“It takes a lot of management of the calendar” – Prof Bower

I was watching an interview with Prof Joseph L. Bower . He spoke of a few interesting points to help develop your career. However what impressed me the most was his response to the question “How do you maintain a work-life balance??”.

I have struggled managing my time and being organized. Being exposed to individuals who do this well exposed my failings even more. My wife for example has stayed late in the office only 4 times in the last 2 years. And that hasn’t prevented her from get her job done and exceptional appraisals.

Looking back I saw pattern in my disorganization: I tend to misplace stuff, tend to waste too much effort perfecting something that’s not worth the effort, a habit of sometimes taking on more than I can chew and also the occasional failure to say no.

After having identified some of the issues I attempted to get some order into my life and achieved some progress and I want to believe that I am much better off than I was say a few years back. But in process I see a new problem. The problem of handling people who refuse to get tied down in your structure L

Last year I had a particularly sad experience. One of my ex colleagues visited Singapore on an official visit and he asked for something that wasn’t quite my area of expertise. Since he was nice to me and I didn’t want to offend him I googled and provided some basic stuff to get him started. Later due to an avoidable triviality we both got into an uncomfortable situation and that guy hasn’t talked to me ever since.

I do rationalize by saying that what he asked for was outside my area of expertise, my help was something that he could have retrieved easily from the net and most importantly when I tried to help he kept on raising issues without listening to my suggestions. Now I have thought about it a few times and the fact is that the outcome saddens me.

I often think if there was something that I could have done to handle things differently. Could I have made my point without offending my friend. And till now I never got a satisfactory answer. The only thing that comes to mind is that perhaps my forced structure on myself contributed. If I was as disorganized as I used to be then perhaps I wouldn’t have taken as much offence.

Well then point of this whole blog is that I faced a similar situation with a friend who closer to me than the previous guy. The situation I got into was messier and in the next blog I will write about whether I was able to extricate myself amicably L

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