The Collision of Work & Personal Calendars
Time to read: 3 mins
It's 5.37pm, half way through another 90 min work meeting and I'm about to do something I have never done before, leave.
It’s nursery pick up time and my turn to go. I don't quite know what to do as the call I'm on has older senior leaders with grown up kids from a generation above me. Those who preach ‘prioritise your career at all costs, after all you are doing it for your family’. Of course the anxiety in my head is much worse than the reality, my frustration wasn’t about leaving but my inability to draw clear boundaries for myself even after 12 months of parenthood.
Boundaries is a notion I suck at, constantly late for everything and playing catch up all day. It was never a blocker before, my partner excelling at her career meant that the difference between being home at 7pm or 9pm rarely mattered. But now there was a non-negotiable stop point, the nursery pick up and I joined the collection of guilty parents picking their child up at exactly 6pm, an empty room with just my son in the middle (to be fair he loves nursery). So boundaries and time management became key. I wasn't trying to be great at organisation, just not be shit at it and avoid being crap at work and at home (for more info on maintaining a great career during parenthood click here).
First step was quite simple, work out what to disconnect vs. connect. Behaving like work and life were inseparable just didn't work. Work is a huge part of my identity. I wanted to excel there and at home. But some bits were too connected, especially work emails which I would check after-hours consistently. So step 1, disconnect my phone. I have two now, like any good South London drug dealer. I have my burner phone for whatsapp/social media/personal and a work phone that gets left in the home office post work. Super useful for disconnecting. However my calendar doesn't work as simply. I needed to combine and plan my way through…So after getting a lot of great advice from work colleagues who were parents I started to do two things I had never done before.
First up, I would colour code personal commitments that were genuine priorities. These were activities that I would get up and leave a meeting for. You can't miss the nursery run, or the doctor's appointment or meeting my partner late because I stayed a bit longer than I needed to. This meant I could successfully navigate the day and understand when I needed to switch between work and parent mode. As I implemented this, I found communicating these things much easier to colleagues, with renewed emotional permission. ‘’Can you do a 6pm meeting tomorrow? Sorry I'm on nursery pick up, would 5pm work?’’ I found 99% of requests could be rescheduled. It of course took trial and error. I used to commit to working after our son's bedtime, but found it near impossible to re-enter work mode after being a parent for 2 hours so dropped that quickly (for more info on management of switching identities in a new family click here).
Secondly, and the biggest change, was planning my diary out far longer in advance, 12 weeks out. It meant I could actively chart the exact points of pressure where work priorities became significant and I needed more support from my partner. Partnership is never 50/50, it's about compensating for each other, especially in parenting so I would chart the exact dates where I needed to be present at work and therefore my parenting and myself took a back seat. In exchange, the dates I could offer more than 50% on, and take on the majority of parenting as it had minimal impact on work. 2 years into parenting this is working much better and creating this feeling of positive energy, I can balance all the priorities that drive me and succeed in all of them. Boundaries, burner phones, communication & prioritisation, things that enabled me to do something I didn't deem possible!
Zoe’s response
The hardest parts about having work and personal calendars separate from each other is that Greg travels a lot with work so if he’s away with work Monday through Wednesday and then has a social event with his pals on Thursday that’s 4 nights away from our son and 4 days and nights of solo parenting. Now that we’ve combined calendars and plan further out he would either decline the social event or go but then make sure he was around all weekend so that I can get time back to see my friends or catch up on any work I haven’t been able to due to childcare.
Greg also hates saying no so this has been quite a tough lesson to learn but I think we are finally getting there with a good balance of individual time and family time.
TAKEAWAYS:
Organising myself started with creating the right boundaries. Learn to prioritise and manage with less time.
Create the right systems, in my case I disconnected my phone but connected my work & personal diary.
Prioritise the future. Look 12 weeks out, isolate the pressure points and communicate and share the workload (it's never 50/50, just needs to be fair).
You can be great at work and home, you just need to evolve, it's worth it!
