Fathers at work

 A couple of weeks ago I got a telephone call from the office of my doctors.  A voice that I thought sounded nervous said ‘It’s about your MRI scan results. Mr R would like to see you. ‘The words sent me straight to a place I thought I had left behind.  An hour later I was clear that everything was fine,  he’d apparently just wanted me to travel up to his clinic to be told that! The upside of the incident was that immediately I saw again very clearly what is important – and it wasn’t the report that had been troubling me all morning!  I had a concrete reminder of why I embarked on this process of imposing balance in my life (and that I seemed to have lost that).

It’s been a few months since I have posted a blog. How have I been doing in terms of my own small steps?  I’d like to say ‘pretty good’.  There have been a couple of significant victories.  In April we went away for a few days break.  I went straight from work which meant that I had all of my electronic devices with me.  But I didn’t even turn them on!   I spent the whole of the Wednesday doing a jigsaw in my pyjamas while everyone visited a country house and it felt great! OK, I admit to feeling like I should be doing other things, work things. But I got over it!  Then after one of the May bank holidays I came into work on the Tuesday morning and literally couldn’t remember what I had been doing on the Friday – which felt like a very long time ago.  It felt like I’d been away – I had switched off completely.

The campaign has been based on four simple steps.

Step 1: active diary management. I have said that I don’t want to work inLondon more than twice a week.  I’m working on the other days of course, but in the office that is close to home.  A diary audit of the last ten weeks shows a 60% success rate.   Twice I have failed because extra stuff has gone in (although in both cases I was watching other people do stuff rather than doing it myself – so I wasn’t expending as much effort) and twice because a personal commitment (a hospital appointment and a lunch with friends) required me to be there.  And it’s worth commenting that on only one of those two latter occasions did I take the opportunity of slipping in a work appointment!

Now as I have said before, I’m the first to admit my very privileged position.  Such control of my diary is a function of me being my own boss and the fact that my recent health history (and their saintly natures) mean that my colleagues are supportive to the point of being protective.   And a big six country trip in May that would have meant working much more than a couple of times a week was cancelled because of the Arab spring.  But there are always things I could be doing and people I should see. The point that I am making is that if you are committed to diary management, it can work.

Step 2: I’ve made a promise to myself that I will only go into the office at the weekend if I really have to.  The office is conveniently (perhaps enticingly) located about 200 yards from my front door.  In the past my default was to be there for a couple or three hours early on a Saturday or a Sunday morning most weekends and always late on a Sunday evening sorting things out for the week to come.  And, when I had a lot on, I’d be there on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon too. I’m reminded of the joke I used to tell about everyone who works at our place having a flexible work arrangement and mine being able to choose which part of the weekend I had off!

I have been largely successful in getting out of the routine of weekend office visits.  And the (three?) times that I have found myself there in the last ten weeks, I have been doing cricket admin not work stuff.  There’s a whole other question there about non-work interests competing with home, but I’ll leave that there for now.  My campaign to not work at the weekend has been largely successful and there has always been stuff that I could have/should have been doing. Papers that have been left unfinished, thinking that hasn’t been done, proposals that have been sent out later, catching up that hasn’t happened.

I think that I’ve been successful with my weekends for the same reason that I have been successful with the diary management.  Because of the work that I did up front on my mindset, because I was mindful about what was happening and what I wanted to happen.  And because I looked carefully at what it was that I was actually doing when I went in at the weekend, and whether I had to do it or whether the business could manage without me doing it.  So now, when my mind proposes a weekend office visit, there is a presumption against it, a sense that to do so would be somehow ‘wrong’.

My assessment (that appears to have been correct) was that no-one would really notice if I lay in bed after waking at 6.30 on a Saturday or Sunday.  At least nobody in the business would notice!  People at home notice I think.  Also I notice because I feel less stressed, my weekend days are my own.  I now see that a weekend day that starts with three hours work is ‘tainted’; time spent at work somehow sets up a mindset of achievement that sits badly with a good Saturday or Sunday.

Step 3: on the three (sometimes two) days that I work in the office I have made a point of not getting into work horribly early. Before I was ill I reasoned that I should get into work at the sort of time that I got onto my train when I was going to London. So 7.30am would have been a late start.  Incidentally I know where that originated – when I was the first man to request a flexible work arrangement under my then law firm employer’s shiny new flexible working policy, I argued that I could spend the time that I would otherwise spend commuting on productive work! Over the last few months I have fallen into a routine of getting up to dress Boy 3 before crawling back into bed feeling very fatigued and waiting till the bathroom is clear – only actually getting up once they have left on the school run.  Occasionally I will get a cuddle or one of them will sit on the bed and do their teeth. There’s some chat, but I’m not really doing anything, I’m just present.  Interestingly in my childhood memory my Mum was always in bed when I was getting ready for school.  My Dad made breakfast and after that I would sit on her bed.  There is something very comforting about that memory. And in a way I think I’m consciously recreating that, hoping that on some level this will have some positive impact on my boys.

