Tag: work life balance

Missing the Minister’s box

I had the unusual sensation of feeling sorry for Nick Clegg when I caught up with the Sunday Telegraph’s story about his refusal to accept new business via the red box after 3pm.

For the record, this does not mean that he is knocking off early to have a game of frisbee in St James’s Park with Miriam and the kids.  It means that if a civil servant wants him to respond to a query or approve a decision, the paperwork has to be  with Private Office by 3pm – else it will have to wait til the next day. That’s all.  The stuff in the box is  what gets taken home to be ploughed through at night, once the day’s meetings have been done.  Box times are just a signpost for officials, they have nothing to do with how Ministers spend their days.   There are, in any case, very few decisions in Whitehall which absolutely MUST be taken within 24 hours (whatever civil servants think), and I’m sure that if Clegg’s private office felt they had one of those on their hands after the 3pm deadline they’d find a way of getting in touch with him about it.

Oh, and far from it being unprecedented to close the box early, Ruth Kelly did the same when she was at DfES.  Her deadline was 4.30, I seem to remember.  It caused the odd raised eyebrow at the time, but the Department didn’t spin wildly out of control as a result.

Now, presumably the Telegraph knows all this.  So why are they gunning for the Deputy Prime Minister?

5 things to remember in between jobs

As I secretly knew it would, the job drought has ended and I’m back fretting about  having to work through the weekends again.  This seems like a good time to jot down some hard won advice about dealing with slumps – not least so that I can read it back when the next one crops up.

1. Jobs travel in packs and use unreliable forms of transport.  It’s perfectly normal for there to be gaps between jobs and then for people to be  falling over themselves to snaffle you up.  I’ve never met a freelancer yet who was busy all the time (and wasn’t lying about it).  Keep a spreadsheet of your work patterns and you’ll see that troughs are inevitably followed by peaks (and vice versa) – nothing lasts forever.  This can be quite comforting when the cupboard is bare, and fooling around with the spreadsheet on quiet days can almost feel like work.  Although…

2.  No-one can job-hunt for 24 hours a day, even though it is tempting to try.  With LinkedIn and other resources on tap you can fool yourself that you’re doing valuable things  just because you’re at the computer.  If you have really exhausted all the leads you can think of (and aren’t just avoiding  another awkward call) give yourself permission to go away and get a life.  Play the piano, contemplate painting the bannisters, torment the cats, leave the house and do something exciting you can use as raw material for your blog.  Remember that one of the reasons you probably had for going freelance in the first place was to kick the “life” part of your work-life balance back into action.

3.  However tempting, don’t take the first job that comes along just because it’s a job.  If it doesn’t fit your core skills or add something to your business it will just end in unnecessary unpleasantness.  Having just done this (again) and with the bruises to show for it,  I am aware that this is a hard one to learn.  Avoiding doing crap jobs was another reason I went freelance and is the reason that I…

4.  Put away a slug of money out of each pay cheque  to act as a cushion when the slumps come along.  This also allows you the smug glow that comes with saying “no” when someone asks if you’d like to do a crap  job,  and it helps deal with point 5…

5.  It ALWAYS takes longer to get work sorted out than you think it possibly can.  Potential clients are always just jetting off on holiday and promising to “pin things down when I get back”,  or need budget approval from a finance committee that meets once a quarter in alternate leap years, or just get tied up in meetings about other things.  The thing to remember is that, eventually, you will work again – and if you doubt that go back to point 1 and start again…

Join the dots

Blogging is like going to the gym, enthusiasm is what gets you started, habit is what keeps you going.  So rather than fall off the wagon over Christmas, I’ve been trying to write something that pulls together the thoughts that have been floating round my head for the past few days.   Sometimes it all seems to be about to come together to make something meaningful, but the bits always  drift apart in the end.  So,  can you join up the dots and make a profound statement about progress and technology on my behalf?  I’ll just dig out my trainers and go to the gym…

1. The Christmas  I was nine my parents bought  Pong which was then state of the art in electronic entertainment. I did most of my under-age drinking in the first pub in Lichfield to have a Space Invaders machine. This Christmas my children are 11 and 8.  My parents provided the funds to buy us  a Wii for Christmas. Is this progress? Should I be worried that geological ages can pass before they get tired of playing the racing cow game ?    One of the virtues of Pong was that it was so dull that once the novelty of playing wore off you generally stopped and got a book to read instead. Are books “better” than TV games?  What will my grandchildren be playing when they’re nine?  Isn’t it weird that I, who still think of myself as being (quite) young, have seen in my lifetime two entire industries (gaming and mobile telephony)  be born and take over the world, to the point that they are changing the way human beings behave?

2. On Start the Week , Susan Greenfield was saying that the ubiquity of computer-based entertainment was changing the way that we think, so that young people now find it hard to deal with abstract ideas or with narrative which develops slowly.   As she puts it –technology is moulding a generation of children unable to think for themselves or empathise with others. Is this  a) true? b)  inevitable? c) what middle aged people always say about the young?

3. Amazon’s biggest electronic seller this year was that electr0nic tablet which impersonates a book. I’m happy to carry all my music around with me on my iPod despite being devoted to vinyl.  Why do I hate the idea of carrying lots of books around the same away? Will I give in eventually, just as I have with blogging and owning a Blackberry?

4.  Julie’s post about work-life balance  came to mind when I was listening to a programme about the Slow Movement,  which aims to restore a gentler pace to modern life.  The programme  included a clip from Tom Hodgkinson of the Idler magazine which campaigns against the work ethic.  He blamed the Puritans for the decline in the value placed on play in modern societies and the  stress placed on work and duty.  In which case is it actually a  good thing that my children are enjoying the racing cow game?

See?  Completely random, but somehow also linked by something.  (Polite) suggestions as to what it might all mean would be very welcome!