Spending Time

Image by Indra Projects on Unsplash

For the 3 long decades I spent in the corporate world, the length of time you were seen to be in the office was the measure of how seriously you took your work, and often of how good you were perceived to be at your job (it’s taken an embarrassing amount of hindsight to recognise how comically arse-about-face that last bit is!).

When my son was young, I had a flexible working arrangement allowing me to leave at 4pm in order to be able to collect him on time from After School Club…but I’d be sending emails from my Blackberry (yes, I’m that old) on the train home and then I’d log into work on my laptop once he was in bed - being sure to send emails to the right people so that they could see that I might be off-site but I wasn’t offline.

It’s easy to see now that I was caught up in the herd and measuring my professional value in terms of how many hours I put in. To not conform to that norm felt unsafe as a woman and a mother in a male-dominated environment where the promotion of any woman to a senior role inevitably attracted mutterings about “positive discrimination”, without any apparent sense of irony that for many generations positive discrimination worked massively in the favour of men. (I mean, it wasn’t until the 1970s that the last part of the UK civil service removed the requirement for a woman to resign her job if she married! But let’s not fall down the long and twisty rabbit hole of the patriarchy’s lack of self-awareness…that way lies madness...).

Even when I began working full time on my own business, I made myself spend most of every day at my laptop. It didn’t matter if I was mostly staring blankly at it hoping for inspiration, or doom-scrolling (aka “research”/“marketing”/“making myself visible”), or trying to motivate/comfort myself with a spot of retail therapy: it was about being seen to be working. Even when there was no one to see it.

When I finally faced financial reality and started looking for a job, I was sure that being back in employment would be way less stressful than before because not only was I looking for a part-time role, but I was also way better at understanding myself and looking after my wellbeing.

So, when a part-time job I’d applied for was changed to full-time, I went for the interview anyway, accepted the job anyway. I told myself that it would be crazy to look the gift horse of such swiftly offered paid employment in the mouth, but, looking back on it, the little whisper at the back of my mind that to work full-time was to work “properly” should have got a red flag or six waving.

Turns out that the programming created by the experience of most of my adult life was way more embedded than I’d realised - who’d’ve thunk it, eh? From the start of my new job, I arrived early and frequently stayed late. And found myself judging those who didn’t.

Before long, I was sliding back into the dark, claustrophobic headspace of my corporate life. I was constantly trying to prove my worth, which left me constantly stressed and exhausted, constantly craving not to be doing what I was doing - even though it was a very different environment with very different attitudes.

While my understanding of myself did not save me from this, it did mean that this time I was going through it with a greater level of self-awareness, a genuine curiosity about what I was observing in myself, and a stronger willingness to challenge my own thoughts, feelings and behaviour (well, in more rational moments, at least!).

Slowly, and not without setbacks, this led to me focusing on finishing on time (or as on time as someone as easily distracted as me can manage). I don’t like leaving a task unfinished, or pausing in the midst of something that requires concentration, so I’ve become more careful about what I choose to start towards the end of my working day. If someone approaches me when I’m packing up, I ask if I can get back to them in the morning because it’s time for me to finish - I would never have felt able to do that in my old corporate life, because I would not want to be labelled a clock-watcher or jobsworth, and I desperately needed to feel that others thought well of me.

Doing what I can to maximise the leisure time I have each evening makes me less resentful of work, is better for my energy, and keeps me out of victim mode, all of which, in a deliciously virtuous circle, makes me more productive at work.

The starting early thing still happens – not because I’ve failed to change it but because I’ve realised that I don’t want to. I don’t like being late and I enjoy having a little time to settle in before the working day with all its peopling kicks off in earnest (any other introverts have this preference?). When my usual bus fails to appear in the morning (I’m beginning to suspect a Croydon Triangle), I don’t stress…well, not nearly as much as I used to! Always a work in progress, right?!

And now I’ve taken it a step further: I’m going part-time. Simply because I want to and am lucky enough to be able to afford to (if I’m careful). It may look like a decision about work, but if feels like a decision about life. And that feels bloody brilliant.

It is no longer a truth for me that I only have value if I spend most of my time on work. Instead, I have chosen a new truth: that time is not a valid measurement of my worth. At last, I am making the choice to spend my time on fulfilment, not validation.