I’m a budgetary liability.  I have 49 days holiday accrued and have been “strongly encouraged” to take 2 days off each week to reduce my leave balance.  So for eight weeks I get a four-day weekend.  I still have the same workload to manage so treat my time as a valuable commodity:

• Meetings, meetings, meetings.  I stopped attending ineffective or unproductive meetings.
• Decline without prejudice.  I decline meeting invites if:
  • There’s no agenda or context for the meeting
  • My input is not critical to the outcome
  • The meeting is for a timeslot where I’m already booked
• No one person is critical.  I don’t reschedule meetings if some attendees double-book themselves.  The meeting proceeds as scheduled; I send notes and actions after the meeting.
• Dedicated productive time.  My Wednesday afternoon is cleared of all organized commitments and reserved for productive work.
• Focus on what’s important.  On Monday morning I ask my leads two questions to help me focus my week:
  • What important things do I need to know from last week?
  • What do you need from me this week?
• Expecting and accepting limitations.  I write down the important things I need to achieve and focus on those.  Unexpected work crops up and I have to pivot…that’s expected.  I say “no” to work I don’t have capacity for (my manager wasn’t happy…a topic for a future blog post) and set expectations around work I’ve committed to.  If I can’t meet a commitment I let the person know in advance or delegate.
• Limit the work day.  Working past 8 hours allows tasks to stretch out and non-important work to creep in.  I work a solid 8 hours and go home knowing I’ve done my best to get through my work.

Taking a hard line toward managing my time and flexing as I see appropriate is working well.  The odd thing still slips through the cracks and I’m OK with that.

More important than managing my workload is my own mental health which is why I don’t work 12-hour days to squeeze five days of work into three days.  For someone who loves to work, being forced to take time off is difficult.  I fill my days off with activities I enjoy, including setting up this blog.  I might need the odd “mental health day” when I go back to a five-day work week…

Photo: Early morning coffee at our favourite coffee haunt down a little laneway in the city. It’s a little blurry, but that’s because I hadn’t had my morning coffee yet.