How To Be A Boss In Your Own Home
Sun Herald
Sunday May 23, 1999
We might want our private lives to run as smoothly as the office - but job descriptions, time scheduling and leadership sound so exhausting. GENEVIEVE FOX reports.
Are you caught out every time there's a loo-roll crisis because you don't know where to find them? Do sharp objects fall on top of your head when you open the top cupboard? Is having a clean pair of socks your sad domestic fantasy? Do you constantly feel like you've got too much to do?
You're not alone.
According to a French survey earlier this year, 84 per cent of women feel they are trying to do too much.
Do we have to feel this overwrought?
It must be possible for the home to run as smoothly as the office - that Utopia of sorted in-trays and emptied bins, of daily meetings and clear-cut tasks.
Surely it is merely a question of downsizing the children, rationalising your spouse, expanding the workforce, retraining the cleaner, reprogramming the dog and teaching yourself time management?
Importing into the home the language and strategies of the workplace may sound preposterous, but many experts argue that our lives would be a lot less frantic if we did introduce some of the techniques and systems that make offices run like clockwork.
Or seem to.
The first step towards feeling like your home is running smoothly is to acknowledge that it can't do so all of the time. Things happen.
The second step is to have a sense of humour.
Richard Carlson, author of Don't Sweat The Small Stuff With Your Family (Hodder & Stoughton), has one brilliant tip: "Lighten up."
Accept that running the home can be an infuriating, frustrating process, he says, and don't let it get to you. Become more playful instead - don't take things too seriously. That way, Carlson says, "the daily hassles we all must face won't seem like such a big deal".
When the hassles begin at daybreak with a hangover, persist through the school run, dreadful traffic, freak weather conditions, an incontinent dog, a grouchy partner, an empty fridge and a red phone bill, and end with a double gin and tonic and a resounding headache, that's easier said than done.
But not impossible, says psychotherapist Gillian Buffer, author of Manage Your Mind (OUP). The key, she says, is a sense of perspective: "We need to remind ourselves of what it is that we value about our home and family."
It's what corporations refer to as "mission statements" - and what the rest of us call seeing the wood for the trees.
"One way of doing that," she says, "is to ask yourself which you would rather have: a family life that feels chaotic or no family life at all. We put pressure on ourselves, saying that the home has to be neat and tidy. We can remove that pressure by changing our attitudes."
Pressure close to boiling point is what one 35-year-old self-employed potter with two daughters aged seven and five, a husband who works from home, two cats and a three-storey home, experiences on a daily basis. At her studio down the road, all is calm and order. But at home, no matter how hard she tries, how much she plans her day, how fast she toils, the daily round of domestic chores, school runs and admin never gets done.
"I want to be in control," she says, one eye on the clock so that she isn't late to pick up her elder daughter from school.
"It's not that I want my husband to do everything; it's just the combination of all the tasks that need doing that makes me panic. When I wake in the morning, I feel my heart beating faster at the thought of what needs doing."
And emotional meltdown lies just around the corner.
The way to avoid it, advises Eileen Mulligan, author of Life Coaching (Piatkus), is to employ the "mental space-clearing techniques" she teaches members of major corporations.
This involves re-evaluating goals - remembering what you are aiming for - and becoming more efficient in the process.
On a personal level, it means banishing that debilitating sense of having too much to do.
The first step is to train the brain to focus on, and achieve, one task at a time. Trying to do too much, like writing unrealistically lengthy lists, is completely ineffectual.
"There is no point writing down 20 things you've got to do if you can only reasonably do six of them," says Ms Mulligan. "You'd go crazy.
"People who are fanatical at making lists rarely feel as if they are finishing anything; they just become preoccupied with list-making.
"Women sometimes expect to be able to do too much," she continues, "while men are very good at doing one task at a time.
"Women have to retrain themselves not to think of all the tasks in one go. They burn themselves out, running through their heads all the jobs that need doing. They panic about little tasks not being done much more than men would."
The men are too busy relaxing.
A man lost in a newspaper on a Saturday morning, feet up, not a care in the world while his house cries out with tasks, is a common scenario.
Meanwhile, his partner is tearing her hair out. The solution, says Ms Mulligan, is not for the man to fold up his paper and get into domestic overdrive, but for the woman to put her own feet up.
Living life like a non-stop emergency isn't the solution; training your brain to relax is.
Allocate 10 minutes a day to problem-solving, Ms Mulligan says. Practise a relaxation technique first: recall a favourite memory, say, or imagine an idyllic beach. Then isolate your most pressing problems and decide when you are going to deal with them - either that day, that week, or some time that month. It's called prioritising. Then note down those tasks in your diary. Just as you would at work.
This process of mental space-clearing, according to Ms Mulligan, won't work unless you've done the physical space- clearing first.
In the office, that means updating your files, sorting out the stationery cupboard, dealing with the in-tray and so on.
At home, it means "rationalising" those junk-filled cupboards and bulging drawers by ruthlessly chucking out or giving to charity what you either never use or haven't worn in the past year.
