Are we bucket carriers?

If you read my previous blog posts on this weblog, you'll realize I'm very passionate about family time. I have seen so many people chasing a career and in the process sacrificing the happiness of their children and families.

Initially I guess, I was a bit judgemental (quick to forget my learning curve in this area) and realized later that many of these people really deep down want to spend time with their families. Many (if not most) of them just get so stuck in their current job commitments and the ever increasing demands, that they slowly but surely start compromising their time.

After reading an amazing book, Parable of the Pipeline, I realised most of us are bucket carriers. We don't have a passive income, no pipelines. This way we dread losing our jobs and the boundaries between work and personal live gets compromised along the way.

Recently I started building a pipeline in order to gain true financial freedom where my passive income exceeds my expenses. If you're interested feel free to contact me at lootsd at gmail dot com.This used to be an Amway oppurtunity. I was part of Network 21 / Amway and believed it would help with problems of people spending more time at work and less at home. However, I resigned from Amway a while ago due to various reasons.

By the way, if your money stops when you're not working, you're a bucket carrier. If your money comes in with or without you, you've got a passive income from some sort of a pipeline. When you work, it only increases your pipeline income more.

I used to think that this kind of dream is beyond my reach, beyond most middle-class people's reach. I recently discovered, it is not. Once you set your goals and follow a specific proven system and work hard at it for a while, you may just make it without having to spend huge sums of money.

Tell me what you think.

Hard realities of live

Boy did a lot of things happen since my last post? After the last vacation I returned fully charged to work. For a while it was the usual, but then I had various requests from different customers (keep in mind I am an independent consultant). Due to various reasons I had to accept all. All of the jobs turned out to be longer than expected. The end result was that I was away from home for little more than two weeks, 3 days back home and then away again for another two weeks.

The effect on my family was more than I am willing to sacrifice. I have small children (3 yrs. and 6 yrs.) and I try to have a very good relationship with them. The first two weeks was tough, but the second trip was devastating. When I went into the airport for the second trip it was already heartbreaking, to say the least about the rest of the time I was away. My very good relationship with my wife also had a huge dent. It felt as if we were completely losing touch with each other and we share everything.

When everything was eventually over, I thought I'll never leave home again, not one day! After working for quite a long time from home again, I had another request. This time for only one night away from home. Everything on this trip was okay, but the night away from home brought back all those terrible memories of the time I was away from home. It almost felt like I was still in that period of 4 weeks.

To make matters worse, while I was away, I had a call for a request for another week away about a week later. This time round I was confronted with major opposing emotions. On the one side was me as father and husband that did not want to be away from home ever again. On the other side was me as a business man. The money is very good for traveling in Africa (compared to South Africa) and this specific customer was quite new and presented huge opportunities for me. I cannot even begin to describe the thoughts and emotions I had to go through.

The end result was that I did go, made some good money and the trip was a resounding success. The family was okay, since I was away for only three nights. I decided that for now I'll accept one week trips only (preferable no more than 4 / 5 nights).

Now during all my travels, I realized that I am quite fortunate to have all these opportunities and I am still very thankful for them. It is however, as always not an easy task to keep a healthy balance between work and personal life.

What are your comments? And your experiences with traveling away from home, especially with small children?

Fully Charged!

Apart from resting a few muscles, limbs, etc. as a result of thorough holidaying, I am now much better of than before the holiday. I have strengthened some of the most important relationships in my live. I am now ready again to take on the world and all the difficult customers (and managers?) out there.

I know so many people that does not go on holiday frequently (less than once a year!). I really don't know how they manage to do it. I don't know if it is at all possible to work optimally under the usual stress and challenges, without a balanced live.

In my humble opinion (IMHO) I think a healthy balanced live starts at home.

For you going on leave soon, enjoy and come back relaxed. Now back to working, although I must admit, it is hard to get going after such a good holiday.

Holiday

I am about to do what any good employee should do on a regular basis. Go on holiday with my family. Since I'm a consultant, it means unpaid leave, but believe me, it is worth a lot more than any money can buy.

What is more, I'll come back supercharged, ready to take on the challenges of this world. I'm going to fix all the cracks and just re-enforce a very important foundation of my life, i.e. my relationships with my beautifull wife, my lovely children and my Source / Saviour / Creator / King.

Remember, don't make the wrong investments. Work hard, live happy, play a lot, but make sure the most important relationships in your live gets stronger.

The perfect employee?

I think the perfect employee is one that does his (of course I also include the female employees, but I don't want to add /her or /she every time) work to his best ability with dedication and confidence. This person will first do the work that needs to be done and then come up with new ideas of new things to do. I am not saying this person should not find better ways to do the work, but get the work done, then go look for new projects to take on.

Furthermore, this person should give his absolute best during the hours expected from him. Not unnecessarily be on the phone, Web, email or whatever is not really necessary. This person should be focused on what needs to be done and the quality of the work.

In times of emergencies or stressful times, this champion employee will still continue to work mostly unaffected. He will not waste his time and energy with unnecessary office politics. Yes he should be part of the team, he should be friendly and interested in colleagues lives, but not spend too much time with idle chit-chat.

Should this person be someone that regularly works overtime, without compensation? Will a person like this be more productive? I believe not. I think the perfect employee will understand clearly the boundaries of work and personal live. The perfect employee will work hard and dedicated, but he will plan carefully and not spend unnecessary time at work.

