What matters

The stress levels were rising in Two Hills World Headquarters Tower in inverse proportion to the billable hours. Something had to be done. Urgent action was called for. So I rearranged my office.

Actually it was triggered by my son moving to a new bedroom which in turn triggered an extensive furniture reshuffle. The outcome was a much nicer office.

When I look out the window I'm reminded of the words I wrote in my book Working in IT

There is a road called the Karakoram Highway, a wild military road punched through an arm of the Himalayas by the Chinese army at the cost of 900 lives to connect to their ally Pakistan.

It winds up the beautiful Hunza valley full of warring Islamic tribes, before trekking across the plateau wastes of Xinshiang to remote Kashi, populated by the more peaceful but equally hard-bitten Uygur people. It is not a road I expected to share with a portly young earth-mother from Hawaii, robed in velvet kaftan and dripping chunky jewellery, with two little blond pre-school children in tow.

Now at the time my pony tail came halfway down my back and nobody could have guessed my natural skin colour, so I liked to think I was travel-hardened and open-minded, but I struggled with the idea of those two kids staying in the same roadhouses and eating in the same markets and scrambling onto the same local buses as me.

I challenged her on it, and I learned something of great value. She said that it was not a decision she liked to take – bringing them there - but it was the right one because it fit her priorities.

So long as you have your priorities clearly sorted, then decisions are easy, even the hard ones...

That noted philosopher, Garfield the cat, said “Work is so bad they have to pay you to do it”. Arrange your life so that work gets the priority it deserves based on your list, and so that it leaves sufficient room and resources for your other priorities to get proper attention.

(And for those of you who ARE so busy you never see home in daylight and you leave your credit card behind everywhere, read The Man Who Cut My Wife.)

My family is healthy. The sun shines. The house is freehold.

No contracts means Jack and I can go fishing. Yesterday I was changing nappies. Today he is nine.

I'm broke but not bust. Something will come up. Who knows, one of my books might turn into a smash hit.