Working hours

In my head I know how ridiculous it is to think that the most important thing about my work is that I am sitting at my desk at certain hours for a certain amount of time. But I am finding it hard to challenge and shake that sense of guilt when I am not at my desk when I feel I am suppose to be there.

It is a legacy of being a consultant for so long, billing the client by the hour and having the feeling of being watched.

I am encouraged by those I work around that they don't have this assumption. They encourage me, implicitly more than explicitly, to where when and where suits me. Results are paramount over location.

Today I tried to do it all...find the fastest way into school, workout in the morning, and get into work before 9. It was a failure on most accounts...but it lead me to this new way of thinking.

So tomorrow morning after dropping my kids at school I will be doing some work from home before heading into the office. I will avoid the peak hour rush. I will be more effective and less stressed when I do work.

Reflections on work

I'm not sure if this will be dry or interesting, but over the next few days I am going to post my reflections on being back in paid employment after 18 months of working for myself.

I want to note what seems weird and strange and different this time round, before I become normalised to all this craziness.

The future of workplace design

As I see it, the workplace is a relic of a bygone era.

We are supervised to ensure that we are sitting at our desks for the hours we are contracted to work, as if it is the sitting that is the productive activity. This is the case when sitting at a machine which is part of a production line that only works when people do the right thing at the right time. This is not the case for a majority of the people working today in the office buildings of many downtown CBDs.

We are asked to work from 8:30am to 5:30pm, Monday to Friday, in places far away from our family and community life, in environments that ensure we need to spend additional time outside of work in the gym in order to recover the vitality sucked out of us underneath those fluorescent lights.

This somehow worked when there was only one person from each family working, enabling the other person to spend time with and bring up the children. This certainly doesn't work for the majority of families today, where either both parents are working these kinds of jobs and hours, or where the family has separated parents and one parent struggles to keep it all together by themselves.

Part of my mission is the help create places of work where people have more vitality, have more energy, and are more well, at the end of the day than they were at the start of the day. This is because of the conversations they have had, the food they have eaten, the space they are in, the way they have moved, and what they have created through their work throughout their day.

They don't need to go to the gym after work because they have moved their bodies during the day. They don't need to feel guilty or neglectful about their families because their work enables them to be with their kids according to their needs. They don't need to have a side passion to ensure they get some kind of satisfaction out of life because their work is in alignment with their interests and purpose.

I think these are the workplaces we need today, and I think think they are on their way.