Tag Archives: life

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Productivity

I just can’t figure how to follow all those “improve your productivity” guides. I’m sure you know the ones I mean: they suggest exercising at 6am; or switching off your email and Slack during the day to avoid distractions; or to schedule all your meetings in the mornings; or…

Can anyone make those things work?

The problem I have is that I work and live with other people. So, sure, I can try to schedule my meetings in the morning but I don’t think my American colleagues will appreciate having to get up at 4am to make my 9am daily standup; if I don’t have Slack running I’ll miss the notification that the database server is going down; without email I won’t learn that the client meeting I’m preparing for has been cancelled; and going to the gym at 6am would be great except who is going to look after the kids while I’m out?

All these productivity guides fail to recognise that we all have external commitments, that we work in places with existing infrastructure and conventions. The best you can do is cherry-pick the bits from the guides that work for you and try to figure out your own process for everything else.

Which, if we’re honest with ourselves, is what we were already doing.

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Lucky Number Two

I’ve been pretty quiet here for a couple of of weeks and that’s because… well, a picture speaks a thousand words.

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Junior took his sweet time popping out — we were in the hospital over a day before he made his grand appearance — but for Juniorette we weren’t sure we’d make it there in time! In the end we checked into the delivery suite just after ten in the evening and the birth was recorded just before eleven.

I’m not sure the midwives realised how close things were when we first arrived. They were fussing around and promising to check on progress and then… there’s a head!

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Less than an hour afterwards I was alone with the baby and mum was walking around, off getting a shower. The contrast with the birth of her brother couldn’t have been greater ((Okay, that’s a cliche. Certainly Junior’s birth was harder but it could have been a lot worse.)).

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Since then things have been (relatively) straight-forward. She’s been remarkably quiet and neat so far. I’m sure she’s saving the worst for when we’re least expecting it!

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Her brother has been great. Very gentle and helpful. The day she arrived home he quickly realised that, as a tiny baby, she’d appreciate all his smallest toys. I could see the logic even as I was terrified at the choke hazard…

Soon I’ll be back at work and then the grandparents will leave. We’ll have two under threes to look after and, I guess, that’s when the real work begins.