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I don’t know why, but for some reason when I think of the word FLEXIBILITY it amuses me. Before I had children, 21 and 18 years ago, I have to readily admit I was not a flexible individual. You would think by getting married 27 years ago, flexibility would have been easy for me, nope not for me. Even at the young age of 22, when I married I was very set in my ways. It was basically, my way or the highway. Thankfully my husband has always been a go with the flow flexible person. Over the years though, I’ve learned to relax more and more and to go with the flow… hence creating flexibility in my life without even realizing it. My epiphany to this new found flexibility? I’ve learned there is more than one way to do things and to think outside the box is much more exciting rather than staying the narrow minded course of my way or the highway.
What do you do to stay flexible and more enjoyable to be around?
Looking forward to hearing about your tips! Thanks for visiting!
Dee and Deb Off They Go Kindergarten First Day Jitters ~ December 2015 ~ Guardian Angel Publishing, Inc. ~ 2016 Story Monster Approved A Sandy Grave ~ January 2014 ~ Guardian Angel Publishing, Inc. ~ 2014 Purple Dragonfly 1st Place Picture Books 6+, Story Monster Approved, Beach Book Festival Honorable Mention 2014, Reader's Favorite Five Star Review Powder Monkey ~ May 2013 ~ Guardian Angel Publishing, Inc. ~ 2015 Purple Dragonfly Book Award Historical Fiction 1st Place, Story Monster Approved and Reader's Favorite Five Star Review Hockey Agony ~ January 2013 ~ Guardian Angel Publishing, Inc. ~ 2015 Purple Dragonfly Book Award Honorable Mention Picture Books 6+, New England Book Festival Honorable Mention 2014, Story Monster Approved and Reader's Favorite Five Star Review The Golden Pathway ~ August 2010 ~ Guardian Angel Publishing, Inc. ~ Literary Classics Silver Award and Seal of Approval, Readers Favorite 2012 International Book Awards Honorable Mention and Dan Poynter's Global e-Book Awards Finalist
0 Comments on F is for Flexibility - #atozchallenge as of 1/1/1900
Wrapping up 2014, the EU year of Workplace Reinvention, once again brings worklife balance (WLB) policies into focus. These policies, including parental leave, rights to reduced hours, and flexible work hours, are now part of European law and national laws inside and outside of Europe. For example, Japan has similar WLB policies in place.
The existence of these rights does not always, however, reflect the capabilities of individuals to claim them without risk to their careers, and even job loss, particularly when so many companies are downsizing. There is a gap between policies and practices, and, more broadly, a widening gap between aspirations for worklife balance—for more time for family, friends, and leisure activities—and the pressures for greater productivity and increased work intensity, alongside the growing numbers of insecure and precarious jobs. For men, this gap has become more tangible due to changing norms and expectations for them to be more involved fathers and the persistence of gendered norms around caring and earning in the workplace. Research, including the European Social Survey 2010, reveals that when looking for a job the overwhelming majority of men (as well as women), place a high priority on reconciling employment with family. They also show that majority of working fathers would choose to work less hours even if it meant a corresponding loss in hourly pay. Still, between 40-60% of them in European countries are working more than 40 hours a week (European Social Survey in 2010).
Firm and work organizational culture has become the central focus in worklife balance research, with a particular focus on increasing flexibility (flexi-times and flex workplaces) and telecommuting. Flexible working times, once a perk for the valuable worker, have been embraced by many firms as the hallmark of new management and work organization. It is a cornerstone in EU policy and discourse on WLB. In June, the UK granted all employees the right to request flex time. Flexibility is presented as the win-win situation for achieving WLB, allowing for changes over the life course as well as individual preferences.
Family on Beach, Somerset by Into Somerset. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via flickr
But does flexibility actually increase one’s scope of alternatives and choice in worklife balance? This depends on the job/sector, the skill and education of the worker; gender matters, as do national statutory provisions and the practices at firms. Consider the following example. Flexibility in working times and especially the possibility to reduce hours has enabled many mothers to combine employment with family, but there are career penalties since part-time jobs tend to be considered “dead end jobs”. Can one adjust working times over the life course? The European Survey on Working Times (firm level data) show that only 18% of firms offer full reversibility (the possibility to move from part-time to full-time and from full-time to part-time).
Within the current debates on worklife balance and flexibility we see two cross-currents. On the one side, there are switch-off policy initiatives in France, which seek to set limits on the number of hours that an employee can be “linked-in” (accessing work systems and emails). In Germany, the Westphalia region is considering banning office communications in the evenings and during vacations, a practice that has already been established by VW, BMW, and Deutsche Telekom, which banned after-hours calls and emails to workers. On the other side, the solution to WLB is cast in terms of total flexibility with employees setting the pace of work and schedules and telecommuting rather than traveling to work. Work becomes an activity, not a place; rewards are based on performance and results, not on the hours you put in at the workplace. In this vision of future work, the workplace would become superfluous and employment conditional on evaluated performance. Is this a workers’ utopia that would enhance the capabilities of individuals for a better WLB and quality of life? Or is this a scenario with high levels of uncertainty, longer working days, the removal of boundaries between working life and other spheres of life, and lastly, the loss of community among workers who interact at the workplace?
Headline image: Seconds Out by dogwelder. CC BY-NC 2.0 via flickr
Like many families, summertime for us often means traveling by car for long distances. (I’ve learned that going anywhere in Texas means traveling a long distance.)
This summer I re-read an old post on writing while traveling and decided to practice what I preached. I packed the laptop and my novel notes, and we took off.
The Realities
Did I like working on a laptop in the front seat of a compact car? No. I don’t like typing with my elbows close to my waist or trying to find angles where the sun won’t glint off the screen. Happily, we were driving in the dark a good bit of the time, so the sun wasn’t a huge problem.
Did I like writing with the radio blaring? No–I like total quiet to write. Despite the less-than-ideal writing conditions, I was able to write a whole chapter going and half a chapter on the way home. That was about 4,200 new words of a rough draft. If I hadn’t written, what would I have done otherwise? Daydreamed. Napped. Stared out the window.
Additional Benefits
Besides getting the words down, the words written in the car will be very helpful to me later today. When I sit down to write, I won’t have to go back and see what I wrote three days ago and try to remember the emotions of that scene or where I was headed with it. It’s still fresh in my mind from writing in the car last night. I can pick up where I left off with little trouble.
(By the way, I readily admit that writing with no small children in the car is MUCH easier! When my children were little and I didn’t own a laptop, my writing in the car was done with pencil and notebook, using a flashlight after dark. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!)
Dare to Be Flexible
All our best laid plans for setting up a writing schedule can go out the window during the summertime. We don’t live on islands, but instead in families that require our flexibility. So learn to build that flexibility into your writing life.
By all means, have a set schedule and a favorite place that is most conducive for your writing. But learn to go with the flow too–and fit the writing in whenever and wherever you can. Later, you’ll be glad you did!
During the summer and vacation time, what are some other places you’ve discovered that you can write? I’d love to hear about them.
Getting into the writing habit is difficult, especially in the early years of writing. Our lives are full to overflowing already, so where can we possibly fit in some writing? How can we form a consistent writing habit when our schedules change from day to day, depending on our obligations?
Believe it or not, you have more time to write than you think. Keep a time log, tracking how you spend your time for a few days or a week. If you do, you’ll spot “down” time that you use for other things which could be snagged for your writing.
Redirect Your Time
When my kids were very young, I desperately wanted to write. I realized that instead of catching up on laundry and chores during their afternoon naps, I could write. Instead of making beds and doing dishes during the morning half hour of “Mr. Rogers,” I could write. Instead of thumbing through ragged magazines for twenty minutes every Friday afternoon while my daughter got her allergy shots, I could write.
