Учебное пособие: English in business
WORK AND LIFE BALANCE
1 Many business people are facing the problem of how to keep a balance between their business career and private life. What priorities would you set up if dealing with the same problem?
2 Read and discuss three parts of the article by Vicki Sussens-Messerer"Fitting it all" in which she presenfthree different points on work-life balance ( Spotlight 6/2008).
FITTING IT ALL
PENNY FERGUSON, mother of six and owner of leadership-development company Penny Ferguson Limited, in Newbury, England.
Penny Ferguson is sitting in the log-cabin office in the garden of her country home in Newbury, in southern England. The 65-year-old British leadership specialist has just spent 20 minutes relaxing in an armchair. She arrived back from Canada the night before and was up early for a breakfast meeting with clients. She is tired and in a reflective mood. "I have consciously started to take more quality time for me," she says. " That is a big change because I chose to work pretty hard for the last ten years."
In fact, Ferguson has worked hard her whole life. She has six children, five grandchildren and four terriers, and started her company at the age of fifty. At one point, she had six small children, two step-children and nine dogs. "I used to go shopping with eight children," she says. "I had the three eldest pushing the youngest in the prams and I held the hands of the middle two".
Ferguson had her first child at 21 and her last at 29. In the middle, she married for the second time. "I laugh about this now, but when it came to the sixth child, I really didn't know how to fit him into the schedule." She had an eight-bedroom house, which she says she ran like clockwork. She had a mother's help, but not all the time. "I would get up at 5.30 a.m., have a bath and change before I did the baby's first feed of the day. I would make the children's beds as their feet touched the floor. I would take them downstairs and give them breakfast. Then I would drop the boys at their school and Lucy at nursery school. In total, I drove 92 miles(146 km) a day on school rounds. Between rounds, I did the washing, ironing, cooking and shopping. The last thing I did, before I fell into bed at night, was to put the washing in the machine."
But Ferguson doesn't think this is good time-management. "I fooled myself into believing that being efficient made me happy. But what was more important - keeping the house perfect or having quality time with children?" Between her second and third marriages, Ferguson was a single mother for six years, at one stage holding three jobs.
3 Sort out the statements below into TRUE or FALSE:
1Penny Ferguson was married two times.
2Penny has a dog.
3Penny keeps her house perfect.
4Penny's children attended schools which were quite a distance from her house/
5Nobody helped Penny with her kids.
6Penny had to do a lot of washing.
7Penny is sure that being effective makes a person happy.
8To make money enough, Penny had several jobs.
9Penny Ferguson has never had much time for herself.
10 Penny had had six kids by the time she was 30.
CARY COOPER, author and professor of organizational psychology and health at Lancaster University Management School
СагуCooper, professor at Lancaster University Management School, is chaotic. The coauthor of Detox Your Desk, Declutter Your Life and Mind (Capstone Press, ISBN 978-1-84112-787-3) knows he has an interview at 7 p.m., but forgot that it was with us. When I phone at the agreed time, he is not there. But the guru on work-life balance is, surprisingly, always available. His answering machine greets me cheerfully and supplies several ways to find him. When he answers his mobile, he is in his car, stuck in a traffic jam. He promises to be home in 15 minutes, which he is.
"I guess I seem a jumble," says Cooper, an American who lives with his British wife in Poynton, near Manchester. "But I am actually quite organized. I know what the big things are that I have to achieve. It's the things in between that I juggle." But he likes it that way:"I would have huge problems if everything was planned for me."
That's why he gives out his telephone numbers. "I like to be disturbed! I find the interruptions stimulating. I like it when a journalist calls me. They often ask, "Cooper, what do you think about X?", and I think "Oh, that's fascinating!" Then I jump back into my writing again. I can't write at home; it's too quiet. But I guess I'm unusual this way."
Yet Cooper gets his work done. Today, for example, aside from his normal university duties, he finishes editing three chapters of a book he is writing on managing stress, he did two live BBC interviews, and gave an interview for both The Times and The Daily Express. What's his secret? "I always start the day by prioritizing, and plan the big items well. But I am lucky because I can process input fast, I write quickly, and I am able to talk off the cuff.
"I don't want work to dominate my life," says Cooper, adding that his first marriage suffered because he spent too much time at work. "I wasn't there for my two oldest children. So, after I remarried, I decided to work bloody hard so I could get home early." Now, when he stops working, he really stops, he says.
4 Answer the questions about Cary Cooper's story:
1What nationality is Cary Cooper?
2Is he easy to access?