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Olaf Ransome's avatar

I smiled as I read. Writing, or content production, is something I do a lot of. I am not always fast and pretty much never under a deadline.

Two of my gigs are fixed price for fixed amounts of output, so I can manage that.

One is a board job where I have to be somewhat reactive. Today I guided that by prodding our CEO early in the morning re a conversation we needed to have about our interaction with a regulator. The next tool in that box is setting the timing myself and putting a meeting in the schedule to suit me. Every meeting has a POST - Purpose, Outcome, Structure, Time.

In the world of full-time work, the talk is of ROWE, results only working environment. This de-emphasises "presence" as a metric. You will still have to manage interruptions. Remeber others' failure to plan does not make it your emergency.

The moral here is that you can protect your time and avoid, minimise spontaneous interruptions. But, you need to work on finding a structure which works for you.

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Kevin Alexander's avatar

In my role, the "real" work happens at the front end of my shift; that first few hours is what sets the tone for the rest of the flight day. Get that rolling, and the rest of the time is spent staying out in front of things.

Unfortunately, I also work for a company that prizes "presence" above all else. There at least 5-6 layers of management between me and the C-Suite who spend most of their week hopping on Teams calls with one another and ginning up new metrics to worry about.

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