Writing for life

“Working it” column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 29/10/2007

Time! You can almost hear it tick-tocking away… and the more you have to do, the quicker it seems to tick.

I’m hopeless at managing my time. Oh, I know the theory. Prioritise, just say no, structure your work, focus on the most difficult thing first, delegate… yaddy, yaddy, yadda!

I have structured, prioritised to-do-list’s coming out of my ears, and my hard-drive is crammed with time-saving, productivity-enhancing gizmos that beep and whistle at me when I should be doing things. I have a plethora of time management options spread before me. Why then, don’t I have enough time?

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Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 24/10/2007

Once upon a time I used to look forward to getting up early.

I used to love the serenity of it all. There’s something curiously liberating about being the first one up and about. Pretty soon the house would erupt into the inevitably manic hubbub of morning: everyone rushing for showers, breakfast, school lunches… but for now it was time to savour the calm before the storm.

I’d sit at the kitchen table, with a steaming mug of fresh coffee and a section of the newspaper, and simply enjoy the peace. I might even open up the laptop and churn out one of these columns, make a start on a longer article or catch up with some e-mails before the kids were up and about. Sometimes I’d renege, and opt for a lie-in, but more often than not I’d choose to get up early.

The astute among you will note that all this is written in the past tense. That’s the way things used to happen. Not any more. These days I lie under the duvet like a useless lump of lead. My conscious mind urges me to get up but my subconscious overrules. Five more precious minutes it implores.

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"Working it" column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 22/10/2007

Back in the “bad old days” when I worked in an office, I’d often find myself sitting through pointless meetings, idly twiddling my thumbs as someone too fond of their own voice droned on about something that everyone in the room already knew. There’d be no clear agenda to these mind-numbing exercises in superfluous bureaucracy, and more tangents than your average trigonometry lesson.

Eventually, via a protracted and tortuous route, the meeting would close pretty much back where it had started. It invariably achieved zip, nada, zilch – apart from wasting inordinate amounts of time and money, and generally leaving attendees frustrated and annoyed.

Not all meetings were like that, of course… but the overriding impression I’d have when leaving most meetings was that my time could have been more productively engaged doing something else.

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Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 17/10/2007

“Dad, when is Mummy coming home?”

Mum had been gone less than 24 hours when the question first reared its head. On the surface of it, it was an innocent and perfectly reasonable query. It was the unuttered subtext that had me worried. I couldn’t help thinking that what “when is Mummy coming home?” really meant was “Dad, you’re rubbish at this. Mum’s way better, and we can’t wait until she’s back.”

I thought I was doing an OK job… but apparently I was deluding myself. My wife was in London visiting her younger sister – and had left me in charge. Well, I use the term “in charge” loosely. Within hours of her departure I didn’t feel very “in charge”. In fact, if that accolade applied to anyone, I’d have to say that the most likely candidate was the four-year-old.

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"Working it" column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 15/10/2007

Gravity issues – that’s what they called them.

This was back in deepest, darkest 1996, when I was working with Transco, the UK infrastructure and pipeline utility that was part of the former British Gas. In an effort to boost morale, promote team-building and foster innovation (sound familiar?) they’d decided to send all employees on an American style “soft skills” training programme called “You make the difference”. It was all very touchy feely, group huggy kind of stuff. Still, quite a lot of it made sense – especially the message that every individual employee has a significant contribution to make.

But I digress. I was talking about gravity issues.

Gravity issues are things that happen that we have absolutely no control or influence over. We can’t do anything about gravity – it’s just there. We learn to live with it, we work around it… we accept it. In short, unless we’re about to head over Niagara Falls in an oak barrel, or dive head first out of an aeroplane, we tend not to worry about it.

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Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 10/10/2007

“Yipee it’s autumn,” shouted one of the twins. “I love autumn.”

It was a blustery early October morning. As we waited for the school bus the wind plucked curling brown leaves from the boughs of the ash tree overhead. They spiraled earthwards, and as they came into reach the girls tried to catch them.

I shivered. It wasn’t so cold, really, but the wind had a bitter edge: a hint of winter that somehow managed to make you feel colder inside than you actually where on the outside. Over the weekend we lit the fire for the first time since spring, and had to turn on the heating to take the chill off the girl’s bedrooms at night.

