The boys have continued their tag-teaming efforts to keep us up at night: when it’s not one of them screaming his head off it’s the other. I can’t remember when…
Meri, Meri, quite contreri
Tag: work
I came across a funny parallel to my old career in publishing at work. In publishing people talk about gate-keeping – how publishers act as a filter between the universe…
When you have children, you play a round of Russian Roulette every morning. BAM! Someone is sick and you have to take the day off work. Clearly, the more children…
I have a sense of foreboding regarding the next few weeks at work. Maybe this or some other anxiety caused me to have my first real nightmare in a long…
Today we find out for sure if our house offer was accepted, and it’s going to be quite a nice watershed moment as I feel reasonably positive about either outcome.…
Finnish LinkedIn is talking about #TärkeäOsaMinua (‘an important part of me’), which seems to have originated as a social media campaign by one of the big trade unions to get people to think about their professional identity. I’ve really enjoyed reading the posts tagged with the slogan, and here’s mine!
For whatever reason, it’s quite rare to find a talk so interesting you’re on the edge of your seat for most it. This delightfully happened to me recently while listening to LEK Consulting‘s Andrew Allum talk about automation.
I find the topic of automation generally quite clear-cut: I think it’s a Good that will cause a fair amount of Bad in the short term. The bad consists of major restructuring in the job market and a lot of unemployment, which makes the fear and loathing around automation justifiable – too emotional and alarmist, but understandable. The good is in the long-term effect of greater productivity, lower prices and increased availability of valuable products and services for more people. Also, better jobs.
So against that backdrop of ‘This is a non-issue’, I was happy to find a lot of new food for thought in the talk. Mr Allum stressed that he was not a futurist and did not want to speculate much on what the effect of the changes we’re seeing now might be. I however am letting my mind wander, so have your grains of salt at the ready…
I have a book recommendation! Laura Vanderkam is a wonderful author who writes about time management. Her new book, I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time is really worth reading if you’re a woman who dreams of having both a happy family life and a career, or already have both and find the juggling act stressful and difficult. (And if you’re a man in a relationship with such a woman, I would also recommend it to you for perspective.)
I’ve been a fan of Vanderkam’s writing ever since I happened to find What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast in a bookshop, and was inspired by her optimism about time. The lack of time is a favourite complaint among ‘busy’ people, but she actually maintains that you can make time for anything you want by planning and prioritising. And some of the things your time is currently spent on probably aren’t worth it.
The new book is based on research among women who have a big career and a family, and her findings are honey to my ears. I’m ambitious career-wise, but I also hope that I will eventually have at least one child, and I’ve already started worrying about how that’s going to work. The narrative is that if you want one, then you need to be reconciled to the fact that you will never be fully invested in the other. But Vanderkam’s research shows otherwise: the book is full of women who find the time to be properly involved in both, without big trade-offs, and it’s really reassuring to read about.