(originally published April 24th, 2005)<\/p>\n
My wife went away for a conference this weekend; she left Thursday afternoon, and won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be back until late Sunday evening.<\/p>\n
One would think that, as a grown man, I would treat this time as if it were any other day. However, we have no children, I work for myself, and so I was free to do a few things I probably wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have done with her home, including eating some things I normally wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have had the opportunity to eat.<\/p>\n
Why am I telling on myself like this? To prove a point, and to relate it to working with employees, who among us hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t felt like a great weight hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been lifted off us at work when the person we report to isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t there? Sometimes you treat it as a usual occurrence, but other times you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll take that opportunity to do, or not do, something that you might not have done if that person was around. Sometimes you produce better work if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been feeling pressure, sometimes you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t work because you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have anything expected of you for that day; or so you feel.<\/p>\n
As with everything else, if there are plans and expectations it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s harder to deviate from the norm. The plans don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to be all that rigid; for instance, if my wife had left and there was food I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to take a lot of time to prepare, I might have stayed home and cooked for myself; maybe not. At work, if you know you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not going to be around, no matter how good your employees are, you need to make sure to set the goal and duties and standards you want to see from them when you get back.<\/p>\n
Either that, or just know that your time off is your employees time off, and deal with it when you get back to the office, whenever that is. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(originally published April 24th, 2005) My wife went away for a conference this weekend; she left Thursday afternoon, and won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be back until late Sunday evening. One would think that, as a grown man, I would treat this time as if it were any other day. However, we have no children, I work for myself, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-motivation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttmitchellconsulting.com\/Mitchblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}