and Superman Stops Flying Off)

2. See-Saw Cissies

On the See-Saw: Shirley

3. The Thirty-Six-Hour Day

4. Little Angels and Devils

5. Damned by the ‘Dammy’

On the See-Saw: David

6. Work and Childcare on the See-Saw

7. The F-Word: Flexibility

On the See-Saw: Amanda

8. Fitness Freaking Out

9. Me-Time (and the Non-Book Book Group)

On the See-Saw: Sarah

10. Guilt: The G-Spot You Can Always Find

11. See-Saw Romance

On the See-Saw: Linda

Afterword

Acknowledgements

1

Superwoman Lands with a Bump

(and Superman Stops Flying Off)

Overloaded is the New Overweight

I bet you hate this book already. I bet you think it confirms that (a) you need work–life balance and don’t have it, and (b) you aren’t getting enough of a balance because you are doing it wrong. If this was a diet book (and I have picked up plenty in my time), at this point you’d be wishing something would change about the way you eat, or think about food. You’d be longing somewhere, however secretly, for transformation.

Well, something is wrong: somewhere along the line not many of us are achieving great work–life balance. Or we worry that we aren’t. Only children say, ‘I’m bored,’ because adults don’t have time to be bored these days. They might say, ‘I’m stressed,’ but who has time to be bored? Overloaded is the new Overweight.

Everlasting Overload

I don’t know about you, but I think about work–life balance a lot. I have to. If my life were a household budget I’d be down to zero every month at best, overdrawn every week at worst.

I relish being multiple things: mother, stepmother, wife, sister, daughter, daughter-in-law, auntie, great-auntie, colleague, and, of course, friend. My parents, my two brothers and I are close, and my cousins are like sisters. My life is not quite The Waltons – though I loved every minute of that 1970s American TV serial about a family where all the grandparents and their children and grandchildren live together and call out ‘Goodnight’ to each other – but we are all in each other’s lives a good deal. Being close in family or business is a commitment that takes time, and no matter how enjoyable that is, it can often make you feel like an egg-timer on its last few seconds of sand.

Our children range in age from three to eighteen. Two of them are my husband’s, and three of them are mine and his together. The job-that-never-ends called parenthood includes, of course, organizing school runs, play dates, assemblies, parents’ evenings, homework, TV policing, settling sibling rivalry scores, reading, playing, talking, drum lessons, and fresh air enforcement. In return for this continuous work, we get the wonder of parenthood: being around several delightful, small and not so big people who are interesting, loving, and maddening in equal measure. Children amuse us and love us. And they scare the pants off us when they (a) scale down from the balcony aged nine, (b) insist on getting out of the bath unaided aged three and slip, or (c) don’t return a mobile phone call aged fifteen at midnight on a Saturday.

TOP TIP

Pause for breath and pause for thought instead of mindlessly rushing around.

Keeping the Show on the Road

My day work seems, by comparison, less stressful and more predictable, although technically it is hard to see where the ‘day’ of the job ends. I created and nurtured my business like a child. I shared its growing pains and take enormous pride in every new development. My team is like family, and my board are quite like brothers. Business families certainly fall somewhere in between strangers, friends, and siblings. I spend as much time with them in person and by email as with my own flesh and blood. In order to keep the various shows on the road, and because I’m in my mid-forties, I need to spend time I’d rather not have to spend, keeping the mid-life sag and tiredness levels fractionally at bay. This involves as little exercise as I can get away with, as much retail therapy as I can justify for clothes and make-up to make me look un-saggy generally, as well as to hide the eye bags, and reasonably close attention to haircuts, highlights, and, last but by no means least, manicures. It nearly kills me to sit still for the time it takes for them to dry and I always think I should be doing ‘something else’, but needs must and, to coin a well-known phrase, I’m worth it.

