LifeStyle, Popular

School’s out for summer

If you’re a parent, this statement can fill you with dread.  Or a warm fuzzy feeling.  Or a mix of the two.

Pleasant thoughts of lie-ins, not having to get the show on the road five days a week, a break from homework monitoring (or doing) and lazy summer afternoons (remember summers?)… But if you’re a working parent  then it can also bring on a sicky feeling of “how on Earth am I going to muddle through this year?”.

Well, as a working parent I am not going to offer a solution to the all-too familiar juggle, as the only solution is to give up work.
What I will do though is introduce you to the concept of life-slicing that might help you feel a whole lot better about the weeks ahead.

Basically,  it’s the idea that there has been a paradigm shift in the way people’s work and personal life are split.  There is no longer a clear division between the two,  and work life and personal life are a series of interspersed slices.  This is how I, and many others I know, now live their lives.  Technology has accompanied this (or led it) and it’s never been easier to life-slice.

When I wrote an article about life-slicing last year, I was hit by protestations: this wasn’t a healthy way to live and we should all be able to cut off from work.  And of course, they’re not wrong.  Technology = bad guy.

Or is he?

Before I was technically enabled to work from anywhere (and more on that in a second), I remember returning to work at the end of the summer holidays and finding an inbox so overwhelmingly large that I just wanted to go straight back out the door.  And then I’d spend the next week getting on top of things.  Prior to the “big holidays” was equally stressful – trying to complete on things knowing I’d be out of range with no access to the company for days.   By being able to keep on top of my emails whilst out of the office has made a huge difference to me, for the better.

But emails are just part of the picture.
The game changer for me has been the ability to access my whole desktop just as if I were at the office. This really came into its own when I was on holiday recently on a Greek Island.  The weather was unseasonably cold and wet one day and everyone had taken to watching the Godfather on DVD.  So I just got on my “desktop” and had a blitz on company Health & Safety, as you do.  It was annual review time and it was hanging over me like a cloud but I knocked it on the head.  There and then, on my Greek island.  At that moment in time, technology was not only a good guy, he was my best buddy.

So, as we head towards the summer juggle, it might just be worth taking a look at how a hosted desktop could change your life and what’s more, the life of those around you.

Jo Radcliffe

Co-Founder of 404 team Ltd who is passionate about bringing colour, clarity and budget-ability to businesses' experience of IT.