Skip to main content

The perils of working from home

530 am...wake up and plan to do a whole lot of work

530 to 6 - snooze all alarms

6 to 7...rush hour. Kids are sent to school...Wife is off to work

7 to 9...a morning walk, breakfast and just about time to open the laptop. What a beautiful day apt for working...

9 am...Wife calls. I am in a meeting. Please tell the maid what has to be cooked for lunch.

9 to 10...start work by checking email - click some random link and browse 71 sites in the name of research (but actually twitter, news, random social media)

10 am...Maid walks in complaining about traffic. Instructions are passed on to her on what is to be made.

10.01 am...Maid returns with a list, saying, unless these items are purchased, cooking wont happen for the day.

11 am...1 hour wasted in shopping for essentials. Day is saved.

11.05 am...Maid wants to share stories of her life - all pointing to how she badly needs a raise after last months raise. In the spirit of employee engagement, give her a patient ear.

11.30 am...message from wife. Many bills to be paid. Some plumber, pest control, water purifier repair,  <insert any handyman> is supposed to come. Anyway today you have no meetings, so I have asked them to drop in.

11.30 onwards till 3 - try to do a bit of work, but lunch and post lunch hibernation have to fought, plus various people are ringing the doorbell

3 pm...All service people have been seen off. Kids are back from school.

330pm...They dont like anything that the maid has prepared for snacks. They protest by going on hunger strike. Negotiation skills deployed.

4 pm...Maid protests that kids are not having milk now and want it give it all to the cat. On arrival to event site, cat is overjoyed and is purring loudly while kids are pleased. Negotiation skills deployed again. Cat is clearly displeased with this turn of events. Pass some milk to the cat as well...remaining milk is quickly finished by the kids...Open laptop again and get distracted by being called to referee three impossible to decide arguments for the next half an hour...

430 pm...Kids want to go out and play. What about homework? They will do it later it seems...not that I was interested, so permission is granted - anyway they were only informing.

430 to 5...irritated that no work is done since morning...realise one courier has to be sent...Go and courier said invoice.

5 to 6 - Realise that there was an email that came in a few days ago that wanted 23 corrections in one invoice that was sent two months ago - and make those corrections - check, double and triple check.

6 pm..Wife is back...

6 pm onwards...Now I get to work

6 to 10 - work, hover to the kitchen, munch, work, browse, reply mails, payments, invoices among other things

10 pm..wife - you are never available when you work at home...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Be Civil. Make nice!

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...
Post a Comment
Read more

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call
Post a Comment
Read more