The main reason I believe this, is because I firmly believe that the employee with a healthy personal live / family live, is the one that will be able to work dedicated, untouched under any circumstance. Because his family live is healthy, he will not care that much / will be less affected if some colleague mistreats him. He will get into less office politics. And because this person is not sacrificing any personal live to for work, he will also not use work time for personal matters unnecessarily.

When he goes on leave, he'll make sure that the office will not need to phone him while on leave, and then he might even switch off his mobile phone / redirect all calls back to the office. This might sound very unproductive and very disloyal, but I believe that the perfect employee will make sure that his holiday is used very effectively to rest and forget all about work. He'll build relationships that will make his personal live even more healthy and he'll come back, ready to take on the world again.

What do you think?

Nerd score?

Some of you might be very interested in your Nerd Score and you would hope to get the highest possible one.

I also tried it, hoping to not get too high a score, I got 71%! Far higher than I would have liked it.

I guess if you know as much technical detail about stuff that I know, you have to be at least a little bit nerdy. Not that I know THAT much.

Check it out at:

Work vs personal live

Wow, that was quick. I could not believe how quick I got feedback and now I appeared on a very popular blog by John Clingan. It was very interesting to read John's comment as well as some other feedback.

Yes, I understand that some of the personal time you're investing is in order to gain more knowledge and experience. I have also done this various times, specifically in the days I were permanently employed. I also agree with doing this.

But one important piece of self discipline you have to practice, especially if you've got a family, is to not let them pay for it. I have seen so many people being very unhappy because of their unhappy family / personal lives.

I have seen men and fathers (not sure if mothers will do it) work very long hours and then still demand some time for themselves. They hardly ever see their children during the week, and then on Saturday they're on the golf course!

My attitude in life is that nothing in this world (other than God) is more important than my family. If I need to work overtime, invest some extra time in work, then my family should not be the ones paying for the investment. So I try to do this extra investment at night when everybody is in bed and if I had to be physically at work early evening, I get up earlier the next morning (my children are still very young and they always get up early!) and send at least 30 minutes - 1 hour with them.

This way I am sure that this very important aspect of my life gets its due priority. What I also found is just exactly how important this aspect is to my own sanity. What I figured out is that no matter what happens at work (good or bad) if I have a healthy family life, I can handle it.

I had some very good managers, I had some less professional managers, I had some good times at work (especially working for Sun Microsystems, don't even get me started on that) and some bad times at work (two companies went down the tubes, survived two company wide reduction in staff, etc.) One thing remained, I could always return to a happy home, a family that is happy to see me, a wonderful wife who helps to carry my burdens and worries and shares in my joys and happiness.

The reason I mention this is because I once got it wrong. I have seen so many people getting it wrong. Colleagues that spend too much time at work (mostly because of bad self-discipline) and then when things don't go that well at work, they can't handle it.

I have seen so many times, that people with a healthy and stable family live, tends to be able to handle a lot more stress at work. They tend to be more stable overall, not easily get caught up in office politics, etc. And most of all, they seem to be more productive, especially the self-disciplined ones.

At one programming job I had for example, I was a lot more productive than most of the young lads that used to spend about 12 hours a day at the office, because I knew there was no time for idle chit-chat, no unnecessary surfing and emailing (there were no blogs at that time).

During these times I also invested some of my time in learning new things (like C++, Java, etc.) Nowadays I work mostly on the hardware of Sun Microsystems and I also need to spend some time on them. But I always try to keep a balance. I always try to give back to my family, what my work took from them. I try to make some time for enjoying myself as well, but after my family got their time.

To summarize, I guess self-discipline is the answer. Work hard and dedicated at work, invest the necessary extra time, but get your priorities right. Don't harm the most useful relationships in your live for your career. Believe me, it is worth the while. If you don't have it, you cannot imagine the worth of a heavenly marriage / family live.

If you're single I guess you'll need to apply the above however it fits to your live.

Boundaries of work and personal live

This is my first attempt at blogging. I was inspired by the blogs of Sun Microsystems, specially I spend a lot of time on the blogs of Jonathan Schwartz and John Clingan. My intention for this blog is not necessarily Sun or Solaris related, thus I decided to use rather use Blogger.

My first entries will be about how much am I supposed to allow my work to interfere with my personal live. For now I just want to start the discussion and later I'll start posting more stuff. Firstly I must add that different jobs, different countries, etc. may affect this topic in different ways.

I'll mention a few observations. Firstly let me say that I am now a self employed consultant in the IT industry in South Africa. I have seen jobs where the boundaries are very clearly defined, where people work exactly on an per hour basis. They still "clock in" and "clock out", and the amount of hours they should work is very clearly defined.

I have also seen some countries where people just don't work overtime unnecessarily, firstly because work is available in abundance, thus almost everybody just work the required hours.

What I have however seen in a lot of IT (and other professional jobs) in South Africa, is that many people work long hours overtime without extra payment. They do this because the boss wants them to do it and they thing it is right. The work somehow has the right to make you work overtime without the overtime pay.

Some may provide the overtime pay, but you don't really have the freedom to decide yourself if you want to do this or not.

I suspect this mostly happens because South Africa does not have a "dole" system, which basically means that if you don't have a job, you die of hunger. This is very different in most European and other countries. Furthermore, it is not always easy to find a job, specifically a job that pays well. Thus people in South Africa tends to tolerate a lot more from their job than they're supposed to.

The reason I posted this blog entry, is because of some personal experiences, observations and some books I read. One of the best books on boundaries, is one by Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend.

So if you happen to stumble on this blog, let me know what you think. In due time I'll add bits and pieces that I have time to post.