Step 4: on those office days I am much more conscious of the time I get home (which, of course, is about two and a half minutes after I leave!)  In the past I would shamelessly time my arrival to coincide with dinner time.  Now I see that being home at six or half past is a good time to be at home.  Not necessarily to do anything domestically productive, just to be there and pick up on some of the stuff that’s happened and is happening around me.  I can’t claim anything like a 100% success rate on this one, but I have often got an extra half hour or so to experience the everyday life of the family unit.

The fact that I am not being domestically productive in the mornings or when I get home early is obviously unfair and something that I am reflecting on as I write this. Possibly I think that it’s a function of the changed family dynamic following my illness, of my ongoing tiredness.  And the fact that the dynamic has always been one of me doing what I’m asked to during the week.  But I am clear that my increased presence in family life is making a qualitative difference to my relationships with the boys.  I say that from my perspective obviously.  I have a sense that the same is true from theirs too.  A while ago we both picked the boys up from school. I can’t remember why it was, but it’s certainly something that the rational, pre-illness me would have frowned upon as a criminal duplication of parenting resource.  We pulled up at a set of traffic lights on the way home and Boy 2 said à propos nothing at all: ‘We should do this more often.’ And he didn’t mean stop at the lights!  He was commenting upon us all being together and it stuck with me.

I think that I’ve made a start at rebalancing stuff and the means I have used are very simple.  First I looked hard at what I was trying to achieve.  Then I set diary targets and changing the way you work to accommodate them. I made promises to myself based on realistic assessments of what has to be done (and what I was currently achieving in the time spent at work).  Those targets and promises need to be revisited and are current in my mind.  My experience is that I’m seeing pay offs in my family relationships.

I have been thinking about some of the responses to the blog to date. Do please leave your thoughts.

First can I stress that I do know how lucky I am and if that does not come through in what I write, there is something wrong!  I am blessed.  With seemingly happy, healthy children, a supportive partner and a job I love doing.  All that I have lacked is balance.  Now my illness has given me both the opportunity to recognise that I have a choice and some impetus to use it.  I do see these two factors: (1) the recognition that choice exists and (2) the impetus, desire, call it what you will, to exercise that choice as being two separate ideas.

I also hope that I have also made clear that I know there are many fathers who have little or no choice about how and when they work.  The blog is possibly going to be less relevant to those fathers.  I think I’m writing principally for fathers who have a choice, but who perhaps may not recognise that they do or who may lack impetus to exercise it.  The thing about choice though, the more I reflect on it, is that surely most of us have some degree of choice?  For someone it might be limited to whether to accept an extra shift or some overtime or casual work because the money would be great and how much will you actually add by being home for those hours?  For someone else it may be whether they want to press for promotion or the extra responsibility a project involves? For me I’m finding that it’s about choosing to go to London less and to make sure I leave at six rather than seven.

Maybe what I’m saying is that if everyone recognised that there was some choice and had the confidence both to exercise that choice and to be public about it, perhaps we would see a shift in culture.  William (in his comments on my last entry) writes about his company talking about flexibility and balance but not expecting you to take it.  I hear that often.  Over the last decade, working within large organisations, focusing predominantly on how people treat each other at work, I have thought  a great deal about the nature of ‘companies’ and I have come to believe that they don’t actually exist!  For me companies are just a brand name and a collection of (sometimes very fine) buildings all over the place.  Talk of ‘company culture’ is I think often exaggerated.  What companies really consist of is an assortment of people with influence over each other.    And that influence does not rigidly follow hierarchical lines.  You influence people on your team, the people around you, obviously you influence anybody who works for you, but you also influence your boss, and their (senior) colleagues too.   Much of my work is about helping people to recognise the influence that they have.  I would say to someone in William’s position that talking to your boss about leaving early twice a week so you can supervise tea or pick up from swimming isn’t necessarily ‘rocking the boat’.  Particularly if at the same time you are making clear that the work will get done; that the boss won’t lose out.

One of the things I want to cover in the blog is the whole question of how exercising a positive choice can make you more productive overall, but let’s not run before we can walk!  For the moment, let’s leave it at fathers like William saying, credibly and assertively to their boss, that their exercising a choice isn’t going to mean that the boss loses out.  Small steps!

