Gil Mayer, Author at from Gnome to Goliath

How to Organize the Free Time of Your Kids

A family of two working parents and a four-year-old decided to empower the kid to own his free time, education, and entertainment.

The current reality in the world is scary – most of us are working from home, people are getting sick all over the world. There is a lot of uncertainty. In situations like these (i.e. crisis), the best thing you could do is to concentrate on the short-term. Obviously, making long-term plans in times of uncertainty is hard.

My spouse and I are also working from home since March. Our 4-year-old kid is also at home with us. He has a lot of free time during the day, because the education system is, like often, slow to react and adapt to the new environment. After all, do you know that the original idea of the summer vacation for the kids is so that they can help their family with the harvest? Talking about adapting to new times …

Anyway, we decided to give our son’s routine in his own hands and to empower him to define his agenda for the day. We designed a game where we control the rules (i.e. guardrails like for example “max 2 hours of tablet per day”, “family has meals together”, etc.) But we largely let him decide how to self-organize his free time.

In this article, I am describing the way we did this.

Work-life Balance

Finding your work-life balance is the next logical step after defining your life roles and the goals associated with each of them.

So far, so good. You have several life roles that you have defined. Each role has a funnel with long-term, mid-term, short-term, and weekly goals. And for each role you have defined the mission statement and the personal vision statement. But how do you juggle with all these often-competing priorities? How do you achieve balance between them? How do you know at what point of the day on which role to stress? And in general, how do you divide your time?

This chapter is about balance. I believe that finding balance is the most important task and all your efforts so far have been leading to this. There are different descriptions for this. Some people call it “finding work-life balance” with the implication of quantitative division between work and life commitments. Other people call it “finding work-life harmony”, or qualitative division between work and life. In practice, all this means that you cannot afford to neglect any of your life roles in favor of the others. At least not for long.

However, you can still decide to neglect any of your life roles by dropping it from the list. The implications are immense and I urge you to really think about it, but this is what I did a few years ago (more about it later in this chapter).

How to Survive the Back-to-back Meetings Week

A week full of back-to-back meetings can be tough to navigate. This article will give you 10 tips on how to do that and survive.

You have established your habits and your work routine, you feel productive, and you inch toward your goals day by day. You follow your daily routine, you wake up at the same time, do exercises, meditate, and then go to work. And then, that dreadful week comes when you have to start discussing next year’s roadmap in your company. You get visitors from all over the world. And you are facing a week full of back-to-back meetings.

This article will give you some insights into surviving these long days and keeping the impact on your daily responsibility (because there will be impact) at a minimal level. This is just a guideline, as always, feel free to keep things that work for you, and add others that I might have thought about.

Gil’s List of Best Books 2018 (Non-business)

A list of the best books I’ve read in 2018 that are “non-business”. Covering a collection of spirituality, wisdom, philosophy, and psychology topics.

I cannot always read all of Tin’s books but I surely try to skim over most of them and dive into selected few. This year, I’ve also decided to share my list. But unlike Tin’s it will be just a list, do not expect rankings, tables, and any other sophisticated statistics.

I concentrated on non-business books (if you allow me to use this weird description). Tin’s list of best books of 2018 can be found here.

Help! My Manager is an Introvert!

A while ago, I shared my approach in dealing with a new manager. This time, I am diving deeper into the subject and sharing the steps I took when I realized that my new manager is an introvert.

You have recently changed your role? Or you have recently changed your employer? Or maybe, you just now realized that your new manager is an introvert. Don’t panic! First, there is nothing wrong in being an introvert. Second, I agree that working with introvert is different mostly because we are so used to these images of flamboyant, extrovert bosses. Third, pure introverts are very rare, so maybe you are wrong. And last but not least, there are approaches you can take if you dive deep into the world of introverts. This article is the logical next step after my article a while ago about approaching a new manager (link here). After working a few months with my managers I started realizing that they are actually introverts. Continue reading if you are interested in my journey and the way I approached thew new situation. Continue reading