A Letter from Sally McGhee

I’ve realized that since I have so many other people on my team contributing to our newsletter these days, I don’t have as much of an opportunity to “talk” to all of you like I feel I used to. I’ve asked for a special edition of the newsletter so I can fill you in on a few new projects I’m working on these days.

First, I’ve been working on a new seminar called “Take Back Your Life: Living in Balance.” As a result, I have been contemplating work-life balance and what this really means to all of us. For some, you might consider work-life balance an 80-hour week; you work and play with the same people and you love what you do. Your life integrates and blends into itself. On the other side, there are people who are happy just to make their objectives, go home at 6pm to be with their family and friends, and take most of the weekend off. My point is that work-life balance is not the same for everyone, and sometimes I think we talk about it like it is.

I must admit that lately I have not been experiencing a great deal of balance. In the excitement of business growth and opportunities, I stopped doing things in my personal life that I enjoy. I got so excited about work that my hours began to creep up. One day I looked in the mirror and said to myself, “What happened? This isn’t fun anymore!” I pondered this and looked back to see if I could tell what the difference was: I was taking horse riding lessons, going away for weekends, and taking spontaneous afternoons where I went riding or did long lunches with friends or co-workers. I always made up my time at night or over weekends and felt lucky I could work flexible hours. But then I started to work weekends and 2-3 nights a week and my time was tightly scheduled months out. There was a problem with this picture: not enough fun and too much scheduled time with no room for spontaneity!

Plainly, I was not living in balance. I got a little too caught up in the excitement of growth and toppled into work further than was good for me. Now I am causing balance to happen by planning it and making sure my time is not so tightly scheduled.

I now have a regular riding lesson each week, I’m spending more time and weekends with family, and I spontaneously left work last week and went cruising around with a friend. I am back to loving what I do and doing what I love. I have room for spontaneous activities and that is important to my view of work-life balance. So I have an object lesson for this new seminar!

One of my other projects is writing the new version of “Take Back Your Life!” updated for Microsoft Outlook 2007. In doing this, I am learning all about Outlook 2007, of course. There are so many great new features! This week, my favorite is the centralized action function of the To-Do List. This function enables you to centralize all of your actions in your IMS on the new To-Do List. If you are using products like OneNote and SharePoint to track actions, you can set it up so these actions all get transferred to your To-Do List. Now you can see everything you have to do in one place. Of course we are updating our course content to take advantage of this.

Finally, I’ve been working really hard on the new webinars that are now available on our website. I suspect our marketing folks will tell you all about them in another part of this newsletter. I wanted to do these to create value for you in smaller chunks using more multidimensional learning methods. John Wittry presents with me on all of the webinars. It was fun to have two presenters, especially a man and a woman, because we bring different dimensions of our experience to the webinars. You get to see text-based information, hear John and I talk about it, see screen shots and some animation – this multidimensional approach addresses many different learning styles.

Hope you’re all having a great summer. I think I’ll go riding…

Thanks for your interest in McGhee Productivity Solutions.
We look forward to serving you in the future!

www.mcgheeproductivity.com

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