Bed making and dishes and laundry could be done while little ones milled around. I chose to write instead when they didn’t need me. That “nap-Mr. Rogers-allergy shot” schedule became my writing routine until my youngest went to kindergarten. By that time, Atheneum had published my first five middle grade novels.
Hidden Time
“But I really don’t have any free time!” you might truly think. I challenge you to study your schedule very closely. Everyone has pockets of “down” time during the day. It may vary from day to day, but usually it is consistent weekly. (For example, you may sit in the pick-up line at your daughter’s elementary school every afternoon for fifteen minutes. Instead of listening to the radio, write.)
You might free up some time by doubling up on your mindless activities. Most of us multi-tasked before the word became popular, but if you’re not, try it. While supper is cooking, don’t watch the news; pay those bills or wrap those birthday gifts, and free up a half hour in the evening to write. If you want to write YA novels, listen to those young adult books on tape while you walk your dog. You’ll be doing your “market research” for an hour, freeing up an hour later to write.
Get It in Writing
Write down whatever pockets of time that you discover can be used for your writing. Even if it’s only fifteen-minute chunks, note them. You can write an amazing amount in ten or fifteen minutes at a time-and it adds up. You may find these chunks in the “between times.” You might have a bit of time between when the kids get on the school bus and you have to leave for work. Or between your day job and supper, you may have half an hour that you wait on a child at ball practice. (I wrote a lot sitting in bleachers waiting for children at practice.)
Write all these pockets of time down on a weekly schedule and write it on your daily calendar. Make it a habit. Perhaps on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, you write half an hour before work, plus daily you write fifteen minutes before cooking supper, and Saturday morning you write an hour while the kids watch cartoons. That’s four hours of writing in a week, just in the free bits and pieces. Since many of us started writing while caring for small children and/or holding down a day job, this kind of weekly schedule may be the best you can do for a while.
And that’s fine!
Time-Honored Tradition
The highest percentage of today’s famous, best-selling authors admit that their writing schedules were exactly like this in the early years. But they had that “burning desire to write” too. And that desire is what motivates us to find those pockets of time, give the
If you’re a plumber hired to unclog my drain, but I catch you sitting and looking out the window, I can, in all fairness, say you’re not working. If you’re my cleaning lady, but I catch you rocking in a chair staring into space, I can say justly that you’re not working.
What about writers? Not so easy to tell!
Thinking vs. Writing
According to Wallace Stevens, “It is not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out the window.” It’s also not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and going for a walk, between thinking and washing dishes, between thinking and daydreaming, and between thinking and grazing in the fridge.
Why is this true? Lots of thinking precedes writing. For fiction writers, thinking about characters, getting to know them, listening to their voices-all this happens in the head while “thinking.” Plot twists and turns give birth while “thinking”-and woe unto the writer who skips thinking and writes the first thing that comes into her head.
Although all this pre-thinking is critical, that isn’t all the thinking you’ll have to do. Even while working on revisions, you’ll find yourself thinking and staring out the window, thinking and walking, thinking and grazing. You understand that “I’m thinking” means ”so please don’t interrupt.” Chances are, your family won’t. Instead they will walk into the room where you’re “thinking-writing” and say, “Oh good, you’re not doing anything. Can you hold the ladder for me?”
Thinking in Disguise
That’s why I prefer to do my thinking in private if I can. Otherwise it just seems to invite interruptions, often at a critical moment when I’ve just about figured out my theme or where the climax scene needs to go.
If I’m home alone, that’s no problem. If it’s in the evening, though, or on a weekend, I weed flowers or fold a load of laundry or wash dishes when I need to think something through. (Nobody bothers you when doing chores-they might get roped into helping.)
Reap the Rewards
Contrary to the life of a plumber or housekeeper, a lot of the writer’s real work happens when she’s looking out the window. Sometimes my clearest thoughts, my best insights for how to fix things, come when I’m not thinking about the piece of writing at all.
Give yourself enough of this “mindless” time, and you’ll be amazed what bubbles up to your conscious mind. Despite the heckling you may receive, during this thinking time you’re a writer at work. And the pay-off will be huge.
The Constitution in 2020, edited by Yale Law professors Jack M. Balkin and Reva B. Siegel, contains progressive essays on the future of the Constitution from over twenty contributors. The book is the result of a conference held at Yale in 2005, where the year 2020 was chosen because it was close enough to be practical and realistic, yet far enough away for the writers to imagine that the Constitution could be interpreted very differently. About half of the essays are available on the Constitution in 2020website, free of charge. In the excerpt below, from the introduction, the editors use the Constitution’s flexibility in the past as the basis for the idea that we must interpret it flexibly in the future so that the Constitution can accurately express the beliefs of the many individuals that it belongs to.
To say that we have imperfectly realized the Constitution’s commitments is not to deny the nation’s achievements. To the contrary: this understanding of our Constitution is the source of the nation’s greatness. Each generation builds on the best of the past and strives, as the Preamble instructs us, to create a better future for our posterity.
For proof of this idea, we need only look to history: The Constitution once protected slavery. It does no longer. It once sanctioned Jim Crow. It does no longer. The Constitution once permitted a wide variety of forms of political and artistic censorship; it once treated women as men’s servants, and gays and lesbians as criminals. It does no longer. All these changes came about because people believed in their Constitution and in the importance of continually examining our practices in the light of our principles.
Because each generation must honor the Constitution’s commitments in its own time, the Constitution as it is applied in practice will inevitably change, responding to altered circumstances and conditions. This is not a defect; it is a feature of our constitutional tradition. It is how each generation makes the Constitution its own.
Americans honor their constitutional heritage, but they do not worship it uncritically. The Constitution of today draws on a rich history of past accomplishments, starting with the Declaration, the Revolution, the founding, the second founding of Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the civil rights revolution. In these great epochs, those who forged the constitutional understandings that we today take as foundational did not treat the past as sacrosanct—it was their opponents who did.
There have been long periods in which unjust policies and defective interpretations of the Constitution reigned supreme. We often hear people talk as if the greatness of our nation and the justice of our Constitution were fixed and guaranteed at the founding; if we only would bind ourselves to the wisdom of the framers, all would be well. But those who fetishize the founders do not keep faith with them; those who framed the Constitution forged a framework for nation building, a framework for developing a political community committed to justice. As we strive to realize this commitment, we are more faithful to the constitutional project than those who supported slavery, segregation, sex discrimination, and religious intolerance in the name of the fathers. In every generation, people have defended injustice in the name of an imagined past. And in every generation, people have countered this complacency by invoking a different conception of our origins and traditions, remembering our history as a people in quest of justice.
Constitutional argument appears backward-looking, to consist in little more than appeals to text, history, and precedent. But this obscures its true genius. Americans appeal to history to make claims on one another about our deepest commitments as a nation. We appeal to history as we debate with one another how to face the future.
The Constitution, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, is made for people of fundamentally different views. We live in a world of heterogeneous beliefs and sustained conflicts about values. And we live in a democracy: a system of government in which we must live together and rule together despite deep normative disagreements. We turn to the past not because the past contains within it all of the answers to our questions, but because it is the repository of our common struggles and common commitments; it offers us invaluable resources as we debate the most important questions of political life, which cannot fully and finally be settled. In this process, we draw on the text, history, and traditions of the U.S. Constitution to make the founders’ Constitution our own. Over and over again, we have looked to our collective past to imagine our collective future.
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Like many families, summertime for us often means traveling by car for long distances. (I’ve learned that going anywhere in Texas means traveling a long distance.)
Getting into the writing habit is difficult, especially in the early years of writing. Our lives are full to overflowing already, so where can we possibly fit in some writing? How can we form a consistent writing habit when our schedules change from day to day, depending on our obligations?
If you’re a plumber hired to unclog my drain, but I catch you sitting and looking out the window, I can, in all fairness, say you’re not working. If you’re my cleaning lady, but I catch you rocking in a chair staring into space, I can say justly that you’re not working.