Rush Hour

Fantasy Me is someone who glides and doesn’t rush, who gets to the end of her To Do List with a flourishing tick at the end of each day and has the energy to focus fully on the loved offspring her non-stressed gaze alights upon (that’s before she plans world domination in business and after she has made her husband glad as glad can be that she is home). Fantasy Me knows where everything is at any given time, because everything has a neat place and is not in a disordered heap somewhere. Fantasy Me is, well, a fantasy. The truth is distinctly more chaotic than I dare admit.

TOP TIP

Make a meaningful To Do List, not a bottomless one.

TOP TIP

Ditch uneccessary work meetings. Have ‘Telephone Tea’ or perfect other techniques to have you home and connecting to your non-work life.

And of course the truth hurts. There I am, often running around like a headless chicken who has missed a deadline, desperately going between board meetings and trying to organise dentist appointments and play dates (while knowing deep down that I can’t remember the names of all my children’s teachers or friends.) I want to rename parents’ evening parents’ afternoon and find myself bitterly resenting that the latest appointment seems to be 5 p.m., just when I’m getting stuck into a meeting or list of emails. Meanwhile, I have to duck my head in shame as yet again I do not volunteer to do anything for the school fair, not even the tidying up.

There I am, telling myself that I will have only one To Do List and in fact having eight, spread between an out-of-sorts pink Filofax, a hand-held computer, and various bits of paper. There I am, getting home for bedtime three or four weekday nights (big tick), but in reality coming in, sitting down at the computer and continuing where I left off at my desk (bad mark). And there I am, saying I’m not working at weekends and in reality often sinking into an exhausted stupor as soon as Saturday comes and being no good to anybody.

TOP TIP

If you are overloaded with lots of competing obligations, learn to treat your life like crop rotation! In other words, allow yourself to give priority to some things at the expense of others some of the time.

Most of us recognize the living-like-an-egg-timer syndrome. Whichever way I spin it to myself, I work for more hours a week than I don’t; no matter how much I thin out my diary, it always fattens back up again; no matter how much I plan and organize, I leave something out, like those bits of balloon that pop out when one end is squeezed and squeezed again.

CASE STUDY

Sophie, a writer, is married to Dan, a film-maker.

I started to work from home only about five years ago. I found it really hard, coming home after a busy day in the office, knowing as you put your key in the lock that there are going to be all sorts of other demands made of you. You take a deep breath and then you’re in. There will be arguments to test King Solomon, homework to help with that is way beyond your academic capacity, or vital pieces of clothing or sheets of school info to find. It used to amaze me how much responsibility would seem to be mine. In my head I would be wondering how it ever got like this. There was always so much left for me to deal with: running up and down those stairs like a maniac, hoovering while I carried the washing down the stairs.

Not that it was always like that. Sometimes I would come home and there would be smells of supper cooking, and everyone would be doing their homework or music practice, and it would all seem as if everything was fine without me. Then one part of me felt sad while the other wanted to step away, take advantage of it, and go and do something else.

Juggling and Struggling and Muddling Along

In short, I veer between extremes like most working parents, just as I multitask not just because I’m good at it but because I have to do it, like it or not. Women and men are driven by all sorts of feelings as we juggle and struggle and muddle along, including fear: that someone else will take our job; that there won’t be enough money; that if we don’t organize a million things for our children they will be denied some kind of Personal Development holy grail; or that we will ‘forget’ how to do it. Either way, we generally don’t feel we have a choice because often we have only limited choices.

There is Lauren the radio producer who, having dropped her son at his three-hour-per-day nursery, spent most of her second maternity leave ‘running’ back home to feed the baby with little more than turnaround time before she had to get back to the nursery. There’s Habie, the market researcher and writer who, although childless, gets less sleep than a parent with small children because she stays up half the night writing her novels and reports. And there’s Steve, the computer software entrepreneur who makes his excuses to dash to an imaginary meeting in order to scoot to school to catch his daughter in her assembly. Steve doesn’t want to miss the event but the culture doesn’t let him easily or flexibly take the time off – yet.

Even celebrities are beginning to talk in interviews about balance as much as about their latest product....