Take Back Control of Your Time

My brother and I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago about the expectations of the work world and how to survive it. Out of that came my idea to pursue the subject of "Learning to Let Go". I want to begin today by recounting our conversation to you, and would welcome your comments and stories as well. My goal is to take all the stories and hints out there and turn them into a self-help book for the sandwich generation so that we can try to sail into our twilight years in peace and harmony rather than in chaos and frustration. I hope you enjoy the journey with me as I learn to let go.

So, my brother told me about this day he had a work and I couldn't believe it. After that conversation I knew that it was time to develop a way to take back control of my time. Here is what he told me:

J got to work at 7:30am on that Thursday morning, turned on his computer, checked his email and already had 150 emails. He had a meeting at 8am, so he didn't really have time to answer any of the emails. After his meeting, at 10am, he went back to his desk and started working on email except that now the number had multiplied to 300! He answered about half and then had another meeting from 11am-1pm. At 1pm her ate lunch at his desk and continued to work through his email until his next meeting, a conference call, at 2:30pm. That call lasted over an hour and he once again tackled email after the call. He worked on email and answering phone calls until 5pm when he had yet another conference call with a client in California. He finished up this call at around 6:30pm and drove home just so he could get on the phone with another client in California who was having issues. During this call J continued to receive emails from clients on the West Coast and attempted to answer them as best he could. At approximately 9pm as he was finishing up the call, he saw an email beep on his computer and checked it since it was from his corporate office in California. The email was an announcement that one of the people in their finance department, who my brother worked with, had died. Death happens you say. Well, yeah, it does. But this woman was 44 years old! J had talked to her only a couple of weeks before and then she missed their next call because she was out sick. Turns out she had an aneurysm and had been in an induced coma to try to relieve the pressure in her head. It was unsuccessful, caused a second aneurysm and she passed away.

What a day, you say... How would you respond to this news? Well, it got his attention, and mine as well. But what do we do with that? How do we take back our lives and our time so that we don't end up dying before we've really finished living? That's what I want to try to help people do. Claim their lives. Take back their time, and set parameters that allow them to be people first and employees second.

Let's pick up J's story with the following morning. He had a doctor's appointment the next morning at 8am. By the time he arrived at his office at 10am, one of those clients from the day before had escalated an issue he hadn't even had a chance to see to his Senior Vice President and accused him of not doing his job. His comment to me, "I knew I should have checked email this morning, but I overslept because I was up so late the day before."

WHAT!!!

Where is the common decency that used to exist in the world? Why did this person feel the need to escalate before hearing from J? What makes it okay that his company expects him to work these hours and then reprimands him because the call was escalated when he had no opportunity to do anything about it? It would be different if my brother was an executive with his company, and keeping these kinds of hours you might think he is, but he isn't. He is an Account Manager who makes less that $60,000 a year. What is up with this? I want to develop a plan for companies and employees, but more importantly for people to relearn how to be civil to each other and how to respect boundaries.

Join me, won't you?

Lynn