Time Management?
Oct. 18th, 2007 07:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lsandersonOh Joy! Breakfast With the Boss
By LISA BELKIN
By LISA BELKIN
PLEASE do not invite me to breakfast.
It’s not that I don’t like breakfast. To the contrary, I could happily eat eggs or cereal at every meal. But I write about life-work balance, and it feels a little contradictory to conduct an interview, or attend a conference, or give a speech, when everyone involved had to sacrifice sleep to attend.
I have similar qualms about working dinners. After a long day of work, why follow it up with more work? True, there is good food, and probably wine, and it beats coal mining. But if you have to be there because the client and boss expect it, or if you would rather be playing “airplane flies in the hanger” with your toddler, then it is work disguised as socializing.
Don’t even get me started on weekends and holidays. I was once invited to a conference of pediatricians over Mother’s Day. Pediatricians! Cannibalizing Mother’s Day!
And a few weeks ago, on Columbus Day, I was registered for a full-day seminar about Stay at Home Moms heading back into the workplace. I had to cancel when I realized it was a school holiday, and attending would mean scrambling for child care.
There has been a shift in the role of these meetings-with-food over the years. In the 80’s, a 7 a.m. appointment was a sign that you were so important you had to start before dawn. We called them power breakfasts back then, and Masters of the Universe wanted to be seen at their regular table at dawn.
More recently, however, they’ve come to feel like yet another symptom of an overstuffed day. “My manager tells everyone to come in early, he’ll bring the bagels, because early morning is the only time in the whole day that we can find time for everyone to get together,” said one administrative assistant at a large accounting firm, who would prefer not to be identified for fear of angering that manager. “But what that means to me is that maybe everyone is just busier than they should be if they can’t find any other time.”
How to stop the madness? More
