Oh, the joys of working from home. It’s Sunday afternoon and I just sent an email to a client. Fail! I’ve been focusing on disciplining my work hours and yet, too often, the office calls to me on evenings and weekends. Does this happen to you as well?
Our Books & Such founder and president, Janet Kobobel Grant, encourages us to work hard during those hours we’ve committed to work and save the others for rest and play. She believes that the balance will show in our work. I agree with her but all too often I backslide.
I’ve either found myself working from home or my studio for most of my career. When I was actively raising our children, I made a promise not to have them remember me with my back toward them plugging away on the computer. I often wrote or worked after they had gone to bed. When my job was sculpting and design, I always made sure to have a chair next to mine at the work table so the kids could come out and chat away. Or just play with clay alongside me. I certainly didn’t do a perfect job of striking that balance but I was mindful of the importance of trying.
So what are the working at home disciplines I’m now trying to practice?
- I like to have a familiar rhythm to the work week. On Mondays, I don’t schedule meetings if I can avoid it. I save that day for reading client work, which is one of the most time consuming (and enjoyable) jobs literary agents have. And I’m always behind, no matter how hard I try.
- I try to schedule Zoom meetings and calls for Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so I know I need to spiff up a little on those days. In between meetings I do much of the paperwork that’s a big part of my job.
- Thursday I reserve for deep work, drilling down on proposals and getting those submitted.
- Friday morning is our weekly staff meeting– an important time in the life of our agency. We share about our goals, our achievements that week, we talk about the trials and triumphs of our clients, and we discuss issues that affect our industry and may affect our clients. We make plans for client webinars and possible retreats. But, of course, we are dear friends as well as colleagues so we share about our lives and laugh (and sometimes cry) together. We often follow up with a book discussion, working our way through a business book week by week. When that meeting wraps up it’s time to mop up the hanging jobs, clean the office and shut things down for the weekend.
- Once a quarter, I have a “mind-clearing” exercise scheduled for Friday afternoon. I take a piece of paper and just write down every thing, big or little, that’s been taking up space in my brain. Getting it out on paper and scheduling follow-up is a great discipline.
That’s how it’s supposed to work.That’s how I could work at peak performance, but, well, the best laid plans. . . Like last week. I was scheduled to take the week off. So how did that work out? I’ve never worked so hard. I had one emergency or time-sensitive thing after another. It was a good week but nothing like I had planned.
So if your agent doesn’t answer your Friday evening email until Monday morning, just smile and realize she’s probably got a good handle on work/life balance. and that will make her more productive and creative in the long rum.
How about you? How do you balance life, family, work, community, friends and everything else you are called to juggle?
An Ode to Poetry
Discipling work from home
one can let the devil win,
knowing one just wrote a tome
and money isn’t coming in,
for cash is, after all, the mark
of success, and always was,
and even jumping cancer’s shark
daily’s not enough because
someone out there does it better,
juggles eggs while brewing beer,
Zooming while penning a letter,
copperplate, to those most dear,
and in the shade of those so cool,
I feel a failure, and a fool.
I try to keep a set time to write each day, but keep a notepad near me other times. If my writing calls during my “off” time I jot a quick note so I can let it go and focus on my “other” job.
My biggest challenge when it comes to working from home is living with older parents and my young adult son. I finally learned not to expect them to respect my schedule, my deadlines, or my closed door at all times. I need to be the one to create “Please do not disturb signs” and lock the door when I’m on a Zoom call in case the sign doesn’t work. If Mom announces that my sisters are coming over for lunch, I need to decide whether to rearrange my schedule (sometimes relationships need to come before my plan for the day) and when to say, “I can eat lunch when everyone gets here, but then I need to work.”
At the same time, I am fully aware that my time with my 19-year-old son is limited. If he asks, “Can we go get food later,” I try to make it work. A request to “get food” often means he wants to talk about something, and I want to be available for him. I also make a point of getting out with a friend or my sisters about once a week, just so I’m not always chained to my desk. I make up for this by sometimes working a Saturday, but I try as hard as I can to leave Sundays free.
Through all of this, I have discovered that when I am truly trying to get my work done, everything gets finished.
Thanks for opening up this great discussion topic, Wendy!
I try not to overcommit, but life interrupts plans often, so I try to allow time to manage interruptions. Mondays I determine the week’s goals, finish any little things left from the prior week, and review my writing projects. I dedicate Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays to writing. I handle the business end of things on Fridays and Saturdays. I schedule lunch meetings on Thursdays and other meetings on Fridays so I don’t lose writing momentum earlier in the week. I work 9-8 Monday through Thursday with three breaks to eat with and talk to my husband and one walking break. Fridays and Saturdays I work until 5, after which we have a meal with friends. Sunday is church and relaxation.
I LOVE your mind-clearing exercise, Wendy!!! I find that I can get so much more done if I simply make a list for myself so that I can see everything that I need to do, want to do, am stressed over doing, and even those things that feed the soul. When my children were young, I poured myself into being there. My oldest needed three trips outside a day to feel himself and since we live way off in the forest without a yard and he and his brothers loved to wander (and fall into creeks, ha!) that meant walking alongside him while he pulled his wagon and chased bugs. I wrote in the early morning and still do. Now, I do writing when my kids are at school and focus on the family and the home when they are with us. I love your schedule and will keep it in mind if I have the honor of having an agent one day!
What a great topic, Wendy! I’m definitely still figuring this out, with two mostly-from-home jobs and a busy two-year-old boy. 🙂 Definitely late nights and early mornings are when I do most of my writing and lesson planning/grading. I like the rhythm of your weekly schedule and probably need to work on ours more! But I’ve definitely found that having set days for laundry, cleaning the floors, etc. has been helpful–my husband is much more organized than I, so he’s helped in this process too. 🙂
And I love the reminder of not wanting your children to grow up most familiar with your back…I remember you telling me that before, and it’s such a good goal to remember…it can be so easy to let the urgent overtake the important at times. Thank you for setting an example for us in that!
Ha en trevlig dag, när du köper en fastighet måste du omedelbart vara uppmärksam på taken om det är dåligt i tak, du måste göra ny wolkenplafond i detta rum för att göra rummet ljusare, om du letar efter något nytt för din inredning belysning, jag råder dig att överväga Öppna tak. Detta är en ny typ av belysning som huvudsakligen endast används av stora företag. Således kan du redan lära dig om denna belysning och implementera den i ditt liv.