Suddenly the nights are closing in. It’s dark outside when the girls go to bed, and when we get up in the morning, pulling the blinds yields not daylight, but a dirty-grey pre-dawn gloom. For the first time in what seems like ages we’re sitting around the breakfast table with the lights on.

Still, for all it’s downsides, like the girls I quite enjoy autumn. It’s a season of tremendous natural beauty, and bounty. Although the weather is a bit unpredictable, fine autumn days with their soft, eerily tranquil light can be simply sublime. Our native trees, if you manage to find any, are replete in their autumn splendour, and our hedgerows and woodland are full of fruits, nuts, seeds and fungi. Nature’s larder is full to the brim, and everywhere you look there are birds, animals and the occasional enterprising gourmet, scrambling to make the most of this brief time of plenty before winter grips the countryside in her icy embrace.

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I’ve just got off the phone with our local fixed wireless broadband provider Rapid Broadband. They’ve been given permission, apparently to relay a signal from a premises up the road — which means, all being well, that I could have a 1Mbit/second broadband connection up and running in the next two to three weeks.

Finally I can get out of the dialup doldrums and see what all this Web 2.0 fuss is all about. It also means I’ll be able to work effectively both up in the home-office and down in the house… and that my wife won’t have to steal my computer to write lengthy e-mails to her friends.

So, fingers, and everything else, crossed….

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Published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 08/10/2007

Innovation is something of an economic buzz word in Ireland today. It goes hand-in-hand with the much vaunted “knowledge economy”. Everywhere you turn you’ll find movers and shakers, gurus and money-makers extolling the virtues of innovation, and telling you how nurturing and encouraging innovation is going to play a pivotal role in Ireland’s bright economic future.

But how much of this focus on innovation is filtering down to the coal face? How much are you being encouraged to innovate in your job? Are you being motivated to think, inspired to get creative and generate ideas, empowered to evaluate what you do with a critical eye, to suggest and implement improvements?

No? Well you’re hardly alone there.

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Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 03/10/2007

It had been a crushing weekend of armchair rugby. First Wales crashed out of the Rugby World Cup in spectacular fashion against Fiji, in what has to be the shock result of the tournament; then Ireland fall to Argentina’s mighty Pumas.

Eddie O’Sullivan’s men in green had disappointed at every stage of the competition leading up to Sunday’s cliff-hanger. Yet no matter how unlikely it seemed, you always believed, somewhere in your gut, that the boys would come good on the big stage. At crunch time, surely, O’Driscoll would perform, O’Gara’s kicking would suddenly click, and O’Connell and Co. would win the line-out’s, scrums, rucks and mauls, giving Ireland a platform from which to launch a spectacular recovery.

It wasn’t to be. The team that went into the competition as Ireland’s best ever World Cup contenders was heading home.

My wife, although disappointed at Ireland’s defeat, was smiling. Why? Because, she surmised, with Ireland and Wales both out of the competition she could reclaim her husband, the girls would have a father again and our weekends could return to normal. Er… wrong!

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Published in the Career Moves section of the Evening Echo on 01/10/2007

In our parents day, encountering SPAM at work meant that you had some dodgy looking pink luncheon meat on your sandwiches. While the SPAM of the day may well have been unpalatable, at least it served a purpose. Today’s endless barrage of electronic spam, by contrast, is of no discernible benefit to the person receiving it whatsoever.

In short it is unwanted, unwelcome, unhelpful, and it’s costing Irish businesses a not-so-small fortune.

What has all this got to do with recruitment, careers and so forth, I hear you ask? Plenty. It affects your efficiency at work, and it costs the company you work for money. How much spam arrived in your company e-mail account inbox this morning? If none did, rest assured you’re in the minority, and guaranteed that you’re not receiving it because your company has invested time, energy and expense to filter it out behind the scenes.

What about the CV you so diligently crafted and sent out to all those recruitment agencies? Did it actually arrive or is it sitting in an overzealous spam filter, unopened and unread?

As more of our communication at home and at work takes place through electronic media, spam is becoming more and more of a problem – and impacting more of us than ever before.

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