Julia Hobsbawm - The See-Saw: 100 Ideas for Work-Life Balance

The See-Saw

Julia Hobsbawm is a mum, stepmum, wife, daughter, daughter-in-law, sister, sister-in-law, auntie, friend and businesswoman.

And the seasons, they go round and round

And the painted ponies go up and down

Were captive on the carousel of time.

We cant return, we can only look behind

From where we came

And go round and round and round

In the circle game.

The Circle Game, Joni Mitchell

Published in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books,
an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright Julia Hobsbawm, 2009

The moral right of Julia Hobsbawm to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The Circle Game by Joni Mitchell 1966 Siquomb Publishing Corp., USA. Assigned to: Westminster Music Limited of Suite 2007, Plaza 535 Kings Road, London SW10 0SZ. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

Still I Rise by Maya Angelou Maya Angelou, 1978. Reproduced from The Complete Collected Poems by Maya Angelou with the permission of Virago, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 84354 911 6
eISBN: 978 1 78239 245 3

Printed in Great Britain

Design by five twentyfive

Illustrations by Streeten Illustration Nicola Streeten, 2009

Atlantic Books
An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd
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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

In memory of Gretl Lenz, who was always an inspiration to me.

Top Ten Headaches

The See-Saw gives us all headaches. My top ten are:

The pressure to work hard, play hard, and look your best all the time.

The fact that modern living takes up as much time as it saves (weve all felt this when stuck in call-centre hell).

Those contradictory cultures of parenthood, which urge us to work or yet also to stay at home for risk of damaging our children forever by fielding them out to nurseries and nannies.

The lack of universal childcare or government recognition of carers in any meaningful way, which ratchets up the pressure.

The fact that the work culture remains fixated by office-based, nine-to-five rules, which play havoc with any other competing demands. We are a long way from truly flexible working.

6. Inequality in pay, which makes womens lives even harder than mens (which arent easy either).

The steep rise of the cost of living, which means that many of us are outpriced from our own lives.

The reality that most households require two incomes just to get by, even though increasingly there is often only one bread winner in the house working their socks off.

9. School holidays and term-time schedules, which are completely at odds with a largely inflexible workplace.

10. The Always-On society that never sleeps, so we very rarely say nighty night to each other and conk out nice and early.

Superwoman Lands with a Bump

(and Superman Stops Flying Off)

Overloaded is the New Overweight

I bet you hate this book already. I bet you think it confirms that (a) you need worklife balance and dont have it, and (b) you arent getting enough of a balance because you are doing it wrong. If this was a diet book (and I have picked up plenty in my time), at this point youd be wishing something would change about the way you eat, or think about food. Youd be longing somewhere, however secretly, for transformation.

Well, something is wrong: somewhere along the line not many of us are achieving great worklife balance. Or we worry that we arent. Only children say, Im bored, because adults dont have time to be bored these days. They might say, Im stressed, but who has time to be bored? Overloaded is the new Overweight.

Everlasting Overload

I dont know about you, but I think about worklife balance a lot. I have to. If my life were a household budget Id be down to zero every month at best, overdrawn every week at worst.

I relish being multiple things: mother, stepmother, wife, sister, daughter, daughter-in-law, auntie, great-auntie, colleague, and, of course, friend. My parents, my two brothers and I are close, and my cousins are like sisters. My life is not quite The Waltons though I loved every minute of that 1970s American TV serial about a family where all the grandparents and their children and grandchildren live together and call out Goodnight to each other but we are all in each others lives a good deal. Being close in family or business is a commitment that takes time, and no matter how enjoyable that is, it can often make you feel like an egg-timer on its last few seconds of sand.

Our children range in age from three to eighteen. Two of them are my husbands, and three of them are mine and his together. The job-that-never-ends called parenthood includes, of course, organizing school runs, play dates, assemblies, parents evenings, homework, TV policing, settling sibling rivalry scores, reading, playing, talking, drum lessons, and fresh air enforcement. In return for this continuous work, we get the wonder of parenthood: being around several delightful, small and not so big people who are interesting, loving, and maddening in equal measure. Children amuse us and love us. And they scare the pants off us when they (a) scale down from the balcony aged nine, (b) insist on getting out of the bath unaided aged three and slip, or (c) dont return a mobile phone call aged fifteen at midnight on a Saturday.

TOP TIP

Pause for breath and pause for thought instead of mindlessly rushing around.

Keeping the Show on the Road

My day work seems, by comparison, less stressful and more predictable, although technically it is hard to see where the day of the job ends. I created and nurtured my business like a child. I shared its growing pains and take enormous pride in every new development. My team is like family, and my board are quite like brothers. Business families certainly fall somewhere in between strangers, friends, and siblings. I spend as much time with them in person and by email as with my own flesh and blood. In order to keep the various shows on the road, and because Im in my mid-forties, I need to spend time Id rather not have to spend, keeping the mid-life sag and tiredness levels fractionally at bay. This involves as little exercise as I can get away with, as much retail therapy as I can justify for clothes and make-up to make me look un-saggy generally, as well as to hide the eye bags, and reasonably close attention to haircuts, highlights, and, last but by no means least, manicures. It nearly kills me to sit still for the time it takes for them to dry and I always think I should be doing something else, but needs must and, to coin a well-known phrase, Im worth it.