An impertinent spot-check of Ms Mulligan's home - all of her cupboards, underwear included - reveals everything in order. Not an odd sock or bulging drawer in sight.
A humbling experience - but one in which we can all share, says Dawna Walter, founder of the Holding Company and author of Organised Living (Conran Octopus).
Queen of clutter-free living, Ms Walter offers an invaluable tip for "physical space-clearing".
"Set yourself a two-hour project at the weekend," she says, sitting in her ordered three-storey house which she shares with a "not particularly tidy husband", a 20-year-old stepdaughter and a poodle. That way, she says, you avoid going from room to room, messy cupboard to messy cupboard, dragging everything on to the floor in a fit of enthusiasm and then, overwhelmed by the mess, giving up in despair.
"Then reward yourself; have a glass of wine, a bubble bath, a cappuccino," she says.
"Make yourself feel that this is an important thing you have done in your life. It's cathartic. It gets out the aggression."
And, practised on a monthly basis, it keeps the clutter at bay.
But a home with all the order of the office, warns Gillian Butler, isn't necessarily the Holy Grail we imagine.
"Sometimes what people value is the difference between the home and the office; the fact that it is unstructured symbolises that it is a place in which you can rest and relax," she says.
Ms Walter disagrees. The home must have structure, she argues. It needs a system and it needs rules.
"If you want your home to work like a well-oiled machine," she says, sitting in her neat but object-filled kitchen-diner that doubles as her office, "you've got to set rules and you've got to obey those rules."
Rule number one: everything must have a home.
The common cutlery drawer is emblematic of this rule. "Knife, fork, spoon - they all have a space," she explains with missionary zeal. "The rule applies to everything in your home. It minimises the time it takes for you to remember where things are."
A whistle-stop tour reveals she's as good as her word. Even the poodle has his own bedroom and toy box.
The entrance hall contains a console table, natural habitat in my home for mail, keys, newspapers, stuff; Dawna Walter's is clutter-free. What's more, to her mind, this is no mere console table; rather, it is the "shared communication area".
Four different-coloured baskets sit like sentinels on its lower shelf; the upper shelf is clear. Each colour-coded basket is allocated to each member of the household for their mail and papers; the fourth basket is for keys.
Rule number two: start the day with a clean slate. "The equivalent of clearing your desk in the evening is leaving no dishes in the sink," she says. "Everything must be cleared up after a dinner party, all dishes put away. The bathroom has to be in order. Your clothes have to be hung up at night."
And pigs might fly, I think to myself, picturing the jetsam that floats through each room of our flat.
Rule number three: everyone must have household responsibilities; it's the equivalent of delegating in the office. And they must be clear what they are. If they don't know what they are expected to do, they can't do it. Simple.
Ms Mulligan, who previously ran a multimillion-dollar beauty company, agrees that this is a fundamental rule.
"When you are hiring staff, you train them first and then tell them what is expected of them," she says. "The clearer the guidelines, the lower the chance of problems.
"The same applies at home. Communication is vital. A common habit is to get upset after the event rather than to pre-plan and stop it happening. Do deals, reach a compromise through negotiation. The minute you explode, with either children or adults, they immediately switch off.
"All they hear is criticism; they don't hear the words."
Ms Walter recommends taking the office template the whole way.
"Pretend the home is your office," she says, speaking at characteristic breakneck speed. Say to your partner, 'I am the office manager. I am going to schedule everyone. This is who does what when.'
"Next, write a job description. Family members don't have an understanding of all the things a woman does in the course of a day, just as my board of directors has no idea how much I get done in a day.
"Writing a job description makes you feel you are valuable; it is empowering, and it gets rid of the resentment."
I outlined Ms Walter's office template to the potter.
She was sceptical.
"They sound too rigid," she says. "I'm not sure I would be taken seriously if I tried to enforce them. I also don't think that my job description would be valued. I think Steve would think I was creating stuff to do to panic myself."
The potter was right to be sceptical of the office template, says Roger Merrill, co-author of First Things First: Coping With The Ever-Increasing Demands Of The Workplace (Simon & Schuster).
"If we try to make the home like the office, we lose the power of the home," he says.
"The key is to differentiate between effectiveness (doing the things that matter the most) and efficiency (getting things done with the least amount of energy); effectiveness must always precede efficiency.
"If you just worry about efficiency, and don't put relationships first, then it won't work," he says.
"You mustn't take the humanity out of the home."
One thing you can import from the office, he says, is leadership.
"It means taking responsibility as a leader and helping things get better. Otherwise you end up feeling like a victim, blaming everything from the children to the economy for your unhappiness and sense of chaos.
"We live in a fast-moving world that is affected by technology, short turnarounds, speed of the market, material acquisitions.
"If you don't take personal leadership of your life, the environment takes over and you end up running like a rat in a cage, with everything spinning.
"You can't control others, but you can control yourself."
© 1999 Sun Herald