The downside to regional bonuses

The annual bonus was announced at work today.

This is always a big day.  The day that rumors prepare for weeks.  What's going to be the bonus percentage this year?  The doom-and-gloomers always swear up and down it's going to be zero, while others tend to make things more interesting: "I bet it's 125% this year!  Maybe 150%!"

But the downside is always the fact that the bonus percentage varies based on the country one's business unit serves.  There's a general corporate percentage (for those of us who work globally) and then country-specific percentages around the world.

I'm part of "corporate," so I always get the middle-of-the-road corporate percentage, which is fine and dandy with me.  It stays fairly stable around the 100% mark, so there are rarely any surprises.

The tough part is that my father works for the same company, but his business unit supports the U.S., which for the last several years has gotten a crappy bonus percentage.  This year was no different.  The economy, and the fact that the U.S. appliance market is fairly saturated, has made it very hard for the company to do very well in the U.S. for the past few years.

But that's not my dad's fault, for goodness sakes.  He works his ass off for the company.  Reward him as well as you reward all us corporate cronies, because he doesn't spend any less time or any less blood, sweat, or tears than the rest of us.

A regional bonus takes all the fun out of it.  Except if you're in Brazil and raking in a whopping 195%.  Dad, I think both our families should just move to Joinville...

Detaching from work

I'm a big fan of Harvard Business Review.  Not only is the magazine great, they have a fantastic online offering, a lot of which is free.  I particularly enjoy the bloggers.

Gill Corkindale wrote a post recently about work-life balance that included a Top 6 list on how to maintain that balance.  The fifth point particularly resonated with me:

5. Treat time outside work as sacrosanct and refresh yourself. Protect your time outside work as much as you can. You need to be able to switch off from work for your own health and sanity and that of your friends and family.

True that.  It can be difficult at times, particularly when I'm absolutely swamped with work and could use a couple quiet hours at home to try to catch up, but then I remind myself: The work will never end.  No matter how hard I try to catch up... no matter how many hours I devote to work every single day... I'll never be caught up.  There will always be a mountain waiting.  So why sacrifice both family time and "refresh" time to a lost cause?  Not worth it.

Anyway, for those interested in the work-life balance topic, enjoy Corkindale's post:
http://blogs.hbr.org/corkindale/2011/01/detach_yourself_from_your_work.html

Yikes, don't skip lunch

I did a silly thing yesterday.  I had so many meetings at work that I missed lunch.  That's certainly happened to me before, but never while pregnant.  However, I was so busy that I didn't even feel hungry, so things were going swimmingly.

I began conducting some project management training in the afternoon, and took a quick break a couple hours in to run to the vending machines and get myself a package of Pop Tarts.  (I know, my poor baby... I swear I'll never do this again.)  I ate the Pop Tarts during the break and continued training, all while standing up.  Well, lo and behold, I suddenly came extremely close to passing out.  I'm talking about ears ringing, things starting to go black, breaking out in a cold sweat... all that good stuff.  All while standing in front of a huge room of people, so add some slight panic on top of it all.  Oh man, what a situation.  Luckily it was right before another break, so I let people go for ten minutes and I sat down, regaining my composure.

So I learned my lesson.  Mom, if you're reading this, I promise I learned my lesson.  No more skipping lunch, no matter what, and definitely not while I'm pregnant.  It had worse consequences than I expected, and still ended better than it could have, luckily.

Happiness on a Wednesday

My happy moments today:

• Listening to Caroline sing along to her favorite Elmo and Toddler Tunes songs in the backseat of the car
• Giving one of the best bosses I've ever had a thankful hug at work (even though I only had the good fortune of working for her for a couple months)
• Getting my car back from the mechanic with not only everything fixed and a very reasonable bill, but a cleaned and vacuumed interior and polished dashboard
• Watching the snow fall all day from my own window outside my cube at work
• Hearing that my Uncle Lloyd is recovering quickly from his lung surgery
• Having a warm, delicious meal ready for me from my husband when I arrived home from work

That is a LOT of happy moments for a regular Wednesday.  I am thankful.

A lesson in futility

fu-til-i-ty (n. pl. fu-til-i-ties): 1. Lack of effectiveness or success. 2. The quality of having no useful result.

Recently, for the past month or two, as I leave the office at the end of a work day, it almost blows my mind how busy I am.  Everyone is insanely busy.  But I've never before experienced such a long stretch of daily growth of my To-Do list, with never a day where I'm able to break even, let alone make the list shorter.

It's truly a frustrating feeling.  For every one person I assist on a given day, there's at least one or two people who get zilch from me.  Zippo.  Nada.  As hard as they try, I'm just completely unavailable, buried under an avalanche of other work.

But as tempting as it may get to catch up on a few emails at home in the evening, I've been downright refusing.  If I have so much work that I can't get it done in a solid 12-hour workday, I simply have too much, and I won't turn them into 15-hour workdays on my own free will.  I won't turn hard work into overwork.

Now if only I could apologize in advance to all my colleagues I'm going to end up ignoring on any given day.