Business director Chris Deary tells us how he’s learning to multi-task conference calls with his toddler’s calls of nature
I spent most of the Christmas period worrying about whether my festive over-indulgence was really the best preparation for the challenges of the coming year. My wife was about to return to work after her second maternity leave and we were stressing about the logistics of having two of us working again — or, more specifically, in my case, about whether my freshly fattened waistline would be able to lug a bike trailer with two kids in up the extremely steep hill we live atop. Little did I know that my biggest parenting conundrum in 2020 would be figuring out how to make coherent contributions to conference calls while simultaneously helping my four-year-old son empty his bladder against a tree in the woods during our one government-approved daily excursion from the house.
I should explain that the tree incident (sorry, nature) was not a planned activity, but a side effect from having left the house without doing all the usual drills — a casualty of the ongoing war between mine and my wife’s Outlook calendars. It starts with the nightly comparison of schedules. We both gaze sceptically at the little blue boxes piled up on top of each other and begin interrogating the importance of each other’s meetings. “I mean, a 300-person conference call with the United Nations and the World Bank to try to solve climate change sounds pretty missable,” I found myself saying the other day. “Oh, you’re chairing it? I see. Could it be 30 minutes instead of an hour then? Otherwise we’ll have to swap over half way through Joe Wicks…”
You see, climate change has nothing on a one-year-old learning to walk. Her kamikaze, head-first missions into walls and cupboards know nothing of the melting ice caps. Her penchant for putting whole toilet rolls in the sink and drenching them with water cares little for deforestation — or the empty supermarket shelves. I remember when the hardest thing about working from home was finding the motivation to get dressed and resisting the urge to become a serial fridge visitor. Work in the time of Covid-19 is now punctuated by desperate lunges to stop milk being poured on my keyboard and kitchen patrols to prevent my four-year-old from depleting the cracker stockpiles.
It doesn’t help that I’m a terrible at-home parent. My go-to parenting activities are all away from the house: swimming, trampolining, going to the zoo, getting angry about the abysmal ratio of parent-and-child parking spaces to regular parking spaces. I just can’t get excited about baking or arts and crafts. It turns out the kids just can’t get excited about watching Daddy update a spreadsheet, either.
My aversion to the need for black-belt level multi-tasking that has been thrust upon me is that time spent in the house with children is directly proportionate to the time spent tidying up the house after they’ve gone to bed. I prefer to let the zoo do the tidying, normally. That’s mainly because I can’t relax or work or do anything when surrounded by mess. My work-from-home days normally start with 30–60 minutes of yin and yang fixing — putting the cushions back on the sofa, wiping porridge off the kitchen ceiling, that kind of thing. I’m coming to terms with my working environment now looking like the opening scene from a Vietnam war movie, with Duplo exploding left, right and centre.
Of course, I’m one of the lucky ones: I have a job that can be done flexibly; an employer that values its people and wants to support them; colleagues who are understanding, patient and kind; and a family who are rapidly becoming experts in transformative customer experiences. Our house is surrounded by the aforementioned, mostly deserted woods, so the isolation zone is pretty big and our daily walks are soundtracked by birdsong as spring sunlight gently pours through the trees. We pick daffodils and spot squirrels and search for mole hills. It all feels very incongruous with the news, which provides timely reminders that if learning how to Slack with one hand and change a nappy with the other is your biggest problem right now, then there are probably some stars in the sky that deserve a thank you.
Read more from our #ZoneWorksFromHome series:
