‘In Australia, we seem stuck in our unproductive ways.’
Returning to work after becoming a mother was a total game-changer for me. Something happened to my mind and it had nothing to do with ‘baby brain’. In fact, it was quite the opposite.
My thinking became sharper, focusing on the things that mattered. I pushed myself to do the best and most efficient job possible so I could leave work at a reasonable time to go home and be with my child.
Mamamia’s Jamila Rizvi discusses returning to work after having a baby:
I became intolerant towards anything that wasted my time. No longer could I stomach long lunches, political whisperings over coffee or lengthy aimless meetings. Instead, I focused on making a real impact so I could walk out the door at 5pm guilt-free.
Was I praised or recognised for my newfound addiction to productivity? Nope. In fact, I received quite the opposite.
I was taken off a project when I asked for meetings to be scheduled during regular office hours instead of in the evening. I was told to make ‘more effort’ to travel for meetings instead of conducting them via videoconference.
But the final nail in my career coffin came when I asked to work a four-day week so I could spend just a little more time with my son. For this, nearly half of my key responsibilities were handed to another team member.
Top Comments
I recently resigned from my professional job. I was sick and tired of being indirectly expected to work ridiculous hours to get the insane amount of workload done. I was extremely productive through the day but didn't think I should have to work overtime due to a lack of resources. I think we also have to be mindful that not everyone wants to or is in a position to be 'the boss'. Happiness is more important to money for me.
I see your point, but I would think working for yourself would actually be even harder work, because clients don't respect the 9am to 3pm rule, and will call whenever they want and also they want things done yesterday. And if you are building up your business you can't really afford to ignore someone till 9am the next day. So sometimes it can be easier at work just to say well it's 5pm time for me to go.
However that's all my suppositions about it, so if you have found a way to make freelance employment work between the hours you need then that's great, i would be interested though how you manage to do this, because if it does work well for people it would be a good thing for many of us to get into. I've always resisted it though because it seemed to me that it would be much harder.
Oh and yeah I'm over the meetings! So many of them are so unproductive, I resent the time I spend in them when I could actually be doing real work!
Re the women picking up their kids issue, I don't have kids but I haven't really found this to be much of an issue with the mothers I work with in the sense that mostly they don't seem to take much more leave than others. Of course there are always some people who are completely unreliable but I find this to be across the board whether they have kids or not, and usually they are the people who are pretty useless also when they are actually at work.