Something else that I believe after 20 years of talking to bosses is that they, like clients, are human beings.  William (and anyone else reading this and trying to imagine how their own boss would react to a request) is likely to be thinking ‘you’ve not met my boss yet!’  All I can say is that frequently as part of my job I talk at length to bosses who have been complained about, who are clearly perceived by someone to be a problem.  I have often seen vulnerability and insecurity; people under pressure.  Sometimes I have seen people who are also struggling with their work life balance.  The main point though is that the people I meet are very different from the people that have been described to me.

I’m the first to accept that many bosses probably aren’t yet convinced that your job can be done flexibly, but I’m not advocating that everyone submits a flexible work request through their HR department.  We’re talking about taking small steps.  I doubt many bosses will put a blanket ban on picking up from swimming – at least if they are clear that the work will be done.   And if, over time, they recognise that your job is getting done, even though you’re leaving ‘early’, they may start to change the way they think.

In this struggle though, it’s important to recognise that covert operations will not have sufficient impact.  We need to be clear about what we are doing; that’s how we maximise our influence.  Last week there was an article in the FT work section about going home when you are tired and unproductive.  I loved it.  But it didn’t go far enough; it didn’t talk about publicising what you are doing.  I wanted it to say ‘Go home when you’re tired and unproductive and tell the people around you what you’re doing.’ That’s what’s going to drive culture change.

Something that I have been thinking about recently is the energy that children and families can give you.  Given that for most parents a state of perennial, child induced tiredness is the norm, this may sound ridiculous.  But I have a different perspective.  After all I am currently a bit like a scientific experiment. I am a perennially tired parent who has had abnormal levels of fatigue inflicted upon them (through the side effects of aggressive chemo and radio therapies).  Hopefully, 18 months on from the treatment, the fatigue will start to fade soon.  But at the moment it’s still there.  During the experiment, over the course of the last couple of years, something very strange has happened to me in terms of the way that I regard my children.  I had always (subconsciously) viewed them as net users of resource.  In so many different ways, but certainly in terms of energy!  They were also always viewed as the principal cause of my (and my partner’s) tiredness.  That was the accepted logic.  In the months following my diagnosis they quietly transformed, from users to providers; providers for me of energy and purpose.  I needed to get it from somewhere!  I wasn’t working and I was being regularly injected with a cocktail of the finest energy sapping drugs.  The whole dynamic changed and I started to see them differently.  (By the way if you’re worrying that I use terms like ‘net energy user’ with my boys, please relax!)  But I have started to wonder whether just recognising the energising effect of being with them (however tiring it may feel at the time) could help others in the way that I think it’s helped me over the last year or so.  Perhaps you might think about telling people that you need to go home to tap into the energy you get there, to refresh yourself.

Argonaut (in his comment) suggested that surely the worst thing would be to get old and realise that you missed your kids growing up because you were at work.  This is ground that I know because five or six years ago (maybe more) over a beer, one of my former bosses, a man who has been very good to me and who has had a great deal of impact on my career, said to me ‘Matt, don’t do what I’ve done and wake up one morning realising that you’ve missed your children growing up.’  When I speak publicly I normally tell this story, because it shows something about the way people addicted to work function.  At the time I remember thinking, ‘this is enormous’, ‘this is why I have started up my own company’, ‘I need to listen to this.’

Of course, being ‘driven’ or a workaholic or whatever word you want to use to describe someone like me, I continued to work 60, 70 hours a week.  The warning had no impact whatsoever on how I behaved.  It wasn’t until the doctor said ‘I think you’ve got cancer’ that I had the realisation that I had spent most of the last 20 years worrying about stuff that didn’t really matter.  And then I started to think about the warning I’d been given and what factors lead me to ignore it.  Some of that thinking is contained in the ‘work drivers’ piece.  But getting back to Argonaut’s suggestion, I have come to realise that there possibly is something worse than realising you’ve missed your children’s childhood.  It’s looking at the product of your parenting and regretting your choices.

People say on your death bed no-one will ever wish they’d spent more time at work.  I take this to the next stage; on that death bed you’re unlikely to regret the way that you managed a particular project or the decision you took not to push that product.  Because you’ll no longer be involved with the company.  But in twenty years you probably are going to be regularly reminded of your shortfalls as a parent.  Because, hopefully you’ll be watching your (grown up) children.  And you’ll possibly be thinking that you regret not spending more time talking to them about a particular thing, blaming yourself for not having more influence.  I’m sorry if that feels a bit negative.  But for me it’s a stronger warning.  It feels a bit like the picture of the damaged lungs on cigarette packets.  And what I’m interested in doing is finding warnings that generate impetus for people to exercise choice but that don’t involve cancer treatment!

Finally William asks about whether commercialism is part of the problem. Whether we are working too hard to collect stuff we don’t need.  Of course we are.  But I don’t want this blog to be a condemnation of the world we live in – just about thinking about how you can change the way or the hours you work.  With small steps at first.

