Work Schedule

For someone that runs a business a work schedule isn’t something that is always the same. If you have a shop and work retail of course that means that you do have set hours and when you lock the door at the end of the day most of your job is finished until the door is unlocked the next time you open for business.

When you have a business that is either consulting or freelancing or even your own business of another type your work schedule isn’t always set and will mean that things can impact it and it can impact your personal time. Of course, being a consultant in the IT area can mean that weekends can mean those are your work days and you then have a couple of days off during the week, maybe if your other clients don’t need you.

A work schedule even now for a lot of employees isn’t just the standard 9 to 5 like it was years ago. With the mobile devices everyone is now more connected to the office and able to work remotely in a lot of cases. Sure there are jobs that need you to be in the office to perform some tasks but being able to reply of emails once you have left the office has become almost part of normal life. There are times that being able to reply to emails in the evenings or even on transit on your way to or from the office can mean that you will be able to focus on the other tasks once you are back in the office.

Working in IT and especially in the consulting business has taken me some time to get use to having the schedule that changes quite quickly. My schedule can start off as a normal day with me knowing what I am going to be doing or at least what has been planned for the day. A simple email or phone call can change that very quickly. Being able to bounce between a number of jobs is something that you learn fairly quickly when you are running your own business. It is something that you get pretty good at even when you are working for someone else. An emergency can happen at any time so that means that you have to be able to change your priority quickly but remember where things stood when you stopped the task so you can pick up where you stopped.

A work schedule can be an interesting challenge especially when you have the emergencies that can happen. Being able to be flexible and juggle a number of things can be very important and understanding that your schedule may be impacted and your weekend can before a weekend and a week day may become a weekend.

When someone makes plans and then they have to change them understand that it might not be them that is actually changing the plans it could be work. Understanding that a lot of people have a work schedule that can change extremely quickly can really make it a challenge for planning things. We have friends that have schedules like we have so we normally get plans that sometimes happen and sometimes done. A lot of our plans end up being the last minute type because at least then we normally know what is happening and there is less of a chance that the work schedule will change it but that can still happen.