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	<title>Adventures in home working &#187; about</title>
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	<link>http://steves.seasidelife.com</link>
	<description>I'm Steve Richards a strategist and all round tech enthusiast working on enterprise desktop, application delivery and collaboration solutions. I work from home by the coast in the North West of England.  All the views expressed in this blog are my own.</description>
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		<title>How I manage my time</title>
		<link>http://steves.seasidelife.com/2007/11/16/how-i-manage-my-time/</link>
		<comments>http://steves.seasidelife.com/2007/11/16/how-i-manage-my-time/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Nov 2007 11:40:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Steve Richards</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Main]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[about]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[productvity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Workspace]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[On the flight home yesterday I was thinking about how I manage my time, and relaxing in a Cafe after a long walk I thought I would jot down some notes.&#160; First a little about me and my job: I am currently in a vision and strategy role, but really I still love to get [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>On the flight home yesterday I was thinking about how I manage my time, and relaxing in a Cafe after a long walk I thought I would jot down some notes.&#160; First a little about me and my job:</p>
<ol>
<li>I am currently in a vision and strategy role, but really I still love to get my hands dirty with architecture, engineering and particularly user experience and productivity issues.&#160; Hands on experience is very important to me. </li>
<li>I work for 4 main groups,&#160; within CSC.&#160; The End user experience group that develops most of CSC&#8217;s desktop service offering, the server based computing and the collaborative services development groups.&#160; I also work with our leading edge forum that does research into new and emerging business and technology trends.&#160; In my spare time I often consult on bids and proposals. </li>
<li>I consider an important part of my job the coaching and development of the people I work with, no one works for me </li>
<li>I work from home </li>
<li>I work in a global role which in practice means working mainly with Northern Europe, North America and Australia </li>
<li>I have a wife, 4 kids and a cat and they take up a lot of my time </li>
<li>I have an auto-immune disease which I can control pretty well, but its does mean my health is pretty unstable on a day to day basis, limits my international travel and the intensity with which I can work. </li>
</ol>
<p>So these are the principles I try and follow:</p>
<ol>
<li>I leave a lot of unscheduled time in my diary.&#160; This means I get a lot of flexibility in my day.&#160; Many people I know seem to fill their diaries with busy work &#8211; often conference calls &#8211; which I rapidly stopped doing when I realised that on a lot of these calls I was adding perhaps 10 minutes of value and hour. </li>
<li>I work a very long, low intensity day.&#160; I tend to start work at about 7:30 and finish around 11:00PM.&#160; But within that day I spend time with my family, walking, swimming, meditating, business and pleasure reading, lunching with friends and even watching an hour and a half&#8217;s TV (generally 1 hour drama and 30 minutes comedy &#8211; which we always do as a family at 8:30PM). </li>
<li>I also typically do quite a lot of integrated work/life activity, listening to podcasts while walking/driving, watching downloaded or DVD copies of technical conferences while I have lunch, scanning my feeds while I watch TV, reading by the health clubs swimming pool while the kids play, working on my Tablet in cafes while gazing at the views and chatting over breakfast.&#160; I fill odd bits of dead-times with email processing and phone calls on my Blackberry. </li>
<li>I don&#8217;t use a to-do list really.&#160; I just decide what my top 5 or 6 objectives are for the week and my top 2-3 objectives are for each day.&#160; I tend to leave &quot;to do&quot; items in my inbox (I email to myself) but otherwise keep my inbox empty (thanks to the Blackberry).&#160; </li>
<li>I find forgetting about all the things I don&#8217;t have time to do &#8211; that seemed important when I thought of them but really weren&#8217;t &#8211; very useful.&#160; When I used to keep a to-do list the backlog of stuff I never got around to was very depressing. </li>
<li>Although I have way too much to do,&#160; I still buy extra holidays off CSC, so right now I get about 35 days a year and I have no trouble taking them all! </li>
<li>I invest a lot of time, money and innovation in my work environment and relationships,&#160; I long ago realised that my idea of a good working environment was not the same as any of my employers but that if I was going to work for thousands of hours a year,&#160; then I should try and create an environment that maximised my chance of enjoying myself </li>
</ol>
<p>The benefits of this way of working are considerable:</p>
<ol>
<li>I get to work on the important but not urgent &#8211; most days </li>
<li>I get to take advantage of good weather </li>
<li>If something urgent and important crops up I normally have time to cope with it without creating too much stress for my already stressed body to cope with </li>
<li>Most of the value I add comes from ideas and I have my best ideas when I&#8217;m not &quot;working&quot; so I do a lot of recording of voice notes or emails to myself while out and about, often after I jump out of the swimming pool! </li>
<li>I get to spend time with people when they need it,&#160; rather than asking them to &quot;find a slot in my diary&quot; days later </li>
<li>I get to see a lot of my family, even when I&#8217;m really busy </li>
<li>When I&#8217;m in a flare, I don&#8217;t disrupt too many peoples schedules </li>
<li>I have time to dive deep into issues that capture my attention and explore them </li>
</ol>
<p>There are a few downsides:</p>
<ol>
<li>I have to make decisions about what to do most days,&#160; which is not as easy as just jumping from one meeting to the next, or one document review to the next.&#160; Making decisions can be hard work, especially when I&#8217;m not feeling well </li>
<li>I tend to do things that are difficult,&#160; often requiring new ideas, challenging existing ways of doing things, stopping activities that don&#8217;t work strategically, convincing people to do difficult and often disruptive things that they don&#8217;t have time to do.&#160; Difficult things are hard to do on bad days when I can&#8217;t concentrate for more than a few minutes or I&#8217;m dosed up on pain killers or sitting feeling sorry for myself with a Migraine.&#160; </li>
</ol>
<p>I refined this way of working using the books peopleware and slack,&#160; but to be honest I have always worked this way regardless of the type of job I have done.</p>
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