Because of inevitable website delays, the introduction to this blog was written some time ago and I should probably provide an update about my progress in the last few months.

Actually the intro was one of many things on the inevitable pre-holiday list of ‘16 things to do before Sunday night!’  We [self, wonderful partner and boys 13, 11 and 8] took three and a half weeks in July/August and travelled round Europe in our VW camper van.  It was absolutely great; there’s something about our camper that makes everybody smile.  And we all smiled our way round Europe!  Obviously that’s a gross simplification and there’s plenty of material there for a whole other blog.  But just concentrating on the balance thing, while we were away, I started to realise that I’d actually been having quite a tricky time.

Fatigue is one of the continuing side effects of my cancer treatment.  I had been doing too much work; involving myself in too many projects, not saying ‘no’ enough type thing.  A week or so before the holiday I was working in New York (where it was extremely hot and I had difficulty sleeping).  And, of course, I was also coaching/running two junior cricket sides at the culmination of their season.  Just writing that down makes me feel a bit stupid.  What was I doing?  There had been some idea that the cricket would get me out in the open air in the summer and provide a barrier against over work. As I say, ‘some idea.’

With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that the fatigue accumulated. In a fatigued state, emotions are more difficult to manage and perspective less easy to maintain.  I started not to handle things in my normal measured way!  If you don’t know me, you won’t know that I’m not unemotional in the first place. There was a meeting, about cricket, just before we went away where it all got a bit ugly and I was irrational on a particular issue that I’d started possibly to obsess about.  Luckily, I think no lasting harm was done.

Of course, I didn’t work this all out as we motored round Europe.  I came back from holiday with it all going through my mind.  ‘Obsessing’ is a word with a whiff of the white coat about it.  Feeling very nervous about the cricket stuff, not wanting to face the people and wanting to run away would describe it better. There was the indoor season to arrange.  There’s always stuff to do.  I took the coward’s exit and announced a complete break from all cricket related activity.  There was one wonderful sunny Sunday in September when I faced down the demons and was hugely rewarded.  Eight under 10s reminded me why I do the whole cricket thing (and probably made me prouder than I’ve ever felt before) by winning a county wide competition with style and humility.

I was also much more careful about taking on work. I should make clear that I run my own company and am lucky enough to be surrounded by a group of wonderfully caring colleagues who have been fantastic about my illness, who ran things brilliantly while I was away and who cheerfully accepted my stated desire to restructure things on my return.  I know that I’m privileged in this regard and I thank anyone who will listen every day for this.  I quite happily told people (client people) that I had overdone things and was feeling extreme fatigue.  Something that I have learnt, and could write very boringly about, is how it pays to be open with (client) people about this sort of thing.

But even without the cricket and taking far greater care about getting involved in work, there was an ongoing internal tension, a deep sense of frustration that wouldn’t settle.  I thought that it was probably related to my feeling that I had let myself down and abused the knowledge, wisdom and insight that my illness had given me.  I had set out at Christmas to change my life, armed with the realisation that I’d spent the last 20 years worrying about stuff that simply didn’t matter.  Now, come autumn, I knew what mattered yet I still woke up worrying about stuff (that really didn’t matter).

Sitting with one of the psychologists at the Marsden last October was interesting.  I had a lot of ideas about my malaise to share and even some questions to ask her.  She listened intently. She said that she saw it more simply: that I’d gone back to work too quickly and was working too much.  That’s what she said.  A year or so earlier, at quite a low point in my treatment, Kate (my as yet uncanonised oncologist) made me promise to tell her everything and to agree to do what she told me.  And with this subjugation came my recovery.  The result is that I tend to listen to people (doctor people) at the Marsden in a way that I reserve solely for them.  The psychologist went on to ask me whether I could take half days?

Obviously I know all about the invigorating nature of the 4½ day week, I teach people about the value of flexible working, I have worked with Working Families since it was Parents at Work. I can quote from a number of case studies, one in particular was a friend who told me that having Wednesday afternoons off had changed his life.  And, of course, being in charge of my work pattern, I can take as many half days as I want.  What a great idea!

So far I’ve taken two.  That’s since October 20^th. There have been 65 opportunities.

And if I’m honest I worked during the evening on one of those days!  And, if this is a really honest portrayal of my struggle to come to terms with my workaholism,  I should probably admit that in that period I have had seven days’ holiday booked/planned and I worked one full day and two half days (so two full days) of those seven.  What I have been better at, but sadly don’t have figures for, is going home earlier – at least in time for tea – and not working during the weekend.  I think that in the same period I have only worked three times during the weekend.

But the central question I have to answer is simple:

‘With my insight, motivation, opportunity and recent medical instruction, why am I so bad at managing my work pattern?’

Answers proper will start next week!!

Matt