I made a mistake at work …
As you can imagine, working at ThirdPath Institute means I’ve got lots of support to create an integrated approach to work and life. Over the years, I’ve also gotten pretty good at this approach.
But I’ve also made a few mistakes, including a recent experience where my failure negatively impacted the work I needed to get done.
This past week I had an opportunity to accompany my mother on a train trip to visit friends she had made in high school and when she first became a mother. We took a train from Philadelphia to Charlottesville Virginia, stopping in different cities to stay with each friend.
We both knew that I would be using part of our travel time to continue to get my work done. In fact, when we left I was confident I’d get my full week of work done, just in a more flexible way.
Day by day I saw these plans unravel. At the start of the week I’d gotten a little work done, but nothing close to the amount I had planned. By the end of the week I was hoping I would at least get one more solid day of work done on the train ride home. But the brain is a tricky instrument. As we wound our way back to Philadelphia I could tell my concentration was shot and the work I needed to complete would just not get done.
What did I learn from this experience?
Sometimes we’re going to make mistakes, our work/life integration experiments aren’t going to go exactly as planned. In organizations where there is trust and transparency, we can learn from these mistakes. For example, I’ve decided to count last week as 3 days of vacation and 2 days of work, including the work I did the Saturday after the trip.
When trying something new, do your best to anticipate this challenge. As I was getting ready to leave for the trip I think I might have unconsciously guessed that things could go differently then planned. So I got a lot of things organized before I left, and I knew I had a little wiggle room to meet my one important work deadline the weekend I returned.
When things don’t go according to plan, don’t lower your goals, just get smarter around how to achieve them. I clearly miscalculated how much work I could get done. But I also wouldn’t trade anything for the wonderful time I spent with my mom and her lifelong friends. A few years from now, if we make the same trip or some new trip, I’ll now know how to arrange things more effectively as I continue to experiment with meeting both my work and life goals. [/accordion]